HOW TO TEACH

LISTENING

Page 1
What is listening?
• Little L2 research on the topic.
• In Rost´s (2000) words “it is a complex
process that allows us to understand spoken
language”.
• Comprehension for native speakers occurs
subconsciously, but in ESL/EFL learners
need to be “trained” by using strategies.

Arlenne M. Fernández
 Notional-
Functional
Learner

Comprehension
subskills
Teaching
Listening

Listening as comprehension Listening as acquisition

Active process

Listener´s response

Listener´s function

Lesson principles

approaches

Top-down

Bottom-up

Listening strategies

Cognitive

Metacognitive

Arlenne M. Fernández
How important is to teach
listening?
• Listening is required in two of the conditions mentioned
before.
• In Brown´s (2000) words “Listening is perhaps one of the
most important skills we have, yet it is one of the least
recognized”.
• It is half of the communication process; adults spend 40-
50% of their time listening, 25-30% speaking, 10-15%
reading, less than 10% writing (Gilman & Moody,1984)
• Listening without understanding can be a source of
demotivation that is why teachers need to think carefully
in the type, purpose and difficulty of the task.

Arlenne M. Fernández
  

SKILL AURAL/SPEECH VISUAL/WRITTEN

RECEPTIVE Listening Reading

(and understanding) (and understanding)
PRODUCTIVE Speaking Writing

Arlenne M. Fernández
Conditions to learn a
language
1) A learner who realizes the need to learn a second language
and is motivated to do so.
2) Learner provided with access to the spoken language and the
support (such as simplification, repetition, and feedback)
they need for learning it.
3) A social setting (linguistic environment) which brings the
learner in frequent enough and sustained contact with target
language speakers.

Most cases of difficulty or failure of a learner, either

a child or an adult, to acquire a second language are
generally due to a lack in one or more of these factors.
(Wong-Fillmore, 1991)
Characteristics of spoken language
affecting listening
• Real life does not have a rewind button.
• For radio and interview speech events lies within
the range of 160 to 190 w.p.m
• The mean words for conversation is 210 w.p.m
• For lectures 140 w.p.m
Speech rate:
• Lower intermediate understand at 127 w.p.m.
• Intermediate understand at 124 w.p.m

Arlenne M. Fernández
 Listening as Comprehension

LISTENING AS AN ACTIVE PROCESS

• Listening is seen as an active process (not merely

receptive) in which learner focus on selected
aspects of oral discourse, construct meaning from
passages, and relate what they hear to his previous
knowledge.
• This active process is based on 6 listener functions
(what listener attends to) and on 9 listener
responses (how learner shows comprehension).

Arlenne M. Fernández
 Listening as Comprehension

What listener attends to

• Listener Functions

– Identification: recognizing aspects of message

(word categories, semantic clues).
– Orientation: finding important information
(participants, tone, topic, etc.).
– Main idea comprehension.
– Detail comprehension.
– Full comprehension.
– Replication (note that this is not necessarily
higher level, just different).

Arlenne M. Fernández
 Listening as Comprehension

How Learner shows comprehension

• Listener Responses

– Doing: physical response (ie, TPR).

– Choosing: matching, ordering sequences.
– Transferring (modality): drawing, filling in.
– Condensing: taking notes, making outline,
writing captions.
– Extending: “going beyond”, new ending.
– Duplicating: evidence of replication.
– Modeling: imitation of features or text.
– Conversion: interacting with text.

Arlenne M. Fernández
 LISTENING FOR
COMPREHENSION
• It is a traditional way of thinking about the
nature of the listening whose role is to facilitate
the understanding of spoken discourse.
• There are two dimensions of processing listening
comprehension which are bottom-up and top-
down (Brown, 2000).

Arlenne M. Fernández
 Listening as Comprehension

• Bottom-up process
“The listener’s lexical and grammatical competence
in L2 provides the basis for bottom-up processing”
(i.e The input is scanned for familiar words, and
grammatical knowledge is used to work out the
relationship between elements of sentences)
(Clark & Clark, 1975)

Arlenne M. Fernández
 Listening as Comprehension

TASKS that use bottom-up process develop these

skills in the learner:

• listening for specific details

• recognizing cognates
• recognizing word-order patterns

Arlenne M. Fernández
 Listening as Comprehension

The kinds of TASKS that use bottom-up process:

• Identify the referents of pronouns in an utterance.

• Recognize the time reference of an utterance
• Distinguish between positive and negative statements.
• Recognize the order in which words occurred in an
utterance.
• Identify sequence markers.
• Identify key words that occurred in a spoken text.
• Identify which modal verbs occurred in a spoken text.

Arlenne M. Fernández
 Listening as Comprehension

Examples of TASKS that require a bottom-up

process:
1) Students listen to positive and negative statements
and choose an appropriate form of agreement.

