Teaching Listening

The Listening Process: 

The Listening Process

A Historical View: 

A Historical View Until late 60s : View that learners should be exposed only to language they already “knew”. Lack of portable recording equipment Lack of research into spoken English – the spoken language seen as an oral representation of the written form

Resulting Listening Activities: 

Resulting Listening Activities - Scripted dialogues - Written passage read to students - Dictation Emphasis on understanding every word.

1970s - 1980s: 

1970s - 1980s - Cassette recorders became common Research into the features of spoken language Research into listening processes New emphasis on providing Ss with the language and skills to meet their communicative needs from the beginning of the learning process

Listening Processes: 

Listening Processes Top down and bottom up processing

Slide6: 

Listening as an active process – top down processing Last week my friend gave birth to a lovely baby boy. David’s 18. He lives with his family near Bramley. Paul’s 46. He lives with his family near Oulu.

Listening as an active process – top down processing : 

Listening as an active process – top down processing Let’s go this afternoon. I really want to stay in this morning because it’s three weeks since I paid for the milk, and he should come today. The procedural statements on the servers either execute the entire transaction or they fail it as a group.

Slide8: 

She said the leaves were from a Gingko tree, but they can’t have been. Gingko leaves are flabellate and these were obovate.

Listening as an active process – bottom up processing: 

Listening as an active process – bottom up processing The pilot was arrested. The pirate was arrested. He’s thirty next week. He’s thirteen next week. He was speaking to an old man.

Listening as an active process – bottom up processing: 

Listening as an active process – bottom up processing At the hospital where I work they do what they call pet therapy. Volunteers bring pets in for the patients to see and to play with. There was a guy in today, in fact, and … … he brought a Boxer. … he brought a box of puppies. … he brought a Boxer puppy. … he brought some Boxer puppies.

Listening as an active process – bottom up processing: 

Listening as an active process – bottom up processing So he doesn’t want me to tell her. So he doesn’t want me to tell her? … and six people have died. Police say they are following up information provided by a key eyewitness … Police say they are … and six people have died. following up information provided by a key eyewitness …

Listening as an active process – bottom up processing: 

Listening as an active process – bottom up processing Well, that was very nice of him! Well, that was very nice of him! I didn’t go there on Thursday Thursday I didn’t go there on

Slide13: 

A while back I went on holiday for a couple of weeks, and I asked my sister-in-law you know to come in to see to them, and I left all the instructions, but she can’t have followed them ‘cos when I got back, they were dead as doornails and just sort of floating on the surface all bloated. I think she must have overfed them or something. And both together …

Listening subskills – examplesBottom-up processing: 

Listening subskills – examples Bottom-up processing Recognising individual phonemes Recognising and decoding reduced forms of words and strings of words Recognising word juncture Recognising meaning expressed by contrastive stress Recognising the meanings carried by the fall, fall-rise, rise and rise-fall tones in English Recognising the meaning carried by pitch change in English Filtering out fillers, hesitations etc Decoding features of connected speech

Listening subskills – examplesTop-down processing: 

Listening subskills – examples Top-down processing Using key words to identify the topic(s) of the discourse Inferring the relationship of participants, the context of the discourse etc Inferring unknown words from context Recognising metaphorical meaning Using knowledge of the world to interpret non-explicit meaning

Transactional listening subskills - examples: 

Transactional listening subskills - examples Extract and retain key facts and details in a discourse Identify the sequence in which a series of events occurred Understand the logical development of an argument – eg identify cause and effect, generalisation and example, claim and counter-claim

Interactional listening subskills - examples: 

Interactional listening subskills - examples Recognise markers of solidarity and distance between speakers Recognize appropriate moments for phatic and backchannel language Recognize the illocutionary intention of jokes, compliments, etc Distinguish between small-talk and “real” conversation topics

Principles of the new approach: 

Principles of the new approach Receptive competence can be greater than productive competence Ss have to learn to cope with the fact that they don’t fully understand. Need exposure to and guidance in coping with ungraded texts containing authentic features of spoken language – ie what they’ll meet outside the classroom Emphasis shifts from testing to see what the student doesn’t understand to using tasks … a) which focus explicitly on subskill development : Subskills can be taught and developed explicitly b) which emphasise what the learners do understand – grade the task not the text.