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Developing Listening Skills

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4 views

Developing Listening Skills

Uploaded by

Ayoub Chater
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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CRMEF-SM Module : Planning and Teaching Language Skills

Trainer : Fatima Drifi Focus : Teaching Listening

Developing Listening Skills

• Each learning experience may involve more than one item (songs, movies, phone calls,
news, conversations, …)
• Listening can range from being very interactive to wholly non-interactive.
• Listening can be:
o Face to face.
o Disembodied (radio, phone).
o Reinforced with images (TV, Cinema).
• The purpose of listening can be:
o Transactional (information is being conveyed).
o For pleasure (songs, films).
• Listening can be:
o Intensive (every word counts).
o For the gist.

Problems for Students

• Unfamiliar context.
• Unknown vocabulary.
• Lack of time to process information, lack of concentration and anxiety about longer
texts.
• Too fast. Can’t distinguish separate words.
• Can’t follow the rhythm. Not able to recognise sense groups, inferred message, mood
or intonation.
• Difficult accents.
• Background noises.

A listening passage may be difficult when:

— Top-down knowledge (extralinguistic information) is lacking.


— Bottom-up knowledge (linguistic information) is lacking.

Comprehension results from the interaction of top-down and bottom-up levels of


knowledge.

To maximize comprehension, it helps to activate:


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CRMEF-SM Module : Planning and Teaching Language Skills
Trainer : Fatima Drifi Focus : Teaching Listening

• Top-down knowledge (to establish the general situation, topic, context of the text).
• Bottom-up knowledge (to provide help with individual words in pre-teaching
vocabulary or allowing dictionaries).

The stages of listening:

Pre-listening: we prepare our students to listen.

While listening: we focus our students’ attention on the listening text and guide the
development of their understanding of it.

Post-listening: we help our students integrate what they have learnt from the text into their
existing knowledge.

The steps of a listening task:

1. Activating interest and background knowledge (top-down) to help understanding.


2. Pre-teaching vocabulary (bottom-up knowledge).
3. Setting a task provides a motivation to listen. More general tasks precede more
specific ones.
4. More specific tasks requiring more intensive listening.
5. Following the transcript helps resolve more residual problems of understanding, and
forms links between the aural signal and written words.
6. The text is used as a source of language focus after it has been thoroughly
understood.

Listening for Gist:

This is where somebody listens in order to get the main idea of what is being said without
focusing on specific details and without hesitating over unknown words.

Intensive Listening:

Intensive listening involves zeroing in on particular segments of the text, and this should
come only after the students have developed global comprehension of the text. Intensive
listening may target different goals such as:

• getting more detailed understanding of some segments of the text,


• transcribing certain segments in the text,
• guessing the meaning of a word or phrase from context,

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CRMEF-SM Module : Planning and Teaching Language Skills
Trainer : Fatima Drifi Focus : Teaching Listening

• looking at certain grammatical structures in the text to see how they can aid
comprehension, etc.

Extensive Listening:

This involves students listening for long periods and usually for pleasure.

Listening for Specific Information:

• Students need to develop the ability to locate the places where they need to listen
closely.
• Once they know 'where' to look for the answer comfortably, then they can worry
about 'what' to look for.

Listening for Detailed Information:

This is the type of listening you engage in when listening to announcements in a railway
station or when listening to directions in a street. You are listening intensively in order to
understand all information given.

Listening Strategies

The following strategies from Rost 1991 are considered to be the areas where we can help
learners with their listening:

• Using background knowledge (what we already know about the content and form)
and context to predict and then confirm meaning.
• Recognising words.
• Discriminating between sounds.
• Identifying grammatical groupings of words, e.g. perfect tenses, conditionals.
• Identifying expressions and sets of utterances which function as a whole.
• Identifying paralinguistic cues (intonation, stress, weak forms, etc).
• Rejecting superfluous content.
• Recalling important words and ideas.

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