Teaching Listening

Teaching Listening

Prepared by/

 Brwa R. Sharif

 

 

Teaching Listening

Contents

1.     Introduction

2.     What is listening?

3.     Problems in listening

4.     Goals in listening

5.     Processes in L2 Listening

6.     Different kinds of listening

7.     Listening Skill

8.     Listening Strategies

9.     Listening in the classroom

10.   Design of listening

11.   Listening activities can be designed in three stages

12.  What role does listening comprehension play in communication?

13.   Conclusion

14.   Reference

 

Introduction

               Listening and hearing are not the same (Skillswise, 2011). We hear all sorts of noises in the world around us, but we don’t listen to them all. There are things we don’t want to listen to so we ‘tune out’ and don’t usually notice them. For example, people who live near busy roads get used to the sound of traffic and don’t hear it any more.

               Listening is one of the most challenging skills for learners to develop and yet also one of the most important. We develop learners' ability to become more independent learners by developing their ability to listen well. This is because by hearing accurately, they are much more likely to be able to reproduce accurately, refine their understanding of grammar and develop their own vocabulary.

                As (Richards & Renandya, 2002) cited that many years, in language teaching, listening skill was not priority, because teaching methods emphasized productive skills, and the relationship between receptive and productive skills was poorly understood. Therefore the nature of listening was ignored by applied linguists in a second language, and it was often supposed that through exposure listening skills could be acquired but not really taught. But some applied linguists are extreme in arguing that listening comprehension is at the basic skill of second language acquisition and therefore strongly requests a much greater prominence in language teaching.

 

What is listening?

              Listening is defined in (Skillswise, 2011) as ‘a form of communication and is an active process’ When you listen you must get meaning from what’s being said before you can respond.

              International Listening Association defines listening as ‘the process of receiving, constructing meaning from and responding to spoken and/or nonverbal messages (1996).

 

Problems in listening

           After studying 7 years at school even plus a year at university, one day someone came to me and started speaking English, but I was only able to understand ‘bus station’ then I told him to slow down because I could not understand. So I found out that I did not understand English, but some tasks in the class which were very different from the real life listening. According to Ur (2012) all the tasks in schools are based on the following:

1.      Formal, carefully enunciated language.

2.      Written texts read aloud.

3.      Audio-recordings.

4.      Written comprehension questions to be answered later.

5.      Tasks that provided no advance information about the text listening purpose

6.      The demand that students understand everything in the text.

               These activities are not a copy of real-life listening (Ur, 2012), most of the occur in face-to-face interactive situations such as conversation, interviews, lessons, shopping or getting instructions, and which are based on the following characteristics:

1.      The speech is typically in informal, colloquial style.

2.      The speech is improvised, not written to be read aloud.

3.      We can usually see the speaker.

4.      We nearly always respond in real time to what we hear, not later.

5.      We have at least an idea of the topic our speaker will be dealing with, even if we do not know the exact information.

6.      We rarely need to understand everything. We listen for the gist, or for specific information that we need to know.

 

Goals in listening

               The main goal of teaching listening is to make students at least deal successfully with the natural listening situations that they may face in outside classroom and real life. And those situations are all most features above.

                Harmer (1998) says that one of the main reasons for getting students to listen to spoken English is to let them hear different varieties and accents not only just the voice of their teacher with its own idiosyncrasies. Nowadays, the learners need to be exposed not only to one variety of English (British English, for example) but also to different varieties such as American English, Australian English, Caribbean English, Indian English, or West African English. When people of different nationalities speak to each other, they often use English too, in order that a Swiss flight attendant might well have to understand a Japanese woman’s English variety, just as an Argentinean might need to be able to cope with a Russian’s version.

 

Processes in L2 Listening

           Listening (Hinkel, 2005) consists of three basic processing phases that are simultaneous and parallels: decoding, comprehension, and interpretation. A fourth phase, listener response, is often included as well in descriptions of listening competence and performance. Decoding involves attention, speech perception, word recognition, and grammatical parsing; comprehension includes activation of prior knowledge, representing propositions in short term memory, and logical inference; interpretation encompasses comparison of meanings with prior expectations, activating participation frames, and evaluation of discourse meanings. Each of these phases contributes to the larger goal of finding what is relevant to the listener in the input, and what kind of response may be required. The goal of decoding is to feed recognized lexical items and parsed propositions for comprehension. The goal of comprehension is to connect the input with relevant knowledge sources for further interpretation. The goal of interpretation is to present a set of viable listener response options to the listener.

