Developing Listening Skills

By Svitlana Sydorets School №6

Zolotonosha Cherkasy region

2013

Listening is trying to understand the oral message people are conveying.

Listening provides the aural input that serves as the basis for language acquisition and enables learners to interact in spoken communication.

Listening as a process has seven levels: Isolation of sounds; Identification of meaning; Integration of meaning with past experience; Noting of relationships; Interpretation to discover implications; Interpretation of responses; Introspection concerning the effect of what is

heard upon the listener.

Listening Strategies

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 ( listener based) listening for the main idea predicting drawing inferences

summarizing Bottom-up strategies (text based) listening for specific details recognizing cognates recognizing word-order patterns

Principles for Good Listening

Basics: Pay Attention. Practice Active Listening. Pay Attention to Structure. Listen for Key Words. Key Phrases or Markers.

Teaching Principles of Listening Make it Explicit. Introducing some key markers and

vocabulary is often welcome. It makes explicit how to understand and manage conversations, which may have been something a mystery.

Model. For new concepts, such as active listening, a model is needed. This can be provided by traditional print example dialogues as well as film clips, and teacher modeling with volunteer students .

Practice. This might be especially important in active listening, which few people, native or nonnative speakers, really know how to do, as we are used to either sitting quietly while a speaker finishes his speech (or diatribe, if he or she is angry), or interrupting, when we think he or she is wrong, or sitting and planning what we will say in response, etc.

For learners, listening presents a challenge for a variety of reasons, among which are the following: Listening involves multiple modes: Listening involves the interpersonal and interpretive

modes of communication. It requires the listener to assume either a participative role in face-to-face conversations, or a non-participative role in listening to other people speak or present.

Listening involves all varieties of language: In addition to listening to lectures and presentations in

academic and formal settings, learners have also to partake or listen to exchanges that involve various levels of colloquialism.

Listening involves "altered" and "reduced" language forms:

In addition to dealing with the vocabulary and structures of the language, listeners have to learn to comprehend reduced forms of the language (e.g., I wanna go, Just a sec).

Listening involves variable rates of delivery: Unlike a reading text that is at the learner's control, a

listening text is constantly moving and at variable speeds that often cannot be controlled by the listener.

How You Can Help Your ESL Students Improve Their Listening Listening with a Purpose From Passive to Active Clear Instructions Use Variety Keep it Real Do the Work Teach Them to Check:Check for meaning, Ask for clarification, Re-phrase

Listening activities classification

Listening activities vary according to their purposes and objectives. Five major distinctions include:

1. Attentive listening

2. Extensive listening

3. Intensive listening

4. Selective listening

5. Interactive listening.

Attentive listening:

Activities in this stage would be interesting and easy including face to face interaction, using visual and tangible topics, clear description of the listening procedure, minimum use of written language, and immediate and ongoing responses etc so that learners can easily keep pace with the text and activity.

Listening to short chunks, music image, personal stories, teacher- talk, small question- answer, and interview etc may be used on this stage.

Extensive listening:

Learners need to comprehend the text as a whole which is called global understanding. Activities in this section must be chosen in terms with the proficiency level of the listeners.

Completing cloze exercises or giving one or two word answers, multiple choices, predicting the next utterances, forming connected sets of notes, inferring opinions, or interpreting parts of the text are some samples.

Intensive listening:

Intensive listening requires attention to specific items of language, sound or factual detail such as words, phrase, grammatical units, pragmatic units, sound changes (vowel reduction and consonant assimilation), stress, intonation and pauses etc. Feedback on accuracy and repetition on the teacher's part promote success here.

Paraphrasing, remembering specific words and sequences, filling gaps with missing words, identifying numbers and letters, picking out particular facts, discriminating the pronunciation of same phoneme in different positions, replacing words, finding stress and boundaries are some good intensive listening practice.

Selective listening:

It involves listening to selected part of a text, as it's name suggests, to predict information and select ‘cues' surrounding information. . Here the focus is on the main parts of the discourse and by noticing these parts listener construct their understanding of the meaning of whole of the text through inferring.

