Teaching listening Submitted by tausif79 on 4 March, 2011 - 03:26 Teaching English can be looked at from many different angles.

One useful way is to look at the teaching process as the teaching of various language skills. There are, in general, four language skills, each based upon the modality of emphasis. These are the Listening, Speaking, Reading, and Writing skills. Generally speaking, it is emphasized that people first learn listening, then speaking, then reading and writing. However, in real life situations of language communication, these skills are interdependent in many ways, even though they can be learnt and taught independently to some extent.

Listening is necessary to develop the speaking skill. The students listen to oral speech in English, then separate into segments the stretch of utterances they hear, group them into words, phrases, and sentences, and, finally, they understand the message these carry. Listening prepares the students to understand the speech of the native speakers of English as they speak naturally in a normal speed and normal manner.

There are three approaches to listening: interactive (listening to a message and doing something as a consequence) and one-way communication or non-interactive (just listening and retaining the message, in activities such as conversations overheard, public address announcements, recorded messages, etc.) and self-talk. Listening to radio and watching TV and films, public performances, lectures, religious services, etc., generally reflect non-interactive listening. Responding to the commands given reflects interactive listening, which, in fact, is equally widespread in communicative situations. Self-talk is also an important process by which internal thinking and reasoning is carried out. All these three modes or approaches to listening may be included in our listening comprehension training.

In the classroom, students listen in order to repeat and to understand. In listening to repeat, students imitate and memorize linguistic items such as words, idioms, and sentence patterns. This is an important beginning task and focus of listening exercises. However, it is listening to understand that is real listening in its own right.

Students listen to understand as part of using English for communication purposes. In listening to understand, students are involved in the question-oriented response model of learning or in the taskoriented model of learning. In the question-oriented response model, students are asked to listen to a sentence, a dialogue, a conversation, a passage, or a lecture and they answer questions in the form of yes/no statements, choice questions, and short answers. In the task-oriented response model, students are asked to listen to a passage and accomplish the task described in the passage through interaction with others or by themselves.

Remember that research indicates that most students have difficulty with listening skills, even when listening to their native language. Among other factors, because of the phenomenon of stress (some syllables of a word may by stressed while others may not be), most learners of English have difficulty in mastering the correct placement of the primary and other stresses in English. (This could lead to misunderstanding the meaning of a word, phrase or sentence.) As a consequence, listening proficiency in English is to be cultivated with great care. Simple Principles of Teaching Listening Comprehension First of all, the teacher should be clear about the goals in teaching a lesson for listening comprehension. These goals must be made explicit and explained to the students so that the learning process becomes meaningful to them. Secondly, he should plan for a careful step by step progression in the material and, in teaching the same in the class. He should give direction to the students as to what they should listen to, how to listen, when to listen, and where to listen. Thirdly, he must insist on active overt student participation. He should provide some written or physical response. Listening is done silently, but needs to be demonstrated through some other overt manifestation. The lessons in my classroom are organized in such a way that there is a need for the students to develop concentration while listening and for remembering (and reproducing) what they have listened to. This does not mean that the teacher should clutter his lesson with facts, figures and details. Even with very little details, we may be able to create a need to listen intently, if the material is based on a communicative need. Listening, thinking, and remembering go together. They are not separate acts. In the beginning, the student may tend to focus on these as independent items. The teacher should organize his lesson and its presentation and teaching in the class in such a way that listening, thinking, and remembering are all integrated in listening comprehension. I use the cassette recorder as often as I can, because the cassette recorder gives a chance for students to listen to a variety of voices apart from the teachers. It is a simple way of bringing native speakers voices into the classroom. In countries where there are only a limited number of native speakers of English and when even these may not be readily available to model English before the class face to face, recorded materials become more useful for listening to dialogues, interviews, and discussions. Students, however, will have greater difficulty listening to the cassette recorder, because face to face listening provides them with more clues. Nevertheless, the cassette can be stopped and played back several times. Focus should be on exposure to the speech of native speakers in contexts that are relevant to the second language learners goals in learning English. A generally followed format of listening comprehension lessons in my classroom includes the following: Select the teaching point for the listening comprehension lesson.

