Teaching listening

Issues for discussion:
Why is listening so difficult for students?
What do we listen to in everyday life?
What are the characteristics of the listening process?
What are the principles of teaching listening?
What are the common activities in teaching listening?

Teaching Receptive Skills
What are the receptive skills?
Listening
Reading

What is the goal of a receptive skill lesson?
COMPREHENSION

WHY LISTEN?
to exchange information
to share feelings
to enjoy yourself

WHAT ARE SOME OF THE MOST COMMON LISTENING SITUATIONS?
listening to live conversations
listening to announcements (at airports, railway stations, bus stations, etc)
listening to/watching the news, the weather forecast on the radio/TV
listening to the radio/watching TV for entertainment watching a play/movie
listening to records (songs, etc)
following a lesson (at school)
attending a lecture
listening on the telephone
following instructions
listening to someone giving a speech/a public address

Typical materials used for listening
Authentic:
radio broadcasts, recordings (e.g. of movie times, airport announcements), videos of TV shows or movies, lectures, phone conversations
Semi-authentic:
unrehearsed tapes; role plays with native speakers who speak at normal speed
Prepared:
commercially prepared tapes and videos

Top-down processing
Listener gets a “general understanding” or “overall view” of the listening text.
This is greatly helped if the listener’s schema allows them to have appropriate expectations of what they might hear.
For example, if I am listening to a doctor talk to a patient, I expect to hear about a medical problem. I expect that the doctor will give some advice, maybe a prescription for some medicine. I also know many of the vocabulary they will use.

Bottom-up processing
The listener focuses on individual words or phrases and gains an understanding of the whole passage by linking these together.

Listening skills
Identifying the topic
Predicting and guessing
Listening for general understanding
Listening for specific or detailed information
Interpreting a text/making inferences

Extensive and Intensive Listening
Extensive ? listening for pleasure (listening on your own; because you want to)
Intensive ? listening for a purpose (often done with the teacher’s help; because you have to)
What are some examples of why you might engage in extensive and intensive listening activities?

WHAT SHOULD TEACHER’S OBJECTIVES INCLUDE IN A LISTENING LESSON?
exposing students to a range of listening experiences
making listening purposeful for the students (provide students with a REASON to listen)
building up students’ confidence in their own listening ability

The “PDP” Framework
What is “PDP”?
PDP is a framework that can be used to teach the receptive skills (reading and listening) and to help develop learners’ comprehension.
Activities in the PDP framework are sequenced and scaffolded in such a manner that learners are provided with the support they need to fully understand a given text.

PDP Framework
P = Pre-listening
D = During listening
P = Post listening
What kind of activities do you think happen in each stage?

Typical PRE Listening Activities
Discuss a relevant picture to activate background knowledge
Discuss relevant experiences - brainstorming what students know about the topic with a word map
Associate ideas with the topic
Associate vocabulary with the topic
Predict information about the topic
Write questions about the topic
Show realia related to the topic (ex: a menu or a movie schedule)
Pre-teach vocabulary (with pictures, realia, examples in context…)
Word Webbing/Mind Mapping

Typical DURING Listening Activities

No specific responses
For stories, or anything that is interesting, humourous, or dramatic, we just have the students listen and enjoy it.

Listen and tick

Listen and sequence

Listen and act
Total Physical Response:
for beginners “Stand up”, “Point to the …”;
for intermediate learners
“Pretend you’re …(doing something)”

Listen and draw
Listen and fill
Listen and guess

Typical POST listening activities
interviewing native speakers
calling for information (e.g. travel agency, movie theatre, car rental agency, restaurant)
perform a role play
reading and/or writing about the topic
discussing the topic
listening to another example
making a poster
Compare and contrast to your own experience
Create your own version of the missing section
Plan a solution to the problem
Share reactions
Debate a topic
Write a letter to newspaper or radio station

What do you think the goals of each stage are?
PRE:
To motivate learners by giving them a reason for listening
To prepare students for listening by contextualizing and/or personalizing to make it more accessible and more realistic.
Pre-teach key vocabulary
To introduce the topic, and arouse learners interest in it, to involve students in the specific topic.
To activate prior knowledge.
To provide a purpose for listening.

DURING:
To comprehend the listening text (from general to specific, easy to difficult and concrete to abstract)

POST:
To enable Ss to consolidate or reflect upon what they have listened to.
To relate the content of the text to learners’ own knowledge, experience, interests, views
To make practical use of, or expand on the listening text and/or lexis and grammar introduced in the text.
To develop language by integrating listening with other skills.

Activity staging in PDP
Activities in the DURING listening stage should be staged from:
EASY ? DIFFICULT activities
GENERAL understanding (ex: main idea) ? SPECIFIC and detailed understanding of the text
CONCRETE? ABSTRACT

SLO (Student Learning Outcome) and PDP
Where is the SLO achieved in the PDP framework?
The SLO is achieved at the END of the DURING stage.

POST stage
Is the POST stage necessary if the SLO is achieved at the end of the DURING stage?
NO
So, why have the POST stage?

POST stage
“Icing on the cake*”
To reinforce students’ understanding of the text by personalizing the topic by integrating other language skills areas (ex: speaking, writing)
Allows Ss to reinforce the new vocabulary and/or language structures from the lesson by using other skills.
Helps Ss to be creative and expand on or personalize the topic.
*When one great thing happens, then another great thing happens on top of it, the second thing is the icing on the cake. Example: "Today I was promoted to head of the department! And they decided to raise my pay!" Answer: "Wow! Icing on the cake!" We all love to eat delicious cake, and sometimes the cake has an extra sweet layer of icing on the top; that is the icing on the cake. Example: "Your wife is beautiful to look at, and she is a wonderful person!" Answer: "True; it's icing on the cake." Example: "We won the case, and they are going to pay our legal expenses." Answer: "That's the icing on the cake." Example: "I've been accepted by the university, and they've offered me a position on the basketball team!" Answer: "That's wonderful! Icing on the cake."

How can we set our students up to be successful at listening?
Make sure instructions are clear; students have to understand very clearly what they are expected to do.
Make sure that each time a listening text is heard, even for the second or third time, the students have a specific purpose for listening; give them a task.
Do plenty of pre-listening work.
Encourage students not to worry if they don’t understand every word; a task can be completed even when they miss some of the words