Teaching Listening by Steven Brown

Teaching Listening by Steven Brown

1. Activation of prior knowledge for improved listening comprehension

   • It is indispensable for teaching listening to make use of student's aprior knowledge to improve listening comprehension.
   • Bottom-up processing
     • It refers to our prior knowledge and experiences; we know certain things about topics and situations.
   • Top-down processing
     • It is about using the information we have about sounds, word meanings, and discourse markers like "first", "then", and "after"
   • Listeners are using their background knowledge to determine meaning concerning prior knowledge and schemata.

2. Systematic presentation of listening for main ideas, listening for details, and listening and making inferences

   • Having a purpose for listening helps students listen more effectively.
   • An important reason for listening is listening and making inferences.
   • Systematically presenting
     • 1. Listening for main ideas
     • 2. Listening for details
     • 3. Listening marking inferences
   • Teachers should spend time teaching them about the purpose of listening. If students know why they are listening they are more focused.

3. Stimulating integration of real-world cultural information for students to know and share

   • Communicative language teaching(CLT) is teaching students about something other than the language they are learning since one of the principles of CLT is the presentation and practice of meaningful language context.
   • The primary place language is situated is in culture. Students of a foreign language are interested in the culture of the places where the language they are studying is spoken.
   • The teachers know that keeping syudent´s interest is key to learning
     • Instrumental motivation: It is a desire to pass a test or obtain a qualification.
     • Integrative motivation: It is a desire to be a part of the culture that speaks that language.

4. Presentation of extensive listening tasks leading to personalized speaking

   • Students listen to a recording and doing a task. They overhear other people's talk, and then they react to that conversation. Students practice listening to other students as well as to an audio recording. They spend time speaking to each other.
   • Some of the features of effective speaking task:
     • Two-way speaking tasks: require students to share information with others.
     • One-way task: it involves one person explaining something to the rest of the class.
     • Close tasks: It is which have only one acceptable outcome answer.

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