Listening to sound sequences, documentary, story maps, incomplete monologues, conversation cues and topic listening are examples of selective listening.

Interactive listening:

This is a very advanced stage of listening practice as it implies social interaction in small groups which is a ‘true test' of listening. In interactive listening, learners, either in pairs or in groups, receive new information, identify it continuously. Besides, they have to work out the problems of understanding each other and formulate responses immediately as we are required to do in real life.

Group survey, self introductions, short speeches, chatting and discussing, exchanging news and views, interviewing and being interviewed etc. might be appropriate here.

Sample listening activitiesEntertaining your friends

Pre-listening Answer the questions: Have you ever been a guest in someone’s

house in a foreign country? When? Why? What happened?

While-listening

You will hear two people describe how they entertain guests in their country. Sumie is from Japan, Rosa is from Spain.

Listen and take notes under the following headings: The kind of invitation, formal or informal The time of day The preparations the host or hostess makes The presents the people take The food and drink served

Post-listening

Work in small groups. Compare information. What similarities and differences are there?

What happens in your country? Is it usual to invite people to your home for a

meal? What are such occasions like in your home?

Tapescript 1 Sumie In my country, Japan, usually we invite guests home at the weekend, in the

early evening, about seven o’clock. Before they come, we must tidy the front garden and clean the entrance hall. Then we must spray it all with water to show that we welcome guests with cleanliness. The guests usually bring presents and when they give you the present they say, “I’m sorry this is a small present”, but in fact they have chosen the present very carefully. When the meal is ready the hostess says, “ We have nothing special for you today but you are welcome to come this way”. You can see that in Japan you should try to be modest and you should not show off too much. If you don’t understand our culture you will think this is very strange.

When we have foreign guests we try to serve traditional Japanese meals like sushi, tempura, or sukiyaki but when we have Japanese guests, we serve all kind of food such as spaghetti, Chinese food, or steaks. When guests leave, the host and hostess see them out of the house and wait until their car turns the corner of the street; they wait until they can’t see them any more.

2 Rosa I come from Spain. At home what we like most is going out to eat in

bars and restaurants. There is a big choice and we can go from one bar to another trying different things and having a few drinks, usually wine or beer. But sometimes we also like to invite people to our home.

I usually invite my friend for an informal meal. I cook Spanish omelette, which is made with potatoes, onions and eggs, fried in olive oil. Then we things like cheese, ham – Spanish ham is different from English ham, and if you buy the best one, called Jabugo, is something delicious, worth trying. And then things like olives, anchovies, mussels. We drink wine or beer. Some people may bring a bottle of wine or something for pudding. We usually meet late in the evening, about eight thirty or nine. Of course, we dress casually; we just want to be relaxed and comfortable, and talk and laugh together.

Summary

These are strategies that go a long way towards improving listening comprehension. Teach them these skills, and you’ll be teaching your students to be active and take their listening comprehension into their own hands.

Students often believe that to improve their listening they must simply exercise their “ear”. But it’s important for students to understand that it’s not as simple as that – the ear is not a simple muscle to train; listening comprehension is a lot more complex than that. Merely sitting and listening to something for hours won’t do the trick; they can learn a lot more from a focused 15-minute listening exercise.

References English Teaching Forum,№3 2006 “Listening in a foreign language” by Ana Maria Schwartz, in Modules for the

professional preparation of teaching assistants in foreign languages (Grace Stovall Burkart, ed.; Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics, 1998)

Methodology in Language Teaching, an Anthology of Current Practice jc Richards W. Renandya Cambridge University Press 2002 ch.21,22,23

Mili Saha&Md. Ali Rezwan Talukdar “Teaching listening as an English Language Skill”/ www.articlesbase.com

Enterprise 3, Coursebook, Express Publishing 2002 Liz&John Soars New Headway English Course, Oxford University Press www.britishcouncil.org www.busyteacher.org ESL articles www.esl.about.com www.learningthrouthlistening.org www.listenaminute.com www.nclrc.org