Teaching listening

TEACHING LISTENING

• The objective of listening is that students learn to fuction successfully in real-life listening situations.
• Listening involves a sender (a person, radio, television), a message, and a receiver (the listener). Listeners often must process messages as they come, even if they are still processing what they have just heard, without backtracking or looking ahead. In addition, listeners must cope with the sender's choice of vocabulary, structure, and rate of delivery. The complexity of the listening process is magnified in second language contexts, where the receiver also has incomplete control of the language.

Real-life listening situations

• Stage 1: Gathering samples
• Make a list of many situations of people talking in their own mother tongue. They may be doing other things besides listening, speaking for example. . The essential point is that they need to be able to understand what is said in order to function satisfactorily in the situation.
• Stage 2: Finding typical characteristics
• With the list of situations you see some features that seem to be common to most situations, the kind of languaje, the kind of interaction and what the listener is doing. In most situations the listener is respondig to what is being said as well as listening.
• Characteristics of real-life situations
• Informal spoken discourse: Most of the spoken language we listen is informal and spontaneous. Informal speech has various interesting features:
• Brevity of ´chunks´ : Broken into short chunks. In a conversation, people take turns to speak, usually in short turns of a few seconds each.
• Pronunciation: the pronunciation of words is often slurred, and noticeably different from the phonological representation given in a dictionary.
• Vocabulary: The vocabulary is often colloquial (ex: kid for child)
• Grammar: A grammatical structure may change in mind-utterance; unfinished clauses are common.
• ´Noise´: Is related with pronunciation and vocabulary. The word is not said clearly, or not known to the hearer.
• Redundancy: The speaker normaly says a good deal more than is strictly necessary. It includes such things as repetition, paraphrase, glossing, etc.
• Non-repetition: Discourse will not be reoeated verbatim, normaly is heard only once, thought this may be compensated for by redundancy.

Slide 3

• 2. Listener expectation and purpose: The listener almost always knows in advance something about what is going to be said. We normaly have some objetive in litening beyond understanding for it own sake- to find somethin. And we expect to hear something relevant to our porpuse.
• 3. Looking as well as listening: Only a very small proportion of listening is done ´blind´(phone calls), We have something to look at that is linked to what is being said: usually the speaker him or herself, but often other visualstimuly as well.
• 4. Ongoing, purposeful listener response: The listener is usually responding at intervals as the discourse is going on. It is hard or rare for the listener to listen to extendded speech and respond at the end, the responses are normally to the listening purpose,and it is a simple demostration of comprhension.
• 5. Speaker attention: The speaker usually directs the speech at the listeners, takes the listener´s character, intentions, etc. And often responds directly to the reactions, whether verbal or non-verbal.

U-2: Real-life listening in classroom

• In order to provide students with training in listening comprehension that will prepared them for effective functioning outside the classroom, activities should give learners practice in coping with at least some of the features of real-life situatios. In real life we don´t normally respond by answering comprehension questions. Listeniing activities based on simulated real-life situations are likely to be more motivating and interesting to do.
• 1. Guidelines:
• Informal talk: Most listening texts should be based on discourse that is either genuine improvised, spontaneous speech, or at list fair imitation of it. Read at loud as a basis for classroomlistening would help your listeners.
• Speaker visibility, speaker-listener interaction: The speaker is visble and directly interacting with the listener should make us think twice about convencional use of audio recordings. Videos make a positive contribution to the effectiviness of litening practice.
• Single exposure: Learners shouold be encoraged to develop the ability to extract the information they need from a single hearing. The discourse must be redundant enough to provide this information.

Slide 5

• 2. Listening Tasks:
• Expectations: Learners should have in advance some idea about the kind of text they are going to hear. The latter instruction activates learners´relevant schemata (their own previous knowledge and concepts of facts, scenes, events, etc) and enables them to use this previous knowledge to buil aticipatory ¨sacaffolding¨ thet will help them understand.
• Purpose: Listening purpose should be provided by the definition of a pre.set task, which should involve some kind of clear visible or audible response, rather than listening and understand, we should give a specific instruction such as: ´listen and find out where the family are going for their summer holidays´.
• Ongoing listener responce: The task should usually involve intermittent responses during the listening; learners should be encouraged to respond to the information.
• Practicla classroom applications
• There are some rules that we need to flow to teach listening: They do not apply to every real-life situations; moreover, there may be very good pedagogical reasons for deviating from some of them in the classroom. The latter involves pedagogical considerations no less important than authtnticity of the listening experience, sucha ass classroom managemen, costeffective use of time, students motivation, interest and learning preferences.
• Specific practical implications:
• 1. Listening text: some of your students´ listening practice should be based on a text which the teacher it self improvise for the class, and which is hears only once.
• Advatages: Less recorded material means less of the expense, inconvenience and occasionali breakdown that the frequent use of tape-recorders entails.
• Problems or reservations: Many teachers lack confidence in their own ability to improvise fluently in the target language, or are worried their spoken language is not good enough model for the students to listen to. Another problem is that if learners only hear you, will not have the opportunity to practice listening to different voice and accents.
• Conclutions: It is important for foreign language teachers to be able to improvise speech in the target language. We should also often wish to let our students listen to the text more than once, good compromise might be to ask them to try to do as much as they can on the firs listening.

Slide 6

• 2. Listening task: expectations and purpose:
• Advantages: Providing the students with some idea of what they are going to hear and what they are asked to do with it helps them to succeed in the task, as well as raising motivation and interest.
• Problems: We may wish to ask students to find out what the passage is about without any previous hint: for the sake of the fun and challenge, and encourage them to use real-word knowledge to help interpretation.
• 3. Ongoing listener responce:
• Advantages: The fact that learnersare active during the listening rather than waitingto end keeps them busy and helps to prevent boredom.
• Problems or reservations: The most naturally-occurring response- speech- is usually impractical in the classroom. A more serious problem is that material writers often overload the task: to many responces are demanded of the learners, information is coming in too fast ´redundancy´and there is not time to respond durind the listening.

U-3 Learner problems

• Stage 1: Defining some problems:
• Problems catching the sound of the foreign language.
• Understanding only slowly and clearly.
• Hearing more than once.
• Boredoom
• ´keep up´
• Stage 2: Interview: Interview some learners to find out which of these they consider particularly problematic, whethr these are any others they can suggest, and what sort of practice they find helpful.
• Stages 3: Summary: Try to summarize the main problems ad make some suggestions as to what the teacher can do to help solve the solve them.
• Problems described:
• Trouble with sounds: Since most listeners rely mostly on context for comprehension, they are often themselves unware of innacurate sound perception.
• Have to understand every word: Often unconsciously fostered by teachers and/or listening comprehension materials which encourage the learners to believe that everything that is said is bears (equally) important information. The effort to understand everything often results ineffective.
• Hearing more than once: There may be very good pedagogical reasons for exposing learners to text more than once. Facts remaind that in real-life they are often going to have to cope with óne-off´listening.