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Listening

Summary

In this section on listening, after a brief consideration of the importance of listeningfor learners of English, we will be thinking about what we, and our learners, listen to,our purpose in listening and how that affects the way in which we listen. We will thenbe looking at what exactly is involved in the complex skill of listening andunderstanding and consider what is meant by top down and bottom up processing.We will go on to considering problems that learners may experience when listening tospoken English. We will then be looking at some current issues related to listening:the different aims of ‘doing listening’ (language input or skills development), whetherwe learn to listen by listening, the difference between testing and teaching listening,whether and how listening can be taught in a systematic way. Finally you willconsider the value of authentic and graded materials, and other sources of listeningmaterial.

ObjectivesBy the end of this section, you should be able to:

• Identify difficulties that your learners experience in understanding spoken text.

• Say what skills are involved in listening to and comprehending different types ofspoken discourse.

• Discuss different approaches to teaching listening.

• Evaluate the effectiveness of the listening materials and tasks in your learners’coursebooks and other published materials.

• Select or create appropriate listening materials for your learners and designappropriate listening tasks.

• Plan how to develop your learners’ listening skills and include listening activitiesas a coherent part of your syllabus and lessons.

• State the aims of different types of listening activities.



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Contents

1. The Importance of Listening

2. Different Kinds of Listening

2.1. Texts

2.2. Listening Purpose

2.2.1 Interactional versus Transactional

2.2.2 Instrumental versus Pleasurable

2.2.3 Extensive versus Intensive

2.3. Listening Style

3. What’s involved in listening and understanding?

3.1. Schematic Knowledge

3.2. Knowledge of Context

3.3. Knowledge of the Language

3.4. Top-down and Bottom-up Processing

3.5. Putting it all Together

4. The Language Learner and Listening

5. Learners’ Difficulties in Listening

5.1. The Speaker

5.2. The Situation

5.3. The Text

5.4. The Listener

6. Current Issues

6.1. Listening for Language and Listening for Skills Development

6.2. Learning to Listen by Listening

6.3. Testing and Teaching

6.4. Teaching Listening in a Systematic Way

6.5. Listening Tasks and Aims

6.6. Different Types of Listening Material

6. Conclusion

7. Terminology Review

Reading

Appendices



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1. The Importance of Listening

TASK 1: Thinking about Listening (25mins)

Listening is one of the four skills, and along with reading, considered a ‘receptiveskill’. How important is it?

Consider these statements. Which is the most striking? Why?

‘Research has demonstrated that adults spend 40 – 50% of communication timelistening, 25 – 30% speaking, 11-16% reading, and about 9% writing’.1

‘Probably most classroom activities, whatever their ostensible purpose, rely to agreater or lesser extent on the learners’ listening faculties’.2

‘Many students whose general abilities in English are quite good – or so theythought - report a traumatic period after their first arrival in an English-speakingcountry. For quite some time - days, weeks or months, depending on the student-

they can understand little or nothing of what is said to them’.

3

‘Spoken language has many characteristics that are different from those of writtenlanguage. The characteristics of spoken language enable us to use languageeffectively in live interaction. It is easier to listen to spoken language than it is tolisten to written language’.4

Now read what Rost says about the importance of listening:

‘It is now widely accepted that listening plays an important role in L2 instructionfor several reasons:

• Listening is vital in the language classroom because it provides input for thelearner. Without understandable input at the right level, any learning simply

cannot begin.

• Spoken language provides a means of interaction for the learner. Sincelearners must interact to achieve understanding, access to speakers of thelanguage is essential. Moreover, learners’ failure to understand the languagethey hear is an impetus, not an obstacle, to interaction and learning.

• Authentic spoken language presents a challenge for the learner to attempt tounderstand language as it is actually used by native speakers.

• Listening exercises provide teachers with a means for drawing learners’attention to new forms (vocabulary, grammar, interaction patterns) in thelanguage.

1 Rivers in Gilman and Moody 1984:331, quoted in Vandergrift, L. Facilitating second language listening

comprehension: acquiring successful strategies, ELTJ 53/3 July 1999

2 Bowen, T. & Marks, J. Inside Teaching chapter 9 p128

3 Rixon, S. Developing Listening Skills p36

4 Rost, M. Introducing Listening p51



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• In addition to creating the right conditions for language development, listeningcan also provide enjoyment and stimulate cultural interests, participation inthe target culture (via movies, radio, TV, songs, plays), appreciation of thebeauty of the language (figures of speech, sayings, colloquial expressions)and fulfilment of social needs (development of relationships, confidence,gathering information for every day survival needs)’.

(Rost, M. Introducing Listening chapter 10 section 3.2)

Do you agree with the points he makes? Do you think any are more importantthan the others? Would you add anything? (It may help to think about a particulargroup of students when you answer these questions).

2. Different kinds of listening

We do a lot of listening in our daily lives and you probably listen to at least some of

the following:

• Chat with family/colleagues/acquaintances/good friends/strangers

• Phone calls with friends/family/business contacts

• Overheard chat (on the bus, in the staffroom, in the supermarket)

• Radio (programmes of interest, background, DJ talk, songs)

• TV (news, soap, adverts, film, comedy, documentary etc.)

• Students talking (if you’re a teacher)

TASK 2: Types of Listening (10mins)

Now think about the listening that you have done so far today (or the previous day, ifit is early morning!). List the people you have spoken to, and what the topic of theinteraction was. Use the list above to help you.

Which type of listening are you mainly involved in?

We will return to this list in Task 3.

There are various ways in which listening situations differ; we can distinguishbetween different types of text, different listening purposes and different styles oflistening.

2.1. Texts

We can distinguish between different types of text (spoken or written) through genre.Genre refers to the type of text in question, that is, prayer, lecture, chat, play, recipeand so on. A particular genre may be identified from the way the text is organised,the lexis, the grammar, the style and register and, in the case of spoken texts,



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probably different phonology. For example, chat between friends may becharacterised by less ‘careful’ enunciation than a formal lecture.

2.2. Listening purposes

Listeners have different purposes in different situations and these different purposesaffect how we listen. There are three clines on which any sample of listening can be

placed: interactional vs. transactional, instrumental vs. pleasurable, and intensive vs.extensive.

2.2.1 Interactional versus Transactional

Interactional uses of language are those in which the primary purposes are social. Inother words, the aim is to show interest in the other person, and follow norms ofsocial behaviour; it has to do with building or maintaining social relationships. It wouldinclude things like greetings, small talk, party chat, and so on. Although someinformation may be relayed in the process, this is not the main purpose of it (‘Howare you? Oh not so bad. And how’s Ben? Well you know, his leg’s playing up again,it’s the weather you know. Oh yes, dreadful recently. That’s right’). They really onlyhold any interest for the participants: listening to others chatting has no real

significance. As Brown and Yule point out, ‘Most conversations are appallinglyboring’! (Brown, G. & Yule, G. Teaching the Spoken Language p82)

Transactional uses are those in which language is being used primarily forcommunicating information. In other words, there is a clear purpose in theinformation exchange. Transactional exchanges are message-oriented rather thanlistener-oriented thus the information needs to be got across accurately, clearly andcoherently. Usually the listener needs the information in order to do something with it.

The two categories, interactional and transactional, are not polar. In the middle ofinteractional chat, we may home in on some particularly interesting bit of informationand decide to do something on the basis of it; thus it takes on a more transactionalnature.

2.2.2. Instrumental versus PleasurableOften we listen because we have a clear goal to achieve, or information to discover.We listen to an announcement at an airport to find out which gate our flight leavesfrom, or we listen to the travel bulletins on the radio to find out what our journey towork will be like. Listening where we have a clear aim is termed instrumental.Pleasurable listening, on the other hand, is for our own enjoyment: listening to aplay, chatting on the phone, going to a poetry recital etc.