Introduce the topic before the class begins to listen to the passage. In this manner the teacher brings the students attention to focus on the material to be listened to. Give one or two guiding questions before students begin to listen to the passage.

 Divide the listening into stages, such as listening for the main idea only at the first instance, then answering some guiding questions. This may be followed by a second listening in which students listen for details. Divide the passage into several sections and check comprehension after each section. Students listen to the passage and complete the set task. Presentation of feedback on the performance of the students.

Asking the students to read the passage once again so that they may follow the passage more fully.

More often than not, a well graded listening comprehension lesson selects the teaching points (that is, the material to be listened to) from all the components of language. Listening does not focus only upon the sounds in isolation or in combination, even though such training to discriminate between various sounds of the English language may be necessary at the beginning level. It may begin with the discrimination of sounds and may proceed to the discriminations of sounds in combination, words, phrases, clauses and sentences. It focuses on the discrimination of various intonation patterns, and grammatical structures. However, the ultimate goal of listening is to listen for information.

A Few General Suggestions A few general suggestions for the selection and presentation of listening comprehension exercises may be in order here. As already pointed out, the teacher should select his teaching points for listening comprehension from various language components. While the presentation is made, he should help students focus their attention on the presentation. He may alert the students to what they are going to do. He may also give them written material to complete the task before they listen to the passage.

This will help them understand what they are expected to do after listening to the passage. Are they going to answer comprehension questions? Are they going to draw pictures or other physical response activities, or are they going to do problem solving exercises? Are they going to involve others in doing physical tasks, or are they going to tell the answers (oral answers)?

While asking students to listen and complete a set task, the presentation is given in normal speed and intonation. The speed is not reduced. However, the exercise is read over again, if demanded. The length and difficulty of exercise will decide the number of repetitions.

Feedback on the performance of students in listening comprehension exercises is better done by a general talk after the session. Sometimes the students themselves check their answers. The teacher discusses the progress with students so that they will know how well they are progressing in listening to native English.

Remember that listening is an important skill which facilitates the mastery of other language skills. Continued exposure to native English speakers both in face to face communication and audio-visual means will help foster the listening skill. The unstressed vowels and the process of vowel reduction make listening a difficult process to master. If students have a better listening skill they are more likely to have a better pronunciation.

2The Nature of Listening Comprehension A Theoretical Discussion This is a discussion of how on how to study second language listening comprehension. Firstly, we provide a simple overview of what scholars know about listening comprehension, and then secondly we conclude from that how to teach, and study, listening comprehension. We hope both teachers and students will find this useful. Listening is Different from Reading There are many skills necessary to listen to spoken English. Some skills are similar to the skills used in reading. But many important listening skills are different from reading skills. Thats why if you want to learn to listen, you must practice listening. Listening skills are different from reading skills because speech is different from writing. Below are some of the main ways speech is different from writing. Speech Consists of Sounds The biggest difference between speech and writing is that speech consists of sounds. This is very important, because processing the sound adds a whole new set of skills that are not necessary for reading.

You must know the sound system; if you dont, you cannot understand the speech. You must also know how the sounds change in fast speech. Fast pronunciation is very different from the dictionary form of the word. The English sound system varies from place to place, and from speaker to speaker

Speech Uses Different Language Written English consists of neat, correct sentences; speech does not. Speech usually consists of idea units. Each idea unit is a short piece of spoken language; usually about two seconds long, and consisting of just a few words; on average about 7 words. Sometimes idea units are complete sentences, but sometimes they are not. The main differences between spoken idea units and written sentences are:

Spoken idea units are usually shorter than written sentences.