 

Different kinds of listening

We listen for a purpose, depending on the situation:

-          Listening for specific details

-          Listening for general meaning

-          Listening for general idea or gist.

-          For information

-          For enjoyment or social reasons

-          To learn new language

            According to (Lindsay & Knight, 2006) if you listen to a friend giving you instructions about how to get somewhere, you would listen carefully to all the details and perhaps note them down, a friend talking about their holiday, you would listen normally, and for general information , you may focus on anything of particular interest. In contrast if you were listening to a radio play, you might be listening for enjoyment, and for a general idea of what the play is about. You would not expect to remember all the details you listened.

Listening Skill

            Lindsay & Knight (2006) suggest that listening is a receptive skill, we receive language instead of produce it. In listening we interpret a message about what people may say. As we listen and collect the elements of listening, for example individual sounds, syllables, words which may be linked together with some sounds being dropped or changed, phrases, clauses, grammatical structures, sentences, and longer stretches of spoken English. And beside of these elements there are other things such as intonation, word and sentence stress, in which a listener should deal with all the above elements and collect them, after that decode them as quickly as the speaker produce them.

             People such as Brown (1990) were able to demonstrate the importance of developing oracy as well as literacy in school. Prior to this, it was taken for granted that first language speakers needed instruction in how to read and write, but not in how to listen and speak, because these skills were automatically bequeathed to them as native speakers. (Richards & Renandya, 2002)

            The listener can be active when s/he is in a conversation and listens, responds appropriately, and sometimes stop the conversation to ask the speaker to repeat what they said, to slow down, or to clarify what they have said, or to interrupt. So it means while a listener is active, s/he has some control of what they are listening to. And when a listener is listening to the news on radio or a public announcement, without any responds, it is called passive.

Generally learners need to develop the following skills:

-          Learning to listen in various ways.

-          Adapting the way they listen according to the text and the reason for listening.

-          Recognizing the features of spoken English.

-          Using visual and textual clues to help them.

-          Listening actively, asking for repetition, clarification, etc.

-          Developing their background knowledge.

           As well as developing their vocabulary and grammatical knowledge, learners should develop their understanding of pronunciation. (Lindsay & Knight, 2006)

Listening Strategies

                According to (Alatis, et al., 2004) listening strategies are techniques or activities that contribute directly to the comprehension and recall of listening input. Listening strategies can be classified by how the listener processes the input.

Top-down strategies are listener based; the listener taps into background knowledge of the topic, the situation or context, the type of text, and the language. This background knowledge activates a set of expectations that help the listener to interpret what is heard and anticipate what will come next. Top-down strategies include

• listening for the main idea
• predicting
• drawing inferences
• summarizing

Bottom-up strategies are text based; the listener relies on the language in the message, that is, the combination of sounds, words, and grammar that creates meaning. Bottom-up strategies include

• listening for specific details
• recognizing cognates
• recognizing word-order patterns

Strategic listeners also use met cognitive strategies to plan, monitor, and evaluate their listening.

• They plan by deciding which listening strategies will serve best in a particular situation.
• They monitor their comprehension and the effectiveness of the selected strategies.
• They evaluate by determining whether they have achieved their listening comprehension goals and whether the combination of listening strategies selected was an effective one.

             Nunan (as cited in Richards & Renandya, 2002) says that we should design activities that teach both bottom-up and top-down processing skills as they both play important, but different, roles in listening it is also important to teach learners specific strategies that can help them understand the processes underlying listening, so that gradually they can assume greater control of their own learning. Among the key strategies that can be taught are predicting, selective listening, listening for different purposes, interfering, and personalizing.