Like interactional and transactional listening, these two types of listening form acontinuum, and some listening may demonstrate elements of both instrumental and,pleasurable listening, for example, listening to a documentary on the radio in orderfind out more about a subject that interests us.

2.2.3. Extensive versus IntensiveListening at length (watching a TV soap, a film, and so on) with no focus on testingthe listener’s understanding of the content, is termed extensive listening. It usuallyoccurs outside the classroom (as it would take up a probably unjustifiable proportionof class time) and is personal to each individual: what one learner chooses to listento at length may not please another (another reason why extensive listening tends tooccur outside the classroom). Intensive listening, which is what we tend to do inclass, usually has a clearly-defined aim. It often occurs for study purposes.



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2.3. Listening style: Interactive versus Non- Interactive

Another way to classify listening is whether it is interactive or non-interactive.Interactive listening is, typically, listening in conversations where the listener is also aspeaker. Other interactive situations include interviews, exchanges in shops,telephone calls and so on.

Non-interactive listening is where the listener does not have the opportunity to speak.Thus watching television, listening to the radio, listening to announcements at thestation, or listening to a lecture are examples.

TASK 3: Types of Listening (10mins)

Now look at the list you wrote in Task 2.

Can you classify the different kinds of texts according to the categories in 2.1, 2.2and 2.3?

Which type of listening are you mainly involved in?

See Appendix 1 for suggested classifications.

3. What’s involved in listening and understanding?

Listening and comprehending is a highly complex process, which is often wronglyassumed to be passive. Because the process is transient and everything has tohappen so quickly, it is also quite difficult to analyse and explain. You may alreadyhave some ideas about some of the factors involved from considering studentdifficulties and, of course, from your experience as a listener (in both L1 and L2) andyour work with your students.



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TASK 5: Reading about the Listening Process (45 mins)

Comprehension of spoken text involves a complex interplay of what the listenerbrings with him, the situation, and the actual message.

Read two of the following excerpts as you can to find out more about how thesefactors play a part in the process of listening and understanding.

• Richards, J. C. The Language Teaching Matrix chapter 3 pp 50 - 58

• Anderson, A. & Lynch T. Listening chapter 1 pp 1 - 15

• Brown, G. And Yule, G. Teaching the Spoken Language chapter 3, p 54 - 80

• Rost, M. Introducing Listening chapters 2 - 6

Anderson and Lynch summarise it as follows (p13)

Based on your reading, make some notes about how each of the elements abovemay contribute to the overall comprehension process.

Then read the following section and compare your ideas.

Background knowledge

- Factual knowledge

- Socio-cultural knowledge

Procedural knowledge

- How language is used in discourse

Knowledge of situation

- Physical setting, participants, context

Knowledge of co-text

- What has been/will be said

Knowledge of the language system

- Semantic

- Systemic

- Syntactic

- Phonological

SCHEMATICKNOWLEDGE

CONTEXTUALKNOWLEDGE

SYSTEMICKNOWLEDGE



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3.1. Schematic Knowledge

This refers to knowledge that the listener already has about the ‘world’ and aboutcertain types of text.

‘Listeners are able to predict and interpret language by analogy with pastsimilar experiences. In other words they have a range of stereotyped

expectations of particular people, places, situations and text types’.

Sheerin, S. Listening Comprehension: teaching or testing? ELTJ41/2 April 1987 p126

For example, if you turn on the TV at 10.00pm and see a man in a suit sitting behinda desk talking; you immediately recognise it as the news. You therefore expectcertain topics to come up, you expect to hear a lot of ‘negative’ things, you expectwhat you hear to be new events or developments, you expect some live coveragefrom other reporters, and so on. You probably know who many of the famous peoplereferred to are, so your background knowledge, assumptions and associations aboutthem will be activated here too. You also expect the stories to be told in a certainway: first a new development, then more detail since that is how the genre ‘newsstory’ works.

In other words, the background knowledge you already have enables you to predictcertain things, and interpret and infer certain things when you begin to listen.

3.2. Contextual Knowledge

The listener also has information from the context in which the listening takes place.To take a different example, if your Director of Studies calls you in to her office, tellsyou to sit down and has a copy of the school timetable in front of her, there areelements within this context that suggest she is going to talk about your teachingtimetable. Her body language and facial expression may give you clues as towhether you will like what you’re going to hear or not. You may also recall a previousconversation or message sent out about timetable changes being necessary and

conversations with colleagues in which you guessed what these might be.

Thus certain elements specific to this particular situation (rather than more generalschema related to ‘Directors of Studies talking to teachers’) will enable you toimmediately predict what the topic is, and even make more specific predictions aboutthe exact content of the message.

3.3. Systemic Knowledge

This relates to grammar, lexis and sounds. In order to make sense of what we hear,we need to be able to recognise sounds, discriminate between sounds (know thedifference between girl and gull), not be put off by features of connected speech(elision, assimilation, weak forms etc) or different accents, and to be able to identify(and interpret) stress and intonation patterns. Stress and intonation may highlight

important points such as the speaker’s attitude and also may indicate withininteraction when the speaker has finished or expects the listener to say something.

We also need to recognise words and lexical phrases and know what they mean. Weneed to recognise if the language being used is appropriate to the genre; if it isn’t, wemay realise for example that the speaker is being humorous. We need to recognisediscourse markers and see how one bit of the message relates to another. We needto recognise grammar in order to understand how the words fit together, the timebeing talked about, whether the speaker is speaking hypothetically, and so on.



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3.4. Top-down and Bottom-up Processing

The types of knowledge we have considered above relate to what we – and students – need to know in order to “understand” a text.

We can also view listening comprehension as involving two distinct processes:bottom up processing and top-down processing.

TASK 6: Bottom Up or Top Down? (5mins)

Fill in the gaps

1) processing refers to the use of incoming data as asource of information about the meaning of a message. From this perspective, theprocess of comprehension begins with the message received, which is analysed atsuccessive levels of organisation - sounds, words, clauses and sentences – untilthe intended meaning is arrived at. Comprehension is thus viewed as a process ofdecoding‘.

‘The listener’s lexical and grammatical competence in a language provides thebasis for processing’.

(Richards, J. C. The Language Teaching Matrix p50 and 51)

(See Rost chapters 2, 3, 4)

2) processing, on the other hand, refers to the use ofbackground knowledge in understanding the meaning of a message. Backgroundknowledge may take several forms. It may be previous knowledge about the topicof discourse, it may be situational or contextual knowledge, or it may beknowledge stored in long-term memory in the form of schemata and scripts – plansabout the overall structure of events and the relationships between them’.

(Richards, J. C. op cit p51)

See Appendix 2 to check your answer.

3.5. Putting it all Together

Are any of these kinds of knowledge more important than the others in the listeningprocess?

A sensible answer to this question would be this: they are all important elements butdepending on the listener and his/her purpose, some may become more important

than others in certain listening situations. It may be that ‘bad listeners’ (they exist!)often rely on schematic knowledge too much and don’t actually listen to the contentof what is being said!

In certain listening situations we may need the ‘details’, the recognition of lots ofindividual words, whereas in other situations we may be happy with a very generalidea of what’s being said (forming our own interpretation based on previousknowledge).



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It is likely, of course, that in real life we move between the two and make more orless use of them even within the same ‘piece of listening’.

‘In general, listening can be regarded not so much as a question ofperception and processing of a signal, but rather as a process of parallelconstruction on the part of the listener: construction of a coherentinterpretation which is consistent as far as possible with the acoustic

clues and the listener’s mental image’.