Speech usually has simpler grammaridea units are usually just strung togetherbut writing usually has more embedded and complex grammar. Speech contains many mistakes, including grammatical errors; so it also has corrections and repairs. Written language is usually more correct and polished. Speech contains many pauses and hesitations. There are also fillers, meaningless words that give the speaker thinking time. Examples of fillers are um, well now, uh, let me see. Written language has none of those. Spoken language is more modern and up to date; there are more slang words, swear words, new expressions, figures of speech, and humor. Written language tends to be more conservative and old-fashioned. In speech a lot of things are not actually stated. Speakers often use their tone of voice, or stress and intonation to express important information. For example, emotions such as pleasure and anger, attitudes such as disbelief or sarcasm, and so on, are often not clearly stated in words. although they may be very important.

Speech is Fast Speakers decide how fast they will speak, and most speakers speak very fastthree words per second is average in English. Many speakers are much faster. So listeners have to listen fast. When reading, the reader can choose a comfortable reading speed, but the listener cannot choose the listening speed. Listeners must listen at the speakers speed.

The speed of the speech is called the speech rate. This is important for second language listeners: usually, as the speech rate increases, comprehension decreases. If the speech rate is too fast, comprehension stops. Because speech is generally fast, the listener must understand the meaning very quickly and very efficiently. There is no time to stop and wonder about the meaning; no time to think about the vocabulary or grammar.

3Teaching Skills for Listening and Speaking Alastair Graham-Marr Tokai University / ABAX Ltd. al@abax.co.jp Why teach Listening and Speaking? There are many reasons for focusing on listening and speaking when teaching English as a foreign language, not least of which is the fact that we as humans have been learning languages through our ears and mouth for thousands upon thousands of years, far longer than we as humans have been able to read. Our brains are well programmed to learn languages through sound and speech. This is not to say that reading and writing are ineffective, far from it, only to highlight the value of listening and speaking and point out that many studies have suggested that language learned through sound and speech is more readily acquired. Apart from this there are of course many other reasons to focus on listening and speaking as skills and these will be detailed below.

What does teaching Listening and Speaking involve? Listening and speaking are complex cognitive processes and the teaching of listening and speaking is no less an involved endeavor. To help us clarify what this might entail, it is perhaps helpful to make a distinction between the language system itself and the associated language skills. A language system encompasses not only the words of a language and their associated order, lexis and syntax, but also the phonology and the macro fields of genre and discourse; how the language is strung together in extended texts. Skills refer to how the language system is used, the degree to which this is automatic, the degree to which it is appropriate to a given social situation and the strategies used which aid and enhance communication. As Canale notes: communicative competence refers to both knowledge and skill in using this knowledge when interacting in actual communication. Knowledge refers here to what one knows (consciously or unconsciously) about the language and about other aspects of communicative language use; skill refers to how well once can perform this knowledge in actual communication. (Canale: 1983:5) Although some linguists might question the psycholinguistic validity of dividing language knowledge and language skill in such a manner, it is nonetheless a useful distinction for teachers as it helps to focus teacher attention on what it is exactly that they are teaching. Teaching skills: A common characteristic of many language classes is a heavy focus on the language system. Vocabulary and grammar seem to garner far more attention than the skills needed to use this vocabulary and grammar. Skills are of course an essential part of communicative competence however skills themselves are often not explicitly taught but rather left to students to pick up with practice and language use. The default position is that skills will just be be acquired implicitly. This seems especially true of many listening classes. Research however suggests that such skills are more efficiently acquired if explicitly taught: Classroom data from a number of studies offer support for the view that form-focused instruction and corrective feedback provided within the context of communicative programs are more effective in promoting second language learning than programs which are limited to a virtually exclusive emphasis either on accuracy or fluency. (Lightbrown and Spada 1999: 152) Another argument for explicit language teaching, a focus on form, comes from Richard Schmidt of the University of Hawaii who contends that language first needs to be noticed to be acquired; that is, once students have noticed something, they are more likely to acquire it if they meet it again. There is support in the literature for the hypothesis that attention is required for all learning. Learners need to pay attention to input and pay particular attention to whatever aspect of the input (phonology, morphology, pragmatics, discourse, etc.) that you are concerned to learn. (Schmidt 1995:45) Although attention to meaning should be a central tenant of our language classes, (language is after all a semantic system, a system of meaning), attention to language form aids language acquisition. Teaching Listening:

Broadly speaking, listening skills can be divided into two classifications:

bottom up skills (or processing) top down skills (or processing)

Bottom up processing refers to the decoding process, the direct decoding of language into meaningful units, from sound waves to meaning. Top down processing refers to the attribution of meaning, drawn from ones own world knowledge, to language input. In short bottom up is what the page brings to the learner and top down is what the learner brings to the page. To illustrate this, listed below are a few of the sub-skills divided into bottom up and top down roughly sequenced from beginning level skills to the more advanced skills (adapted from Brown 2001 and Peterson 1991) Bottom Up Skills

discriminating between intonation contours discriminating between phonemes hearing morphological endings selecting details recognizing fast speech forms finding stressed syllables recognizing reduced forms recognizing words as they link together in connected streams recognizing prominent details recognizing sentence level features in lecture text recognizing organization clues

Top Down Skills

discriminating between emotions getting the gist recognizing the topic using discourse structure to enhance listening strategies identifying the speaker evaluating themes finding the main idea finding supporting details

making inferences understanding organizing principals of extended texts

Teaching Bottom Up Listening Skills: If you were wanting to teach bottom listening skills to your class, what salient phonological features could you bring to your students attention in the following sentences below: 1. She works in an old office 2. Pete and Robert? No I didnt see them last night 3. The water? Put it over there 4. She wants to go to Canada to go skiing 5. The end Teaching Top Down Listening Skills: There are many aspects to top down processing. Very rarely do second language learners hear and understand 100% of all spoken language input and as such need to make inferences or informed guesses about the missing content. Students need to fill in the gaps to give meaning to an imperfect understanding. To help with this students need to:

use their knowledge of grammar to fill in the holes use their knowledge of discourse to fill in the holes use their knowledge of idiom / collocation to fill in the holes use their knowledge of intonation to fill in the holes

Additionally another useful top down skill is the ability to predict what you think youll hear in coming discourse. And again here a knowledge of discourse patterns is a useful tool. Predict and check activities work well for teaching these skills and can vary from simple gap fill style exercises with short simple sentences to longer interpretive predictions to longer texts. Another important top down listening skill is the ability to make inferences from language input; that by applying our background knowledge to any given language input we can make suppositions about the social situation surrounding the language event, its participants and other implied meaning bound up with the content of the language event. As such activities which ask students to make inferences are useful for exercising your students top down abilities. When to focus on the top down and when to focus on the bottom-up: The choice of whether to focus on top down skills building or bottom up skills building is very much discourse dependent. And a useful distinction for language teachers are the categories devised by Brown and Yule of:

transactional discourse interactional discourse Transactional discourse is language that serves in the expression of

content and Interactional discourse is language involved in expressing social relations and personal attitudes. (Brown and Yule, 1983:1) This is a useful distinction for language teachers as it provides a framework for looking at the predictability of discourse. As Burns notes: The concepts of interpersonal and transactional genre types and the predictable staging of texts provide a valuable discourse perspective to language teaching. The concepts give us a framework for categorizing texts we wish to introduce to our learners and we can use our knowledge of their generic patterns to help learners increase their understanding of predictable stages. Burns (1997:29) By and large interactional discourse types lend themselves to top down activities of prediction as the texts themselves are more predictable, while transactional discourse patterns are often better suited for teaching the bottom up decoding skills. Teaching Speaking It is not my intention to put forth an exhaustive list of skills that we as teachers need to present to our students. For those interested in a more comprehensive treatment H. Douglas Browns Teaching by Principles, An Interactive Approach to Language Pedagogy (2001) provides readers with a fairly comprehensive breakdown of language skills into their sub skill components. For our purposes we can note that some of the speaking skills that merit classroom time include:

fluency phonological clarity strategies being able to produce chunks of language appropriacy (register etc.) understanding elliptical forms use of other cohesive devices etc. . . .