Listening in the classroom

           As Rost (1994, as cited in Nunan, 1999) points out, listening is vital in the language classroom because it provides input for the learner. Without understanding input at the right level, learning cannot begin. For practicing (Lindsay & Knight, 2006) listening in the classroom, it is helpful to think about how we listen in real life, such as

-          Ask learners to do things in class which they would be likely to do outside.

-          Give them the information they would have in the real world.

-          Give them the opportunity to listen actively.

-          Give them the opportunity to listen in different ways.

-          Give learners the opportunity to listen to a range of situations, accents, and topics.

 

The design of listening

             Ideally the listening tasks we design for the learners should guide them through the text and should be graded so that the first listening task they do is quite easy and helps them to get a general understanding of the text. Sometimes a single question at this stage will be enough, not putting the students under too much pressure (Peachey). As there are two basic types of material authentic and invented. The designers need to use more carefully adapted texts, and less authentic texts, at lower levels and gradually introduce more authentic speech as the learners develop.

 

Listening activities can be designed in three stages (Pre-listening, Listening, and Post-listening)

1.      Pre-listening

                           During which we help our students prepare to listen, and activities which help our learners prepare for what they will hear. This stage should help learners by focusing their attention on the topic, activating any knowledge they have about the topic, and making it clear to the learners what they have to do while they listen.

             There are certain goals that should be achieved before students attempt to listen to any text. These are motivation, contextualization, and preparation. (Peachey)

·         Motivation

         It is enormously important that before listening students are motivated to listen, so you should try to select a text that they will find interesting and then design tasks that will arouse your students' interest and curiosity.

·         Contextualization

                 When we listen in our everyday lives we hear language within its natural environment, and that environment gives us a huge amount of information about the linguistic content we are likely to hear. Listening to a tape recording in a classroom is a very unnatural process. The text has been taken from its original environment and we need to design tasks that will help students to contextualize the listening and access their existing knowledge and expectations to help them understand the text.

·         Preparation

             To do the task we set students while they listen there could be specific vocabulary or expressions that students will need. It's vital that we cover this before they start to listen as we want the challenge within the lesson to be an act of listening not of understanding what they have to do.

Some activities for pre-listening

-          Discussing the topic or type of conversation with the learners.

-          Helping the learners to develop their vocabulary related to the topic.

-          Giving learners information about the context.

-          Getting the learners to predict what they will hear.

-          Making sure learners understand what they have to do while they are listening.

-          Make sure they understand why they are doing the activity.

 

2.      Listening

               Activities which are usually a type of task, for example, filling in a chart, answering questions, following a route on a map, making notes, etc. While pre listening activities are about preparing for the questions or a task, listening activities are about the learners finding the answers or doing the task. Here are some examples of listening activities:

-          Listen and draw

-          Listen and match

-          Listen and order pictures or a dialogue

-          Listen and follow a route on a map

-          Listen and complete a form

-          Listen and correct

-          Listen and physically respond

             John Field (1998, as cited in Richards & Renandya, 2002) says that most practioners have retained the extensive/intensive distinction. On a similar principle, international examinations usually specify that the recording is to be played twice. Some theorists argue that this is unnatural because in real life one gets only one hearing. But the whole situation of listening to a cassette in a language classroom is, after all, artificial. Furthermore, listening to a strange voice, especially one speaking in a foreign language, demands a process of normalization – of adjusting to the pitch, speed, and quality of the voice. An initial period of extensive listening allows for this.

 

3.      Post-listening

              Activities which are chances to check learners’ understanding of what they have been listening to, giving feedback, and consolidating what they have learnt.

             There are two common forms that post-listening tasks can take. These are reactions to the content of the text, and analysis of the linguistic features used to express the content. (Peachey)

·         Reaction to the text

                We can see that tasks that focus students’ reaction to the content are most important. Again this is something that we naturally do in our everyday lives. Because we listen for a reason, there is generally a following reaction. This could be discussion as a response to what we've heard - do they agree or disagree or even believe what they have heard? - Or it could be some kind of reuse of the information they have heard.