Bowen and Marks Inside Teaching p 131

The role played by the ‘acoustic clues’ and the ‘listener’s mental image’ may thenvary, according to the listener as well as the situation.

‘Listening is anything but a passive activity. It is a complex, activeprocess in which the listener must discriminate between sounds,understand vocabulary, and grammatical structures, interpret stress andintonation, retain what was gathered in all of the above, and interpret itwithin the immediate as well as the larger socio-cultural context of theutterance. Co-ordinating all of this involves a great deal of mental activityon the part of the listener. Listening is hard work and deserves moreanalysis and support’.

Vandergrift, L. Facilitating second language listeningcomprehension: acquiring successful strategies (ELTJ 53/3 July1999

TASK 7: Types of Listening Activities (10mins)

Consider the following tasks which relate to a listening activity in class. Do theyencourage top-down processing or bottom-up processing? Can any involve both?

How?1) Ask students to guess content of a dialogue from accompanying picture

2) Listen to a dialogue and guess where the speakers are

3) Raise your hand when you hear words with the sound /əʊ/

4) Predict which of these topics will be covered in this TV documentary

5) Listen to and watch a video and assess the speaker’s attitude

6) Listen and fill in the gaps

7) Listen and repeat

8) Dictation of a text

See Appendix 3 for suggested answers.



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4. The Language Learner and Listening

Now we will consider listening from the point of view of the language learner sincewhat they need to listen to or do listen to in English may be quite different fromourselves. If your students are living in an English speaking country then theirpotential exposure to a wide variety of text types, text styles, and text registers will

(usually) be much greater than those who are not.

TASK 4: Classroom Research (30 mins)

Devise a questionnaire to find out about what your students listen to or will needto listen to in English ‘in real life’.

Include questions that will give you information about:

• Genre: i.e. what kinds of texts do they listen to?

•

Speakers (non native v native speakers): who are the speakers?

• Purpose: why are they engaging in listening? Interactional or transactional?

• Style: interactive or non-interactive

• What they find easy/difficult about listening

• Why they think they do listening in class

When you have the results of your questionnaire, consider the implications forthe teaching of listening.

How does what your learners have reported relate to what you normally do inthe classroom? Think back to the last four lessons you have done with thisclass. Make a list of the listening that your learners have engaged in (rememberthis may be listening to you or to the other students as well as the more formallistening lesson). How does it match up with their perceived needs? Make anote of any changes you think are necessary in your teaching of listening as aresult of your findings.

Report three key facts from your findings on the DELTA Discussion Forum.

5. Learners’ difficulties in listening



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TASK 8: Difficulties with Listening (25mins)

Listening is a crucial skill, but one which some learners find difficult. Why is this?You probably have some good ideas already on this from your reading but for thistask think about your own experience as a listener in a foreign language. You may

like to think about difficulties in different categories - those to do with the speaker,the text, the situation and the listener.

Use these imagined situations to help you.

• Listening to two English computer programmers talking at work (you’re not anexpert).

• Phoning a plumber in Spain because your bathtub is leaking (you didbeginners Spanish at evening class in Britain).

• Listening to a four way informal conversation between friends in a bar in Italy(you have GCSE Italian).

• Watching the news on TV in Chinese (you’ve started to learn Chinese inChina).

• In an art gallery in Holland listening to a lecture with slides on a topic you knowa lot about (you’ve had no formal tuition in Dutch).

Compare your ideas with those following.

There is some overlap here within the categories but some of the factors that youmay have identified are:

5.1. The Speaker

• Low volume, poor voice quality, monotonous, speed of delivery too fast

• Uses unfamiliar language

• Doesn’t organise discourse coherently

• Lack of appreciation of listener’s difficulties

5.2. The Text

• Unfamiliar topic

• Unfamiliar language (lexis, phonological patterns etc.)

5.3. The Situation

6. Background noise

7. No or few visual/environmental clues to aid comprehension

5.4 . The listener

• Lack of knowledge of the topic



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• Failure to exploit visual or environmental clues

• Unrealistic expectations

• Lack of concentration or interest

• Lack of familiarity with the language and phonological features

Read more about these problems at Appendix 4.

TASK 9: Your Learners’ Problems (30mins)

What particular problems (either from the list above or others) have you notedwith your students? How do you account for this? Is listening more difficult thanreading for your students? Why?

Post your observations on the Discussion Forum on the DELTA website. Stateclearly the mother tongue of the students concerned. Write an absolute

maximum of 200 words.

6. Current issues

If you are interested in reading about the role of listening in ELT from a historicalperspective, see Appendix 5.

Listening nowadays plays an important role alongside the other skills in ELT. Thereare certain areas that you need to be aware of, in some cases because they aresomewhat controversial. Before reading on, we shall consider these issues and your

reaction to them. Some relate to the aims of listening lessons, some the procedureswe use and some the materials.



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TASK 10: Thinking about your Teaching of Listening (25mins)

Make notes about your own views on the following questions:

• Why do you do listening in the classroom? Is it for teaching and practising

language or for teaching and developing listening skills?

• Do you believe we learn to listen by listening?

• What’s the difference between testing and teaching listening skills?

• Can we teach listening in a systematic way?

• What kind of listening tasks do you use? What are the aims?

• Do you think you should use authentic materials?

• Do you think you should use graded materials?

• What sources of listening material are available to you?

Now read on:

6.1. Listening for Language and Listening for Skills Development

Listening is commonly used in the classroom for two different reasons: one as avehicle for focussing on language and the other as a means of developing learners’listening skills. Often the two may be combined.

TASK 11: Identifying Current Practice (30mins)

Look at the excerpts of listening material in Appendix 6:

New Headway Upper Intermediate, Unit 7, page 75 Listening T 7.5

Cutting Edge Intermediate, Module 5, Listening: Working in something different

Pre-Intermediate Choice, Unit 12, page 73, Listening

What differences in procedures are there? What differences in aims?

What do you normally do listening for? Do your students have the same goal?(Refer back to the questionnaire. Next time you do a listening for skills

development you could also ask the students what they perceive as the aim ofthe activity).

See Appendix 6 for comments about the materials.

6.2. Learning to listen by listening

A holistic approach to developing listening skills is to make sure that learners doplenty of listening. Practice makes perfect.



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‘Practice is the most important thing. The more listening the better, andthe sub skills will take care of themselves as they become atomised’.

Ridgway T. Listening Strategies- I beg your pardon? ELTJ 54/2 April2000

TASK 12: Your Opinion (10mins)

How can you maximise listening opportunities for your students? Do you agreewith Ridgway? Why (not)?

Listening comprehension activities can be incorporated into class activities on aregular basis. By using English as the medium of communication in the classroomthe amount of exposure time to the spoken language can be vastly increased.Speaking activities also incorporate listening and thus the learners listen to eachother as well as the teacher.

Outside the class, or in self access slots, learners can be encouraged to listen toEnglish through songs, graded readers with accompanying tapes, cable TV, films,the Internet, tape pen pals, and so on.

One benefit of doing a lot of listening and maybe particularly doing it out of theclassroom (or on a self-access basis) is that it may help reduce inhibitions and fear.Learners can feel very put on the spot in the classroom with the teacher controllinghow many times they are going to hear something and asking them to feedback theiranswers to the whole class.

Live listening is also very useful. See Chapter 18 in Harmer, J. 2007 The Practiceof English Language Teaching (4th edition) (Longman) for a description anddiscussion of classroom applications.

It should be noted that if students are working on their own doing listening, we do nothave insight into what they are actually doing, By doing it they may be actuallyworking on subskills. For example, a student reading a book and listening to a tape ofit may be matching the two and raising his/her awareness of certain pronunciationfeatures.