Fluency Fluency is an important part of speaking and includes the following:

the ability to use language spontaneously the ability to listen and comprehend spontaneously the ability to respond spontaneously the ability to compensate for any lack in any of the above

As such fluency activities do not seek to enhance student understanding of the language system but rather seeks to improve the speed and efficiency with which students access their language system knowledge. It entails getting students to use language they already know. It entails getting students to use language that they are already well familiar with. Fluency work entails getting language to become automatic. A Few Fluency Activities: Fluency work involves activities that demand language at levels of difficulty well within student capabilities.

extensive review, extensive review, extensive review non challenging role plays with functions well within student capabilities well known easy topics etc. . . 5 - 3 - 1 / memory circles / relay races / Alibi Literature circles (http://www.eflliteraturecircles.com/)

A look at Strategies: Communication strategies include the following:

confirmation strategies compensation strategies control strategies involvement strategies

In addition to the reasons given above for explicit language teaching, there are also noteworthy cultural reasons for speaking strategies to be made explicit; namely that strategies can sometimes contradict our students own L1 speech conventions. There is a kind of L1 strategic interference. Ideas such as turn taking, politeness, appropriacy and so on are language specific and some of the second language strategies we often advocate can be at odds with L1 speech conventions. Activities which promote the use of strategies:

dictation exercises / relay races (confirmation / control strategies) activities which push the bounds of student capability (compensation activities) guided dialogs (involvement strategies) role plays

Assignment Questions: Choose one from the following and expand on your answers with suggested activities and variations as they apply to your own teaching situation.

1. Strategic Competence according to Canale and Swain (1980:25) involves how to cope in an authentic communicative situation and how to keep the communicative channel open. What does this imply for the teaching of speaking? What concrete steps could you take in your class to enhance your students strategic competence? 2. What do you think is meant by the following: It is not enough to base classroom exercises on an imitation of reality. We must also take into account the specific difficulties faced by the foreigner in learning to cope with heard English speech. Ur (1984:10) What implications does this have for the teaching of listening? How could you apply this to your own classes? References from Handout and Presentation Brown, Gillian & Yule, George, (1983) Discourse Analysis, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Brown, H.D. (2001), Teaching by Principles, An Interactive Approach to Language Pedagogy, New York: Addison Wesley Longman Buck, Gary, (2001) Assessing Listening, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Burns, Anne & Joyce Helen (1997), Focus on Speaking, Sydney: NCELTR Canale, Michael & Swain Merril, (1980) Theoretical Bases of Communicative Approaches to Second Language Teaching and Testing, Applied Linguistics, Vol 1, No. 1, Oxford: Oxford University Press Canale, Michael, (1983), From communicative competence to communicative language pedagogy in J.C. Richards and R.W. Schmidt (eds) Language and Communication, London: Longman Celce-Murcia, Marianne, (1996), Teaching Pronunciation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Foley, Barbara, (1994), Now Hear This, Boston: Heinle & Heinle Gilbert, Judy, (1984), Clear Speech, Cambridge; Cambridge University Press Lightbrown, Patsy & Spada Nina, (1999), How Languages are Learned, Oxford: Oxford University Press Oxford, Rebecca, (1990), Language Learning Strategies, Boston: Heinle & Heinle Peterson, P., (1991), A synthesis of methods for interactive listening, in M. Celce-Murcia (ed.), Teaching English as a Second or Foreign Language, 2nd edition (pp. 106-122), New York: Newbury House Schmidt, Richard (1995), Consciousness and foreign language learning: a tutorial on the role of attention and awareness in learning, In Richard Schmidt, (ed.) Attention and Awareness in Foreign Language Learning, (Technical Report #9), Honolulu: University of Hawaii Second Language Teaching and Curriculum Center. Underhill, Adrian, (1994), Sound Foundations, Oxford: Macmillan Heinemann Ur, Penny, (1984), Teaching Listening Comprehension, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Listening Comprehension

