How To (really) teach

Listening

Objectives

What listening is not

What listening actually is

Is it possible to teach listening?

The importance of context

Top-down or bottom-up?

The neglected skill

Listening is frequently viewed as an

enabling skill not worthy of attention

on its own.

Scarcella & Oxford, 1992

What listening is not

• Easy

Rather than thinking of listening as a single

process, it is more accurate to conceive of it

as a bundle of related processes. (…) Usually

we are unaware of these processes in our

own language; achieving comprehension

seems relatively effortless unless we

encounter unhelpful conditions.

Lynch & Mendelsohn, 2002

• Unimportant

Despite a gradually increasing acceptance of

the importance of listening comprehension for

second or foreign language learners, the

teaching of listening comprehension remains

a somewhat neglected and poorly taught

aspect of English in many ESL or EFL programs.

Osada, 2004

What listening is not

What does “passive” mean?

• Passive

What listening is not

Why is listening not passive?

adjective

1. Accepting or allowing what happens or what others do,

without active response or resistance

Oxford Online Dictionary, 2012

If we were to take the ability to remember a

message as the ‘acid test’ of comprehension,

we would in some ways be adopting a view

of listening in which the listener acts as a tape

recorder.

Anderson & Lynch, 1988

• Memory

What listening is not

• Challenging

We only become aware of what remarkable

feats of listening we achieve when we are in

an unfamiliar listening environment, such as

listening to a language in which we have

limited proficiency.

Anderson & Lynch, 1988

What listening actually is

You are going to watch a movie snippet which shows two people having a conversation. List how many mental processes these people need to be

able to do while listening in order to maintain the

conversation going.

How many of the listed things do students need to consider

when:

o performing a traditional listening activity (students listen

to recorded audio and perform a task)?

What listening actually is

o having a whole-group classroom discussion?

• Active

Meanings are shaped by context and

construed by the listener through the act of

interpreting meaning rather than receiving it

intact.

Nation & Newton, 2008

What listening actually is

• Crucial for communication

Speaking

Reading

Writing

Listening

What listening actually is

9 million 5%

Effective Listening

Brazilians with

some hearing

impairement

That is

Of the Brazilian

population

Source: IBGE – Census 2010

What listening actually is

• Task-based

Author & Author, 1900

What listening actually is

o Our purpose to listening will shape our

expectations.

o “In real life when we listen to someone

talking we have a definite non-linguistic

reason for doing so”.

Using the given listening transcript, think of two

appropriate tasks that can be used:

• with a beginner group

• with an intermediate group

• with an advanced group

Taken from: Cotton, D., Falvey, D., Kent, S., Lebeau, I., Rees, G. (2010). Language Leader – Advanced – Coursebook and

CD-ROM. Essex, England: Pearson Longman

What listening actually is

Is it possible to actually teach

listening?

Yes! Sort of.

An approach aimed at teaching listening (…)

starts from the premise that the students’

comprehension is blocked by specific

features of the language or listening process,

and that in our lessons we can focus on those

features one at a time and improve the

students’ ability to deal with them.

Swift, 2007

Is it possible to actually

teach listening?

Activate schemata

A schema could be defined as a mental

structure, consisting of relevant individual

knowledge, memory, and experience, which

allows us to incorporate what we learn into

what we know.

Anderson & Lynch, 1988

The importance of context

Imagine you’re going to use the following video

snippet with an intermediate group. They are

going to answer some true/false questions and

then take notes on topics mentioned.

What difficulties can you anticipate that this

snippet may present to your students?

The importance of context

Which of these pre-listening activities would you

assign your students before they watch the snippet

and why? Rank them from 1 (most useful) to 5

(least useful).

Have students predict the answers to the true or false questions

Pre-teach some expressions that appear in the video

Review verb forms used to talk about routine

Exploit what students know about Irish Travellers and their opinion of them and of other modern nomadic cultures

Have students read a short text on Irish Travellers and discuss it briefly

The importance of context

Top-down or Bottom-up?

Bottom-up processing is when we achieve

comprehension starting from the smaller units (words

and sounds) and gradually build up to an

understanding of the whole message.

Top-down processing happens when expectations

and previous world knowledge are used to build

comprehension of a message.

Anderson & Lynch, 1988

Let’s see some listening exercises taken from

course books.

Are they more focused on top-down or

bottom-up processing? Do any of them work

exclusively with one type of processing?

Top-down or Bottom-up?

Top-down or Bottom-up?

Taken from: Spencer, D. (2006). Global Teen – Combined Edition. São Paulo, Brazil: Macmillan

Top-down or bottom-up? Why?

Top-down or Bottom-up?

Taken from: Cotton, D., Falvey, D., Kent, S., Lebeau, I., Rees, G. (2010). Language Leader – Advanced –

Coursebook and CD-ROM. Essex, England: Pearson Longman

Top-down or bottom-up? Why?

Top-down or Bottom-up?

Taken from: Clanfield, L., Pickering, k. (2010). Global – Elementary Coursebook . Oxford, England:

Macmillan

Top-down or bottom-up? Why?

Top-down or Bottom-up?

Taken from: Redston, c., Cunningham, G. (2008). Face to Face – Intermediate. Cambridge, England:

Cambridge University

Top-down or bottom-up? Why?

Top-down or bottom-up? Why?

Taken from: Clanfield, L., Pickering, k. (2010). Global – Elementary Coursebook . Oxford, England:

Macmillan

Top-down or Bottom-up?

Listening as interaction

How can students be made aware of the listening

practice they receive when listening to the teacher

and classmates?

What strategies for coping with listening in the

context of a conversation can we teach our

students?

To keep in mind

Listening is not: easy, unimportant, passive, memory

Listening actually is: challenging, crucial, active, task-based

It is possible to teach listening in the form of strategies for more effective listening

Context is important and should always be worked on

Know which activities are top-down and bottom-up

Questions?

Thank you!