6.3. Testing and teaching

A typical procedure nowadays for dealing with a listening text is as follows:

• Create interest

• Pre-teach a few key items of vocabulary

• Preset a gist task

• Students listen and do task followed by feedback

• Preset a more intensive task

• Students listen and do task

• Maybe a third listening if students found it difficult or disagreed in their answers



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• Feedback, confirmation of correct answers

• Move onto another activity (e.g. language focus, or another skills activity)

TASK 13: Evaluating a Typical Listening Procedure (20mins)

• What do you see as the aims of the above?

• Can you identify any problems?

This procedure for listening texts has drawn criticism.

John Field writes:

‘The methodology profiled above provides practice in listening but fails toteach the skill. A conventional listening comprehension lesson simplyadds yet another text to the learners’ experience; it does little or nothingto improve the effectiveness of their listening or to address theirshortcomings as listeners’.

Field, J. Skills and strategies: Towards a New Methodology forListening ELTJ 52/2 April 1998

White, in Listening also lists a number of objections to the ‘standard’ approach:

• Not much time is spent on actually listening to the tape.

• Not much time is spent on analysing what went wrong.

• The teacher takes on the sole responsibility for building up an understanding ofthe listening text on the part of the students.

• It assumes that there is only one way of listening to something.

• Classroom listening very often puts students in the position of passive over-hearers.

• The tasks do not stress the links between listening and speaking.

• We often expect 100% comprehension.



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TASK 14: Reading (15 – 20 mins)

Read

Field, J. The Changing Face of Listening ETP Issue 6 Jan 1998

Harmer, J. 2007 The Practice of English Language Teaching (4th edition) (Longman)

Sheerin, S. Listening Comprehension: teaching or testing? ELTJ 41/2 April1987

White, G. Listening Oxford University Press 1998

What ideas do you have now for teaching rather than testing listening? Compareyour ideas with those in Appendix 7.

TASK 15: Finding Solutions to Problems (20mins)

The following problems arise in your class. What ‘remedial action’ might you decideto take?

• Students miss the main point because they didn’t pick out key lexical items.

• In a roleplay one of the speakers falls silent as a result of not understandingwhat their partner said.

• Confusion arises over a misunderstood word (can/can’t) in a dialogue.

• Students fail to recognise the speaker’s attitude through intonation.

• Students get the wrong end of the stick because of misunderstanding a culturalreference.

• Difficulties in understanding the news on the radio.

• Not recognising links between different parts of what is said.

• Students say they can’t understand a word of a short conversation because it’stoo fast.


6.4. Teaching Listening in a Systematic Way

From analysis of the different elements involved in effective listening, and theproblems that arise, many writers have attempted to draw up lists of subskills ormicro-skills. Obviously some of these relate to top down processing (schematic andcontextual knowledge) and others relate to bottom up skills (systemic knowledge).



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In Appendix 10 you will find two examples of such lists. The first is from Richards onlistening comprehension in The Context of Language Teaching. The second isfrom Bowen and Marks, chapter 9 in Inside teaching. (See also White’s list inListening pages 8 & 9).

Field in his article Skills and strategies: Towards a New Methodology forListening, points out that Richards’ list is ‘extremely diverse’ and suggests that three

separate areas could be targeted: ‘types of listening (for gist, for information etc.),discourse features (reference, markers etc.) and techniques (predicting, anticipating,recognising intonational cues etc.).

Coursebooks nowadays include listening practice, but as you have seen, variouswriters (including Richards, White, Field and Sheerin) have claimed that we tend totest not teach and that there is little in the way of systematic development of listeningskills in published materials.

What would a systematic approach consist of?

Field identifies two for developing students’ listening abilities:

1. A skills-based approach to listening, consisting of either teaching the subskills of

listening as part of a structured programme of micro-listening exercises ordetermining how and why understanding breaks down, then providing remedialpractice in the subskills involved.

2. A strategic approach based upon the recognition that much second-languagelistening is dependent upon the learner’s ability to compensate for gaps inunderstanding.

What kinds of things could be considered listening skills? And strategies?

Skills relate to the text itself and what you do (top down and bottom up) in order tounderstand it.

Strategies relate to the listener and are:

‘Efforts to compensate for uncertainties in understanding, and couldinclude making inferences, realising where misunderstandings haveoccurred, and asking for clarification. Students should need thesestrategies less and less as they get more familiar with the language andmore competent at listening skills...’

White, G. 1998 Listening Oxford University Press

This is a controversial issue because some writers have felt that there are difficultiesin knowing what skills or strategies are employed in listening (it happens so quickly)and there is disagreement over what skills and strategies exist. Furthermore, even ifyou can identify ‘micro-skills’, teaching and practising individual skills in this manner(building block approach) does not necessarily enable learners to put them intooperation along with other ones.

(Note that the terms ‘skills’ and ‘strategies’ are sometimes used interchangeably andcertain American writers (Vandergrift and Richards, for example) seem to use one orthe other to refer to the same thing).

If you wish to find out more about this, read one or more of the following on howlistening can be taught.



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Field J. Finding one’s way in the fog: listening strategies and second languagelearners MET 9/1 2000

Field, J. Skills and Strategies: towards a new methodology for listening ELTJ52/2 April 1998

Richards, J. C. Designing instructional materials for teaching listening

comprehension in The Language Teaching Matrix Cambridge University Presschapter 3 pages 59-66

TASK 16: Evaluation of Supplementary Listening Material (30mins)

Have a look at a low level supplementary listening book of your choice, forexample:

• Richards, J. C. 1990 Listen Carefully Oxford university Press

• Blundell, L. & Stokes, J. 1981 Task Listening Cambridge University Press

• Bell, J. 1989 Soundings Longman

• Doff, A 1991 Listening 1 Cambridge University Press

In your opinion, does it teach listening skills or strategies in any consistent way?Do you think it is possible or desirable to do so? You might like to post anycomments on the DELTA Discussion Forum.

6.5. Listening Tasks and Aims

The use of tasks when doing listening in the classroom is commonplace. There are

many different kinds of tasks including matching content with predictions, selecting orordering pictures, multiple choice, gapfilling and so on. It is important when youselect or design a task that you are aware of why you are doing it.



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TASK 17: Listening Tasks and Aims (30mins)

What do you think is the aim of the following activities related to listening?

a) Teacher dictates a series of short sentences: I’ve got a terrible cough. The

sea’s very rough today. This steak is too tough to eat. Let’s go through into theother room. I’m not hungry yet though.

b) Teacher asks students to predict what they’ll see on today’s BBC news.

c) Teacher provides students with a copy of the tapescript. They read as theylisten for the final time.

d) Teacher provides students with a gapped copy of the tapescript, plays the tapeagain and they fill in the gaps.

e) Teacher asks students to listen to descriptions of people and match them topictures in their book.

f) Teacher gets a student to operate the tape recorder and replay as requestedby the other students.

g) The teacher pre teaches key items of vocabulary.

h) Teacher plays (part of) the tape in short sections and asks the students torepeat.

i) Dictogloss activity

j) How many words did I say?

k) Write down all the words and expressions you heard connected with the topicof holidays.

l) Put your hand up if you don’t understand.

m) Stopping the tape and asking the students what they think comes next.


6.6. Different Types of Listening Material

There are various options open to us in terms of the listening materials we use andtheir source.

We can use authentic materials or graded, published materials. We can useourselves or other ‘live’ speakers of English. We can use the students. We can usevideo or audio listening material, pre-recorded or home-made recordings. Variety isprobably a good thing and each of these types of listening material has particularadvantages.



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TASK 18:Brainstorming Pros and Cons of Different Types of Material(30mins)

What advantages and disadvantages can you think of for each of these types ofmaterial?