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Modern textbooks are awfully clever in the way they slip seamlessly from an interesting listening text into explanation and practice of a grammar point. It is hard to see how such a system could possibly be worse that just launching into a grammar point- until, that is, your students have listened three times and still haven't understood enough to answer the first question, let alone move onto the final language point. You can only imagine that none of the teachers who reviewed the textbook before publication had that problem, and indeed listening comprehension skills vary a lot from country to country and from person to person. The reasons why some people find listening in a foreign language difficult vary just as

much, so eleven possible reasons why it might be so are given below, along with some ideas on how to tackle each point.

Why some students find listening difficult

1.

They are trying to understand every word

Despite the fact that we can cope with missing whole chunks of speech having a conversation on a noisy street in our own language, many people don't seem to be able to transfer that skill easily to a second language. One method of tackling this is to show them how to identify the important words that they need to listen out for. In English this is shown in an easy-to-spot way by which words in the sentence are stressed (spoken louder and longer). Another is to give them one very easy task that you know they can do even if they don't get 90% of what is being said to build up their confidence, such as identifying the name of a famous person or spotting something that is mentioned many times.

2.

They get left behind trying to work out what a previous word meant

This is one aspect of the problem above that all people speaking a foreign language have experienced at one time or another. This often happens when you hear a word you half remember and find you have completely lost the thread of what was being said by the time you remember what it means, but can also happen with words you are trying to work out that sound similar to something in your language, words you are trying to work out from the context or words you have heard many times before and are trying to guess the meaning of once and for all. In individual listenings you can cut down on this problem with vocab pre-teach and by getting students to talk about the same topic first to bring the relevant vocabulary for that topic area nearer the front of their brain. You could also use a listening that is in shorter segments or use the pause button to give their brains a chance to catch up, but teaching them the skill of coping with the multiple demands of listening and working out what words mean is not so easy. One training method is to use a listening or two to get them to concentrate just on guessing words from context. Another is to load up the tasks even more by adding a logic puzzle or listening and writing task, so that just listening and trying to remember words seems like an easier option. Finally, spend a lot of time revising vocabulary and doing skills work where they come into contact with it and use it, and show students how to do the same in their own time, so that the amount of half remembered vocab is much less.

3.

They just don't know the most important words

Again, doing vocabulary pre-teaching before each listening as a short term solution and working on the skill of guessing vocab from context can help, but please make sure that you practice this with words that can actually be guessed from context (a weakness of many textbooks) and that you work on that

with reading texts for a while to build up to the much more difficult skill of guessing vocab and listening at the same time. The other solution is simply to build up their vocabulary and teach them how they can do the same in their own time with vocabulary lists, graded readers, monolingual dictionary use etc.

4.

They don't recognise the words that they know

If you have a well-graded textbook for your class, this is probably a more common (and more tragic) problem than not knowing the vocabulary at all. Apart from just being too busy thinking about other things and missing a word, common reasons why students might not recognise a word include not distinguishing between different sounds in English (e.g. /l/ and /r/ in "led" and "red" for many Asians), or conversely trying to listen for differences that do not exist, e.g. not knowing words like "there", "their" and "they're" are homophones. Other reasons are problems with word stress, sentence stress, and sound changes when words are spoken together in natural speech such as weak forms. What all this boils down to is that sometimes pronunciation work is the most important part of listening comprehension skills building.

5.

