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Lecture 03 Teaching and Assessing Listening

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nessrinedahmoun
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University of Algiers II- English Department- Third year LMD- Introduction to Didactics- S6-

Dr. Bouchama- Sari-Ahmed

Lecture 03 : Teaching and Assessing Listening

Listening is defined as the receptive skill in the oral mode. It involves not only hearing, but also
understanding what one’s hear. Traditionally, listening was characterized as a passive skill, it was
considered as a skill which does not require any efforts on the part of learners. But, as listening is anything
but passive, these days researchers refer to this skill as a ‘receptive’ rather than a ‘passive’ skill because it
involves highly complex thinking processes that maintain learners active.

I- The stages of the listening process


While listening, the following processes take place in the brain:

1-The brain comprehends surface structure elements such as phonemes, words, intonation, or a grammatical
category.

2- It understands pragmatic context. This implies identifying the speech event (monologue, interpersonal
dialogue, transactional dialogue) as well as the context (who the speaker is, location, purpose)

3- It determines meaning of auditory input; that is to say, the content of the message

4- It develops the gist, a global or comprehensive understanding. The brain deletes the exact linguistic form
in which the message was originally received and retains important or relevant information in long term
memory.

II- Micro- and macro-skills of listening

In order to be proficient in listening, learners need to develop both micro- and macro-skills implied
in the performance of listening comprehension.

2.1- Micro-skills
These are skills related to the identification of small elements and chunks of language in order to decode
and analyze incoming data at different levels of organization: sounds, words, clauses, and sentences. Hence
learners need to develop their ability to:

 Discriminate the phonemes of the language


 Retain chunks of language in short term memory
 Recognize supra-segmentals: stressed and unstressed syllables, intonation, rhythm
 Recognize aspects of connected speech: reduced forms, assimilation, and elision
 Identify grammatical word classes (nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc), and grammatical rules.
 Recognize cohesive devices
 Identify sentence elements
 Process speech at different rates of delivery
 Process authentic speech including errors, hesitations, false starts, and pauses
2.2- Macro-skills:
These skills focus on the larger elements of language. They involve drawing on background knowledge
and using contextual information to make sense of the listening passage. They consist of:

 Recognizing the communicative functions of sentences: request, complaint, argumentation


 Predicting information, drawing inferences, identifying cause-effect relationships, identifying main
and supporting ideas, and illustration.
 Distinguishing between literal and implied meaning
 Using nonverbal cues as facial and body language to facilitate comprehension
 Using listening strategies as: identifying key words, guessing meaning, and asking for clarifications

III- Teaching listening


The objectives of a listening class along with the tasks implemented depend on the level of
proficiency of the language learners. In this section three levels of proficiency are identified: beginner,
intermediate, and advanced.

3.1-Beginner level
At this level, teachers aim at teaching intensive and responsive listening.
Intensive listening requires learners to perceive the components of language: phonemes, words,
intonation, discourse markers. For practice, learners can be provided with multiple choice questions to
identify from the choices the right phoneme, stressed syllable, preposition, phrase, or sentence they heard
in the listening text.
Responsive listening is listening to a short stretch of language (a greeting, question, command etc)
in order to provide a short reply. Questions as ‘How long have you been in this school?’, ‘What is the last
book you read?’, ‘How much time did you take to complete your project?’ can be asked by teachers to
trigger short answers.

3.2- Intermediate level


With intermediate learners, teachers teach the selective type of listening. The listener is required to
listen to stretches of discourse such as short dialogues in order to scan specific information (a phone number,
addresses, names, directions, TV news items). The purpose is not necessarily to look for global meaning but
to be able to understand designated information in a context. In order to teach for this type of listening
performance, teachers can use techniques as listening cloze, information transfer (as fill in a chart), and
pictured-cued items.

3.3- Advanced level


Advanced learners are taught extensive listening. This type requires global understanding of spoken
language. Listeners may listen to lengthy lectures, conversations, debates… etc to extract the main idea or
the gist and make inferences. After learners listen to a long passage, teachers can use the following tasks
and activities to develop their learners’ extensive listening performance: dictation, note taking, responding
to comprehension questions, retelling a story, interpretive tasks (to infer responses), and editing
(learners read a written material and listen to the spoken version of the same material that deviates from the
written form, then they spot the discrepancies between the two versions).
IV- Learners’ difficulties in listening comprehension
EFL learners may encounter many difficulties in the listening comprehension processes. Some of these
problems are as follows:

 Quality of recorded materials: in some classes, teachers use some recorded materials that do not
have high quality. This impacts the learners’ listening comprehension.

 Accent: unfamiliar accents can cause serious problems in listening comprehension. If learners are
exposed to Indian English while they have been familiarized with British and American accents,
they will likely face difficulties.

 Unfamiliar vocabulary: when listening texts hat contain many unknown words, it would be very
difficult for students to understand the listening passage.

 Length and speed of listening: the level of students can have a significant role when they listen to
long listening texts. It is very difficult for lower level students to listen for more than three minutes
and complete the listening tasks. Short listening passages make easy listening comprehension for
learners and reduce their tiredness. Speed can also make listening difficult. If the speakers speak too
fast, students may meet difficulties to understand words.

 Cultural differences: learners should be familiar with the cultural knowledge of language that has a
significant effect on the learners’ understanding. If the listening task involves completely different
cultural materials, then the learners may have critical problems in their comprehension. It is the
responsibility of teachers to give background knowledge about the listening activities in advance.

Reflective question: What techniques can foreign language teachers use to help learners overcome
their difficulties in listening?

References and suggested readings


Harmer, J. (2007). The practice of English language teaching (4th ed.). Harlow: Longman.
Hedge, T. (2000). Teaching and learning in the language classroom. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Nunan, D. (2015). Teaching English to non-native speakers: An introduction. New York: Routledge.
Richards, J.C. (1990) The language teaching matrix. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rost, M. (2002). Teaching and researching listening. London: Pearson.
Scrivener, J. (2011). Learning teaching: The essential guide to English language teaching (3rd ed.).
United Kingdom: Macmillan.
Ur, P. (1996). A course in language teaching: Practice and theory. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.

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