• Authentic texts

• Graded texts

• The teacher

• Other live speakers of English

• The students

• Video

• Audio

• Homemade

For commentary, see Appendix 12.

6. Conclusion

We have now looked at some of the main issues involved in dealing with listeningwith learners of English.

If you would like to, you can now do Optional Task 2 in Appendix 13 which is anevaluation of one of your coursebooks in terms of the listening programme it offers.The aim of this task is to enable you to draw together all your ideas about theteaching of listening.

7. Terminology Review

The definitions below all refer to concepts from this section. For 1 – 5, supply theterm being defined. There is an example provided.

Example. Listening done purely for enjoyment - PLEASURABLE LISTENING

1. Using background knowledge, previous experiences and contextual clues tounderstand the meaning of (= process) a listening text.

2. Listening to extended pieces of text in order to practice listening skills ingeneral, or to acquire vocabulary, with no overt study or language aims.

3. Our knowledge of the world and how circumstances and situations tend todevelop, which allows us to build a mental representation of a given context.



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In the classroom, we tap into this knowledge in order to create interest in alistening text.

4. An approach to listening which advocates providing learners with lots ofopportunities for listening, and lots of practice in the skill, in the belief thatpractice makes perfect. No development of sub-skills is encouraged.

5. Listening situations in which the listener has no opportunity to speak.

For 6 – 10, provide a definition for the labels given. There is an example provided.

Example. “TRANSACTIONAL LISTENING”

“Listening in which there is an overt exchange of facts or information, or a cleargoal or objective to the interaction.”

6. INTERACTIONAL LISTENING

7. BOTTOM-UP PROCESSING

8. INTENSIVE LISTENING

9. INTERACTIVE LISTENING

10. SYSTEMIC KNOWLEDGE

See Appendix 14 for answers.



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Reading

Essential Reading:

Anderson, A. & Lynch, T. 1988 Listening Oxford University Press

Harmer, J. 2007 The Practice of English Language Teaching (4th edition)Longman

Richards, J.C. 1990 The Language Teaching Matrix Cambridge University Press,chapter 3

White, G. 1998 Listening Oxford University Press

Recommended Additional Reading:

Bell, J. 1989 Soundings Longman

Blundell, L. & Stokes, J. 1981 Task Listening Cambridge University Press

Bowen, T. & Marks, J. 1994 Inside Teaching Heinemann, chapter 9

Brown, G. & Yule, G. Teaching the Spoken Language Cambridge University Presschapter 3

Cook, G. 1989 Discourse Oxford University Press

Doff, A 1991 Listening 1 Cambridge University Press

Field, J. 1996 Notes on listening: normalisation MET 5/4

Field, J. 1997 Notes on Listening: authenticity MET 6/3

Field, J. 1997 Notes on listening: listening and pronunciation (MET 6/2

Field, J. 1997 Notes on Listening: the use of spelling MET 6/4

Field, J. 1997 Notes on Listening: variability and assimilation MET 6/1

Field, J. 1998 Notes on Listening: conversational features MET 7/1

Field, J. 2000 Finding one’s way in the fog: listening strategies and second-language learners MET 9/1

Field, J. April 1998 Skills and Strategies: towards a new methodology forlistening ELTJ 52/2

Field, J. April 2000 Not waving but drowning – a reply to Tony Ridgway ELTJ54/2

Field, J. January 1998 The Changing Face of Listening ETP Issue 6

Goh, C. October 1997 Metacognitive awareness and second language listeners ELTJ 51/4

Lewis, M. 1993 The Lexical Approach LTP

Marks, J. 1995 Listening in ETP Issue 16

Richards, J. C. 1985 The Context of Language Teaching Cambridge UniversityPress



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Richards, J. C. 1990 Listen Carefully Oxford university Press

Ridgway, T. April 2000 Listening Strategies – I beg your pardon? ELTJ 54/2

Ridgway, T. April 2000 Hang on a minute – a reply to John Field ELTJ, 54/2

Rixon, S. 1986 Developing Listening Skills Macmillan

Rost, M. 1990 Listening in Language Learning Longman

Rost, M. 1994 Introducing Listening Penguin

Sheerin, S. April 1987 Listening Comprehension: teaching or testing? ELTJ 41/2

Underwood, M. 1989 Teaching Listening Longman

Ur, P. 1984 Teaching Listening Comprehension Cambridge University Press

Ur, P. 1996 A Course in Language Teaching Cambridge University Press, Module8

Vandergrift, L. July 1999 Facilitating second language listening comprehension:

acquiring successful strategies ELTJ 53/3Wilson, J. J. 2008 How to Teach Listening Pearson Longman



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Appendices

Appendix 1: Types of Listening

Interactive Non-interactive

Interactional Chat with family

Chat with colleagues

Phone calls with friend orfamily member toexchange pleasantries,gossip

Overheard chat

DJ talking on the radio

Pop songs

Soap opera on TV

Transactional Chat with family (e.g.talking about dinner plans,making arrangements)

Phone calls to businesscontacts

Staff/business meetings

Radio or TV programmeof interest (e.g. news)

Lecture

(Sometimes, as we pointed out, the distinctions between interactional andtransactional may blur or change during the course of the listening. Television orradio programmes that offer phone-ins also blur the distinction between interactiveand non-interactive!)

Appendix 2: Bottom Up or Top Down

The answers to the gaps are:

1) Bottom-up

2) Top-down

Appendix 3: Types of Listening Activities

The listening activities encourage the following types of processing:

1) Top down (they haven’t listened yet but it’s summoning schemata prior tolistening)

2) Bottom up first to pick out key lexical items, then top down bringing in yourprevious knowledge of places where people talk about these things.

3) Bottom up



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4) Top down

5) Top down

6) Bottom up (you need to listen out for isolated lexical items. Top down processescould help you if you were in doubt).

7) Bottom up (you don’t even have to understand the content you’re focussing onproducing sounds correctly).

8) Bottom up (although top down could help fill in bits that you don’t catch. This istypically an activity where learners fail to use top down processes to help them).

Appendix 4: Learners Problems

Here are some comments about learner difficulties with listening.

Lack of knowledge of the topic:

Our ability to listen and understand is largely determined by our awareness or

knowledge of the topic. If we know, in broad terms, what we are going to listen to, wehave expectations which we expect to be fulfilled and we make predictions aboutwhat will be said. For example, if we are listening to news on the radio, we expectcertain topics and types of report to come up. If we go into a shop to buy a sandwich,we have certain expectations about the kind of thing that will be said to us. Certainschemata are called up in our minds which provide a background to what we arehearing and greatly facilitate comprehension.

‘Schemata, then, are data structures, representing stereotypical patterns, which weretrieve from memory and employ in our understanding of discourse’.

Cook, G. 1989 Discourse Oxford University Press p73

For more on schemata see Cook, Discourse and the section on discourse in this

unit.

One reason for lack of comprehension then is that the listener does not summon theappropriate schemata, because of different schemata in operation across cultures(can you think of an example?), or lack of familiarity with the subject. You may havemore problems with the news in Chinese because of your lack of familiarity with thecultural references than you would with, for example, the French news (regardless ofyour language level). Similarly people talking about computers may be like double-Dutch to you! Failure to summon the appropriate schemata may of course also belinked to not understanding or misinterpreting key lexical items during the listeningprocess. (An English person I knew living in Italy once received a telephone call fromthe Italian police to tell her that her husband had had a small accident on hismotorbike. She misunderstood ‘moto’ - motorbike, thinking they were saying ‘morto’ –

dead. You can imagine how different the schemata she summoned was from the waythe dialogue should actually have occurred!).

