Teaching listening

Some considerations in teaching listening
Listening as a receptive skill
Listening as an active process
The difference between listening and reading (spoken and written language)

Principles
Use both top-down & bottom-up knowledge to help effective listening
Combination of BU & TD = interactive processing
Activating previous knowledge => pre-listening activity
Provide a context for interpretation and activate background knowledge which help interpretation
Provide different types of listening
Listening for specific information
Listening for global information / gist listening
Listening between the lines => inferences

Principles
Provide different types of tasks
The students need experience with production task but don’t be too much
Consider the nature of the text
Text difficulties
Text authenticity

Principles
Teach listening strategies
Predicting
Inferring
Monitoring
Clarifying
Responding
Evaluating

Classroom Technique and Tasks
Dictation
Cloze procedure
Listening for gist
Inferential listening

In the classroom
A warm-up activities
A main listening task
A speaking task related to the previous task

Types of listening activities
No overt response: The learners do not have to do anything
- Stories
- Songs
- Entertainment: films, theatre, video
Short Response
- Obeying instruction
- Ticking off items
- True/false
- Detecting mistakes
- Cloze
- Guessing definitions
- Skimming and scanning

Types of listening activities
Longer responses
- Answering questions
- Note-taking
- Paraphrasing and translating
- Summarizing
- Long gap-filling
Extended responses (“combined skills” activities)
- Problem-solving
- Interpretation