 

·         Analysis of language

            The second of these two post-listening task types involves focusing students on linguistic features of the text. This is important in terms of developing their knowledge of language, but less so in terms of developing students' listening skills. It could take the form of an analysis of verb forms from a script of the listening text or vocabulary or collocation work. This is a good time to do form focused work as the students have already developed an understanding of the text and so will find dealing with the forms that express those meanings much easier.

        Post listening activities often move on from listening practice to practicing other skills. Here are some post-listening activities:

-          Speaking activities: for example learners can be asked to speak about the issues mentioned in the listening tasks.

-          Writing activities: learners can be asked to write about the subject they have heard about.

-          Pronunciation activities: one important thing to do after a listening activity is to consider why learners didn’t understand something.

What role does listening comprehension play in communication?

           Listening comprehension is a key initial step in communication. The better a student can understand what is being said, the better will be their ability to communicate. In addition, they will be better able to notice the characteristics of the target language which will help improve their language development in all four key skill areas.

          Students may feel a great deal of pride when they are able to comprehend something in the target language. This can be a great motivating factor in continuing to learn the language, and teachers should do whatever possible to promote this sense of accomplishment. Consequently, teachers need to construct learning activities which will enhance learners' oral comprehension (listening skills) and motivate them, as well. (Bilash, 2011)

                  Generally listening comprehension is (Richards, Schmidt, Kindricks, & Kim, 2002) the process of understanding speech in a first or second language. The study of listening comprehension processes in second language learning focuses on the role of individual linguistic units (e.g. phonemes, words, grammatical structures) as well as the role of the listener’s expectations, the situation and context, background knowledge and the topic. It therefore includes both top-down processing and bottom-processing.

                While traditional approaches to language teaching tended to underemphasize the importance of teaching listening comprehension, more recent approaches emphasize the role of listening in building up language competence and suggest that more attention should be paid to teaching listening in the initial stages of second or foreign language learning.

                Listening comprehension activities typically address a number of listening functions, including recognition (focusing on some aspect of the code itself), orientation (ascertaining essential facts about the text, such as participants, the situation or context, the general topic, the emotional tone, and the genre), comprehension of main ideas, and understanding and recall of details.

 

Conclusion

               Listening is not a simple process to obtain, but in fact it can go through some processes then it can be obtained as a language or meaningful sentence or utterance. Therefore teachers should use different varieties of language and listening activities for teaching listening in order let the students cope what some says outside and inside school, or wherever someone speak in English.

               For teaching listening both strategies top-down and bottom-up should be side by side used. And they cannot be separately taught, either top-down or bottom-up, to comprehend what someone says.

References

Alatis, J. E., Chamot, A. U., Mahajan, A. P., Cockey, S. W., Malone, M., & Keatley, C. (2004). Teaching Listening. Retrieved from National Capital Language Resource Center: http://www.nclrc.org/essentials/listening/stratlisten.htm

Bilash, O. (2011, January). Improving second language education. Retrieved from Best of Bilash: http://www2.education.ualberta.ca/staff/olenka.Bilash/best%20of%20bilash/listening.html#

Harmer, J. (1998). How to Teach English. Harlow: Addison Wesley Longman Limited.

Hinkel, E. (2005). Handbook of research in second language teaching and learning. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Lindsay, C., & Knight, P. (2006). Learning and Teaching English. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Listening. (1996). Retrieved from International Listening Association: http://www.listen.org/

Nunan, D. (1999). Second Language Teaching & Learning. Boston: University of Hong Kong.

Peachey, N. (n.d.). Methodology. Retrieved from BritishCouncil.org: http://esol.britishcouncil.org/methodology/framework-planning-listening-skills-lesson

Richards, J. C., & Renandya, W. A. (2002). Methodology in Language Teaching: An anthology of current practice. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Richards, J. C., Schmidt, R., Kindricks, H., & Kim, Y. (2002). Longman dictionary of language teaching and applied linguistics (3rd ed.). Harlow: Pearson Education Limited.

Skillswise. (2011). Retrieved from BBC.co.uk: http://www.bbc.co.uk/skillswise/factsheet/en34type-l1-f-what-is-listening

Ur, P. (2012). A Course in English Language Teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge Unuiversity Press.