Failure to exploit visual or environmental clues:

In face-to-face listening situations, or when we can see the speaker, as on thetelevision, we also have environmental and visual clues to help us. The situation, i.e.where the listening takes place, or the way the speakers look (dress, facialexpressions), film footage shown during the news report – these all provide extravisual information which helps us comprehend the spoken message.



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Facial and other gestures are certainly not universal so these may not always providethe right information for learners. Also learners may not automatically transfer skillsfrom L1 and not fully exploit the visual information that is available to them. At timesthere is little from the context that can help you.

Furthermore a lot of listening in the classroom also takes place using audiocassettes. This means that unless the teacher provides the information in another

way, there are no visual clues to aid comprehension. This is quite unlike the mosttypical listening situations in real life.

Unrealistic expectations

This may be on the part of the learners but also on the teacher’s.

‘A study by Bone (1988) of native speakers showed that people oftenlisten at only 25 per cent of their potential and ignore, forget, distort ormisunderstand the other 75 per cent’.

White, G. 1998 Listening Oxford University Press p7

Learners often expect 100% comprehension. This tendency may have been

encouraged by teachers and teaching methodology, for example, in the use ofgraded listening texts and intensive listening comprehension tasks, right and wronganswers, listen and repeat type tasks and so on.

Lack of concentration

This is something that affects us all at times! Tiredness, lack of relevant schemata,nerves when confronted by a tape recorder in the classroom, lack of interest in thetopic or a person growling in a foreign language may all affect our ability to relax andlisten attentively.

Concentration can be lost if you get distracted by an unknown word or expression.Speech is transient and it may not always be possible to ask to hear what was saidagain.

Unfamiliar language

This is of course a key factor. If you listen to a completely unknown language you willprobably understand nothing. With some kind of contextual information you may beable to guess the topic. If some familiar words are used (words which are similar toyour L1, or proper names) you’ll have a better chance of guessing the topic, and soon. (The Dutch art talk shouldn’t be entirely incomprehensible).

Native speakers are familiar not only with the sounds, vocabulary and structures oftheir language but also patterns that occur in language. We don’t need to listen outfor everything because again our prediction skills come into play. We can afford tomiss bits, that is, we exploit redundancy.

Imagine listening to someone with a slight speech defect:

‘Top talking, tand till and tay there until I tell you to move’.

It’s not difficult to understand what is being said even though a phoneme is missing.

You could also delete entire words from a stream of speech and still understand whatwas being said, filling in the gaps from your knowledge of patterns in the language.



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Learners of a language are not so familiar with the linguistic patterns of English andtherefore have to listen harder. It results in ‘tunnel hearing’ i.e. listening to one wordat a time. This results in overload on the memory.

It can also result in understanding what is being talked about but not getting the pointof it: i.e. the main content words have been understood but not the function of whathas been said.

It has been suggested that the brain can take in about seven bits of information orchunks of information at once. If the learner is not sure what is important and what isnot, there may be a situation of overload.

Another problem is not knowing the meaning of certain words. In face-to-faceinteraction it may be possible to ask for clarification, but if you are listening to a tapeor a video or a lecture it is not. Unknown words can result in distraction or wrongguesses. If there are too many of them, overall comprehension may be lost.

Sometimes learners may fail to recognise words that they know within a rapid streamof speech.

Lack of familiarity with phonological features

This covers quite a range of aspects.

Firstly, learners may fail to recognise the function of certain intonation patterns.Proficient users of a language expect certain intonation patterns to be associatedwith certain functions of the text. For example, we recognise when a question hasbeen asked, if the information is new or given from stress and intonation patternsused, what the important bits are, and we can usually spot if someone is expressinga particular emotion. Learners may not be able to do this without considerableexposure to the spoken language.

Native speakers also have a better chance of familiarity with a range of accents(some may cause native speakers difficulty too). Learners are less likely to have hadexposure to such a range of accents and different voices.

We are used to listening to speech at normal speed and the resulting phonologicalfeatures. Words in connected speech may sound different to words spoken inisolation. Learners of a foreign language may fail to hear words that they know withina stream of speech or they may miss an all-crucial sound because of weakening.

Some students may have more difficulties than others. In a country like Portugalwhere television and films are subtitled rather than dubbed, learners have moreexposure to spoken English and different varieties of it than in a country like Spainwhere everything is dubbed. With cable TV exposure may increase. Also it maydepend on the oral proficiency of non-native teachers in schools as this will influencehow used learners are to hearing spoken English, possibly from an early age.

Read John Field, Notes on listening: Variability and Assimilation and see thesection on connected speech in the phonology section in Unit 2.

A lot of listening of course goes on between non-native speakers of English. Twolearners of the same nationality are more likely to be able to understand each otherthan for example a Spanish student and a Japanese student.

Noise, volume, voice quality, speed of delivery

These things may make comprehension difficult when listening in L1 but get worsewhen added on to all the other problems of L2 listening. Some people are easier to



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understand than others because they speak more clearly and in a more interestingway. This may be related to sex, age, level of formality, and their awareness oflisteners’ difficulties.

Appendix 5:Listening in ELT - A Historical Perspective

Listening is clearly an important skill in language learning. It is the first one thatdevelops in children learning their first language. Much listening in real life is tied upwith speaking so in order to learn to speak you need to be able to listen effectivelytoo. Historically in language teaching, however, not much attention was paid to it. Inthe Grammar Translation Method the aim of learning a foreign language was to readand translate and to exercise the brain so, not surprisingly, little attention was paid tolistening. Its only role was in reading aloud.

A Frenchman called Gouin (late 1800s) was among the first to include listening as anessential part of his teaching method: students would hear sentences without readingthem and watch demonstrations of their meaning.

In the Direct Method, listening and speaking were emphasised at the beginning, as in

first language learning. Oral communication was set up by the teacher, based onquestion and answer exchanges.

The Oral Approach, as a development of this, followed the order of listening,speaking, reading and writing in language practice. The listening element was basedon dialogues in which new structures and vocabulary were modelled. The teacherprovided the model and the students repeated. Further drills followed. The Audio-Lingual method took a similar view of the role of listening, that is, it was to provide amodel for the oral work that followed. The language used was strictly graded andcontrolled, based on a structural syllabus. Thus the main purpose of listening wasaural recognition of structures.

More recently listening has been considered as more important. Various methods

known as the comprehension approaches (e.g. Asher’s Total Physical Response,Krashen and Terrell’s The Natural Approach) have a basic similarity. All of themadvocate large amounts of spoken input before the learners are required to produceany language themselves. Listening becomes an essential part of the languagesyllabus at the early stages of learning. This kind of approach is based on the way achild learns L1 and, in Krashen’s case, the early findings of second languageacquisition research. Other writers such as Ellis also recommend large amounts oflistening as a basis for language learning in that it stimulates acquisition.

Communicative Language Teaching also provided a more important role for listeningcomprehension in language learning. Communicative uses of spoken language wereemphasised and thus listening activities were viewed as valuable to the extent thatthey reflected real life listening conditions. Authentic listening was brought into the

classroom and the kinds of tasks that learners were asked to do usually depended onunderstanding meaning rather than focussing on the form, as had happenedpreviously.

‘The notion that listening inputs needed to model language that thelearners were to acquire was abandoned’.

Rost, M. 1990 Listening in Language Learning Longman p29

Listening plays a fairly important role nowadays. Michael Lewis in The Lexical Approach carries on in the tradition of the comprehension approaches and advocates



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‘Listening, listening and more listening’ (Lewis, M. 1993 The Lexical Approach LTPchapter 13 p193). Lewis states that:

‘Early emphasis on receptive skills, especially listening, is essential’since ‘Every piece of language which we ultimately produce comes fromoutside us and, as such, is initially based on receptive rather thanproductive skills’.