They have problems with different accents

In a modern textbook, students have to not only deal with a variety of British, American and Australian accents, but might also have Indian or French thrown in. Whilst this is theoretically useful if or when they get a job in a multinational company, it might not be the additional challenge they need right nowespecially if they studied exclusively American English at school. Possibilities for making a particular listening with a tricky accent easier include rerecording it with some other teachers before class, reading all or part of the tapescript out in your (hopefully more familiar and therefore easier) accent, and giving them a listening task where the written questions help out like gap fills. If it is an accent they particularly need to understand, e.g., if they are sorting out the outsourcing to India, you could actually spend part of a lesson on the characteristics of that accent. In order to build up their ability to deal with different accents in the longer term, the best way is just to get them listening to a lot of English, e.g. TV without dubbing or BBC World Service Radio. You might also want to think about concentrating your pronunciation work on sounds that they need to understand many different accents rather than one, and on concentrating on listenings with accents that are relevant for that particular group of students, e.g. the nationality of their head office.

6.

They lack listening stamina/ they get tired

This is again one that anyone who has lived in a foreign country knows well- you are doing fine with the conversation or movie until your brain seems to reach saturation point and from then on nothing goes in until you escape to the toilet for 10 minutes. The first thing you'll need to bear in mind is to build up the length of the texts you use (or the lengths between pauses) over the course in exactly the same way as you build up the difficulty of the texts and tasks. You can make the first time they listen to a longer text a success and therefore a confidence booster by doing it in a part of the lesson and part of the day

when they are most alert, by not overloading their brains with new language beforehand, and by giving them a break or easy activity before they start. You can build up their stamina by also making the speaking tasks longer and longer during the term, and they can practice the same thing outside class by watching an English movie with subtitles and taking the subtitles off for longer and longer periods each time.

7.

They have a mental block

This could be not just a case of a student having struggled with badly graded listening texts in school, exams or self-study materials, but even of a whole national myth that people from their country find listening to English difficult. Whatever the reason, before you can build up their skills they need their confidence back. The easiest solution is just to use much easier texts, perhaps using them mainly as a prompt to discussion or grammar presentations to stop them feeling patronized. You can disguise other easy listening comprehension tasks as pronunciation work on linked speech etc. in the same way.

8.

They are distracted by background noise

Being able to cope with background noise is another skill that does not easily transfer from L1 and builds up along with students' listening and general language skills. As well as making sure the tape doesn't have lots of hiss or worse (e.g. by recording tape to tape at normal speed not double speed, by using the original or by adjusting the bass and treble) and choosing a recording with no street noise etc, you also need to cut down on noise inside and outside the classroom. Plan listenings for when you know it will be quiet outside, e.g. not at lunchtime or when the class next door is also doing a listening. Cut down on noise inside the classroom by doing the first task with books closed and pens down. Boost their confidence by letting them do the same listening on headphones and showing them how much easier it is. Finally, when they start to get used to it, give them an additional challenge by using a recording with background noise such as a cocktail party conversation.

9.

They can't cope with not having images

Young people nowadays, they just can't cope without multimedia! Although having students who are not used to listening to the radio in their own language can't help, most students find not having body language and other cues to help a particular difficulty in a foreign language. Setting the scene with some photos of the people speaking can help, especially tasks where they put the pictures in order as they listen, and using video instead makes a nice change and is a good way of making skills such as guessing vocab from context easier and more natural.

10. They have hearing problems

As well as people such as older students who have general difficulty in hearing and need to be sat close to the cassette, you might also have students who have problems hearing particular frequencies or who have particular problems with background noise. As well as playing around with the graphic equaliser and doing the other tips above for background noise, you could also try setting most listening tasks as homework and/ or letting one or more students read from the tapescript as they listen.

11. They can't tell the difference between the different voices This was the problem that took me longest to twig, but voices that are clearly distinct to a native speaker can be completely confusing for a non-native speaker. I haven't quite worked out why those problems occur on some occasions and not on others, but the native speaker could be identifying a lisp, an accent or a difference in range of tone that escapes a student. You can avoid these problems by using texts with one woman and one man, or you can practice them with tasks where the students only have to count how many times the speaker changes. Read more at http://www.usingenglish.com/articles/why-your-students-have-problems-with-listeningcomprehension.html#lfTwrzrtjvqp5yRs.99