Lewis, M. op cit p193

In mainstream ELT, listening is introduced from the beginning stages of languagelearning but it probably does not constitute the major focus early on as advocated inthese comprehension approaches (TPR and so on). This is because teachers andlearners may prefer and expect to develop all skills alongside each other.

Nowadays most coursebooks for adults include ‘authentic’ or semi-authentic listeningas well as some graded texts for modelling new language. While there seem to befewer supplementary books for listening practice produced by publishers (probablybecause coursebooks deal with it better now), there are also more opportunities foraccess to authentic listening material if you have access to videos, cable TV, theWorld Service, the internet (e.g. www.cnn.com and so on).



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Appendix 6: Identifying Current Practice



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Cunningham, S. & Moor, P. Cutting Edge Intermediate, Module 5, p52



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Mohamed, S. & Acklam, R. Pre-Intermediate Choice, Unit 12, page 73, Listening



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Commentary on Extract one

(New Headway Upper Intermediate, unit 7 page 75 Listening T7.5)

The listening text, a song is used here solely for recognising expressions with gete.g. have got, I’ve got nothing to prove, I’ve got a plan to get us out of here etc.). Anexercise on phrasal verbs with get precedes the listening. The aim of the listening

then is raising awareness of lexical phrases with get. It is a purely language focussedaim.

Commentary on Extract Two

(Cutting Edge Intermediate, Module 5, page 52 Listening ‘Working in somethingdifferent’)

The tasks here encourage learners to connect the topic to their personal experienceand background knowledge (to help summon relevant schemata/top down processesto aid comprehension). The first task encourages them to work with notunderstanding everything since they only have to identify in what order the peoplespeak. (The task is actually wrongly worded!). The teacher can encourage guessingand justifying at this point. The students then listen again for more detailed

information and again, depending on how this is handled, it could offer opportunitiesfor guessing, justifying, re-listening if there are problems.

The tasks here very much follow the ‘standard’ approach to dealing with listening.

Commentary on Extract Three

(Pre-Intermediate Choice, Unit 12 page 73 Listening)

Task 1 brings into play the students’ background /general knowledge about theevents. Task 2 requires them to pick out key lexical items in the stream of speech.Task 3 again requires them to recognise key lexical phrases.

The underlying aim of this listening activity is grammatical: it provides a context for

and examples of the past simple and past continuous.

Appendix 7: Reading

You may have some of the following ideas:

• Spend less time on pre-listening tasks.

• Allow time for an extended post-listening period in which learners’ problems canbe identified and tackled.

• Encourage learners to write down the words they understand, to form anddiscuss inferences, to listen again and revise their inferences then to check themagainst what the speaker says next.

• Encourage learners to listen and re-listen and to do as much of the work aspossible for themselves.

• Get learners to listen to a short passage, then to compare their understanding ofit in pairs. Encourage them to disagree with each other. Play the passage again.Let the pairs revise their views, ask them to share their interpretations with the



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class, resist the temptation to tell them who is right and who is wrong, get them togive evidence for their answers.

• Spend time asking where and how understanding broke down and then constructremedial tasks (i.e. to home in on subskills).

Appendix 8: Finding Solutions to Problems

1. Get students to listen and note down lexical items they hear, after one listeningthey compare notes and try to reconstruct text.

2. Listen to sentences, mark main stresses.

3. Teach and practise strategies for dealing with not understanding.

e.g. Sorry? / Pardon? / I didn’t get that, what did you say? / Sorry I’m not surewhat you mean. / I’m not with you. / Could you speak more slowly please?

4. Listening to sentences which contain can/can’t, they tick which one they hear (ifwritten) or make a signal (e.g. thumbs up, thumbs down) for positive or negative.Practice with similar (was/wasn’t).

5. Listening to short monologues demonstrating different attitudes, match each withappropriate adjective, identify features of intonation (e.g. lots of variation,surprise/excitement, flat low, boredom, etc.).

6. Word association activities based around such references prior to listening.

7. Getting students to predict content based on their knowledge of what kinds ofstories are usually in the news, current affairs, from newspaper headlines, photosor from headlines of each story.

8. Recognising effect of cohesive devices: looking at spoken text in written form andnoticing examples of anaphoric/cataphoric reference, deictic references, lexicalcohesion; listen to tape and stop it at certain points to ask what things refer to.

9. Get them to write down any words or phrases they understand, then share ideasand try to reconstruct. Let them listen to it as many times as they want.

10. Exercises on features of connected speech: how many words did I say?, markmain stresses, mark weak forms, linking etc.



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Appendix 9:

Optional Task 1: Teaching Experiment

This may be particularly relevant if you teach learners who have a lot of difficultywith listening or if you feel you tend to test rather than teach listening.

Do a listening activity with one of your classes. Try to include some of theprocedures discussed in section 5, particularly if you haven’t used them before. Tryto work out problem areas and remedial work for the students.

Report what you did and your conclusions on the DELTA Discussion Forum.



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Appendix 10:

From Richards, J. C. 1985 The Context of Language Teaching CambridgeUniversity Press p198 & 199.



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From Bowen, T. & Marks, J. 1994 Inside Meaning Heinemann p130 & 131



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Appendix 11: Listening Tasks and Aims

a) To raise awareness of sound spelling relationships in English (in this case thepronunciation of the letter combination ‘ou’.

Field argues for the importance of a knowledge of spelling, or the ability to relate

the spoken to the written form, in his article Notes on listening: The Use ofSpelling.

b) To encourage learners to use background knowledge to help them comprehend(i.e. focus on top-down processes).

c) To help learners identify features of connected speech, to make connectionsbetween what they hear in a stream of speech and the written form, to clear upany doubts about words or lexical phrases they didn’t catch.

d) This depends on where the gaps are. It is probably related to identifying words ofa specific type e.g. tenses, weak forms, words with a particular spelling, stressedwords, discourse markers etc. It involves recognition of single items.

e) To help learners pick out the main points.f) To enable learners and teacher to identify sources of difficulty in listening.

g) To help learners summon appropriate schemata.

h) To provide practice in pronunciation (probably focussing on elements ofconnected speech, intonation).

i) To infer information which has been missed, to listen for main points, stressedwords, to connect spoken with written form, to retain chunks of language.

j) To raise awareness of features of connected speech, to identify word boundaries,to encourage learners to visualise the written form of what they are hearing.

k) To encourage recognition of lexical items.

l) To encourage learners to identify specific areas of difficulty, to encourage use ofstrategies such as asking for clarification.

m) To encourage learners to predict from lexical or syntactic clues, to raiseawareness of the importance of chunking in comprehension processes.

Appendix 12: Pros and Cons of Different Types of Materials

Authentic texts:

•

Some coursebooks incorporate authentic listening material but many, particularlyat the earlier stages of language learning, do not. They include specially writtendialogues for example or texts based on an originally authentic text re-recordedby actors, perhaps with some simplifications.

The advantages of using authentic materials are:

• They give practice in coping with real life listening.

• They have the characteristics of everyday speech (depending on genre) withhesitations, false starts, stuttering, pauses, vague language etc. in conversation.



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(Obviously a newsreader who reads aloud does not display thesecharacteristics).

• Providing the task is appropriate, they encourage learners to adopt strategies tohelp them deal with not understanding everything. As Field says they getstudents used to the idea that ‘real life listening in a foreign language is usuallyan incomplete affair.’ (Field, J. Finding one’s way in the fog: listening

strategies and second language learners).

• They may be more motivating because they are real, topical, of current interest,and provide a sense of achievement if learners can understand something.

• There is a range of material available (Internet, TV, radio, songs, cassettes,monologue/dialogue).

Field is a great believer in using authentic materials and you will have already readabout this in other articles of his you have looked at. You may also like to read:

Field, J. 1998 Notes on Listening: Conversational Features MET 7/1

Field, J. 1997 Notes on listening: Authenticity MET 6/3

White, G. 1998 Listening Oxford University Press, chapter 5

If you are using authentic materials it is of course necessary to ensure that the task isappropriate for your learners. You grade the task rather than the text.

For an example of this applied to authentic news broadcasts, see White, G. 1998Listening Chapter 5, activity 5.1 ‘News for all’.

Graded listening materials:

Bowen and Marks point out:

‘The attention paid to authenticity of material has been a usefulcorrective to the dominance of extremely unnatural material for listeningwork. Nevertheless, there seems no reason to assume that a pedagogicprocess aimed at developing listening skills, not to mention usinglistening material for introducing and practising new language, shouldmake exclusive use, right from the start, of the sort of material it isassumed learners will need to listen to outside the classroom’.

Bowen, T. & Marks, J. 1994 Inside Teaching chapter 9 p136

Using materials specially produced for language learners also has advantages:

‘Reading or listening to a text with a high degree of comprehension willbe more profitable than reading or listening to a text of which oneunderstands little.’

‘Whilst guessing skills are useful, learners learn the skills of listeningcomprehension from what is comprehensible to them. They need topractise listening comprehension, not listening incomprehension...Graded texts, not necessarily authentic, will be the fastest way forwardfor them. They will probably get plenty of practice in listening to textswhich are largely incomprehensible to them anyway’.

Ridgway, T. 2000 Listening Strategies-I beg your pardon? ELTJ 54/2



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A lot of coursebooks include listening which is semi-authentic. That is, it pretends tobe authentic. It is therefore readily available and tied in with your syllabus, the bookprobably contains ready made tasks to use with it and other related activities.

These kinds of texts iron out some of the difficulties of authentic listening but at thesame time expose students to a variety of voices, accents and so on and some of thefeatures of authentic speech etc.

Graded, scripted listening material is also the kind of material that is most widelyavailable in published form. In the pre-communicative days all listening material wasof this kind. It may be easier for the students to understand because all the languageis within their grasp, it is therefore confidence building and provides models forlanguage production.

The teacher:

There was a lot of adverse publicity given to the teacher’s own voice under the labelof ‘TTT’. A distinction needs to be made however between ‘pointless’ TTT andteacher talk that is useful and being used for a specific purpose. TTT is notnecessarily bad! The teacher:

• Is always available, very flexible in terms of topic, genre, aim etc.

• Provides possibilities for interactive listening.

• Familiarity with the teacher’s voice and speech patterns may helpcomprehension.

See Field, J. 1995 Normalisation MET 5/4

‘The live voice of the teacher in the classroom can fulfil two valuablefunctions. Firstly it can provide listening practice where the listeners cansee and interact with the speaker verbally, but also through facialexpression: the speaker can respond to the ongoing feedback from thelisteners – especially expressions which indicate a lack of

comprehension – by repeating, reformulating, adding, changingdirection, and so on. Secondly it can provide exposure to andopportunities to notice new and half-familiar items of language. Forexample, in telling a story, a teacher might deliberately include certainwords and phrases which the class have recently encountered to givethem a chance to hear them used in a new context; or might deliberatelyinclude several instances of the past perfect, in order to draw attention toits use in subverting chronological sequence in narrative’.

Marks, J. July 2000 Listening in ETP Issue 16

However teachers sometimes do adopt an unnatural style of speaking in theclassroom - especially teachers who deal with a lot of lower levels and who spend

many years abroad! A word of warning is given here.

‘Teachers who rely on their own voice for a substantial amount oflistening work should be especially careful not to perpetuate an unnaturalstyle of speaking, with over-articulation, lack of connected speechfeatures of pronunciation and general rather than specifically chosen-reduction of syntax and lexis’.

Bowen, T. & Marks, J.1994 Inside teaching Heinemann p 136



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Unit 4 Section 3 43

Other ‘live’ native speakers:

(Live as opposed to recorded!) Bringing another native speaker into the classroomoffers students interactive listening possibilities along with the chance to hear adifferent voice. Meeting a real person can be a motivating experience in itself.Obviously the type of text, the purpose and so on can be determined by the teacher,the students or the speaker.

The students:

The students themselves provide another important source of listening material. Thisis true even within a monolingual class (the students themselves may not see theadvantages as obviously as in a multilingual class).The students:

• Provide samples of non-native speaker English.

• Can get involved in creating the listening material which is motivating andconfidence building.

• May find comprehension easier since the voices are familiar.

A lot of English used in the world today is between non-native speakers of English. Inbusiness and academic contexts, holiday and travel contexts, for example, it isessential that learners can listen to both native and non-native speakers. Whilerecorded materials these days provide few examples of non-native speakers ofEnglish, (I believe this has to do with Equity rules) we do have the option of using ourstudents’ voices, recorded or live. In Listening, White has suggestions for this inchapter 2.

This is obviously easier to put into practice in multilingual classes where studentshave to communicate with each other in English all the time.

Video v audio:

The main advantages of video over audio are:

• In most real life listening you can see the speaker (which gives you additionalinformation about context, speakers attitude from facial expression etc.).

• Video is more intrinsically interesting – there is visual input as well as audio.

• Video is better for longer listening passages because it sustains interest moreeasily.

• Audio is more readily available in many teaching contexts however and easier forteachers to plan for.

Home-made cassettes:

You can produce whatever kind of text you want in this way. You expose students todifferent voices, you can choose to focus on specific language items if you want etc.However, make sure your recording facilities produce something comprehensible andalso make sure your actors can produce something reasonably authentic sounding ifthis is your aim. Some people do strange things in front of a microphone. Homemade videos can present more problems. The advantage of cassettes over livespeakers of course is that the text can be replayed.

See White, G. Listening Appendix 1 for tips on making tapes.



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Unit 4 Section 3 44

Appendix 13:

Optional Task 2: Coursebook Analysis

Look at the coursebook you are using now with one of the groups that you did Task 4on. Look at the listening material. (Use the tapescripts so you don’t have to listen tothe whole cassette although you will need to have listened to some of the cassette togauge variety of speakers, degree of authenticity etc.). You are not going to do adetailed analysis: the idea is to get an overall impression.

Consider the material from the following points of view:

• Genres and topics

• Authentic texts

• Graded texts

• Listening purpose (are there examples of interactional and transactional listeningsituations?)

• Listening style (only open dialogues provide interactive listening)

• Tasks

• Teaching v testing

• Language practice v listening skills development

• Amount of listening

• Subskills that are practised

Would you say that the book contains a good range of genres, listening purposesand styles? Is there systematic development of subskills and listening strategies?

Does it match with:

• The students’ perception of their needs (as you found out earlier in Task 4)

• Your perception of their difficulties

How would you supplement the listening in the coursebook for your group oflearners?

Appendix 14: Terminology Review

1. Top-down processing

2. Extensive listening

3. Schematic knowledge

4. Holistic approach



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5. Non-interactive listening

6. Listening whose primary aim is to establish, maintain or build socialrelationships. There is little real exchange of facts or information.

7. Decoding a text by focussing on sounds, building sounds into words, thenphrases, then clauses and so on, until the meaning of the whole text isunderstood.

8. Listening to a text very attentively, usually to focus on language use in thetext.

9. Listening in which the listener also speaks, such as a two-way conversation.

10. Knowledge of the language systems (grammar, lexis, phonology anddiscourse) which we employ when de-coding a text. We rely on thisknowledge when employing bottom-up processes strategies.

unit4 section3 listening

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