Students hear Students choose

the correct
response
-That’s a nice camera. Yes No
-That’s not a very good one. Yes No
-This coffee isn’t hot. Yes No
-This meal is really tasty. Yes No

Arlenne M. Fernández
 Listening as Comprehension

2) The following exercise practices listening for word

stress as a marker of the information focus of a
sentence:

Students hear Students check

information focus
-The bank’s downtown branch
is closed today. Where When
-Is the city office open on Sunday? Where When
-I’m going to the museum today. Where When

Arlenne M. Fernández
 Listening as Comprehension

We can illustrate an example. Imagine

I said the following to you:
“The guy I sat next to on the bus this morning
on the way to work was telling me he runs a
Thai restaurant in Chinatown. Apparently, it’s
very popular at the moment.”

• To understand this utterance using bottom-up

processing, we have to mentally break it down
into its components. This is referred to as
“chunking.”

Arlenne M. Fernández
 Listening as Comprehension

The chunks help us identify the

underlying propositions the utterances
express, namely:
• I was on the bus.
• There was a guy next to me.
• We talked.
• He said he runs a Thai restaurant.
• It’s in Chinatown.
• It’s very popular now.

“The guy I sat next to on the bus this morning on the way to work was
telling me he runs a Thai restaurant in Chinatown. Apparently, it’s very
popular at the moment.”

Arlenne M. Fernández
 Listening as Comprehension

Following a Bottom-Up processing

Many traditional classroom listening TASKS

focus primarily on bottom-up processing, with
exercises such as
• dictation,
• cloze listening,
• the use of multiple choice
• questions after a text, and similar activities
that require close and detailed recognition, and
processing of the input. They assume that
everything the listener needs to understand is
contained in the input.
Arlenne M. Fernández
 Listening as Comprehension

Top-Down process

refers to the use of background knowledge

(previous) in understanding the meaning of a
message. Unlike bottom-up processing which
goes from language to meaning, top-down
processing goes from meaning to language.

Arlenne M. Fernández
 Listening as Comprehension

• For example, consider how we might respond to

the following utterance:
“I heard on the news there was a big earthquake in
China last night.”

On recognizing the word earthquake, we

generate a set of questions for which we want
answers:
• Where exactly was the earthquake?
• How big was it?
• Did it cause a lot of damage?
• Were many people killed or injured?
• What rescue efforts are under way?

Arlenne M. Fernández
 Listening as Comprehension

Following a Top-Down processing

• These questions guide us through the

understanding of any subsequent discourse that
we hear, and they focus our listening on what is
said in response to the questions.
• However, top-down processing alone
often provides insufficient basis for
comprehension.

Arlenne M. Fernández
 Listening as Comprehension

The TASKS that use a top-down listening

process involve:

• listening for the main idea

• predicting
• drawing inferences
• summarizing

Arlenne M. Fernández
 Listening as Comprehension

Tasks that require top-down processing develop

the learner’s ABILITY to do the following :

• Use key words to construct the schema of a

discourse.
• Infer the setting for a text.
• Infer the role of the participants and their goals.
• Infer causes or effects.
• Infer unstated details of a situation.
• Anticipate questions related to the topic or
situation.

Arlenne M. Fernández
 Listening as Comprehension

• In real-world listening, both bottom-up and

top-down processing generally occur
together.
• The extent to which one or the other dominates
depends on the listener’s familiarity with the topic,
the density of information in a text, the text type,
and the listener’s purpose in listening. (e.g a cook
listening to a recipe)

Arlenne M. Fernández
 Listening as Comprehension

Principles for a Lesson of Listening

for comprehension
General principles in teaching / learning listening comprehension
are:
• Listening materials should be based on a wide range of authentic
texts, including both monologues and dialogues.
• Schema-building tasks should precede listening.
• Strategies for effective listening should be incorporated into the
materials.
• Learners should be given opportunities to progressively structure their
listening by listening to a text several times and by working through
increasingly challenging listening tasks.
• Learners should know what they are listening for and why.
• Tasks should include opportunities for learners to play an active role
in their own learning.

Arlenne M. Fernández
 Listening as Comprehension

A typical LESSON in current teaching materials

involves a three-part sequence consisting of pre-listening,
while-listening, and post-listening. And contains activities
that link bottom-up and top-down listening.

• The pre-listening phase prepares students for both top-down

and bottom-up processing through activities involving
activating prior knowledge, making predictions, and
reviewing key vocabulary.
• The task-listening phase focuses on comprehension through
exercises that require selective listening, gist listening,
sequencing, etc.
• The post-listening phase typically involves a response to
comprehension and may require students to give opinions
about a topic.

Arlenne M. Fernández
 Listening as Comprehension

TEACHING LISTENING
STRATEGIES
• Cognitive strategies: Involve solving learning
problems by considering how to store and retrieve
information (Comprehension, Storing & memory;
and Using & retrieval processes).

• Metacognitive strategies: Involve planning,

monitoring and evaluating comprehension; better
done at intermediate levels up (Planning,
Monitoring and Evaluating)

Arlenne M. Fernández
 Listening as Comprehension

Types of instruction of listening

strategies
There are three levels of teaching strategies:
a) Blind (Sts do a task requiring use of a strategy but
this is not identified, nor it´s labeled).
b) Informed (Sts are given a name for the strategy and
told why it´s useful)
c) Controlled (Sts are provided opportunities to
compare and evaluate their use of different
strategies)

Arlenne M. Fernández
 Listening as Comprehension

LEARNING LISTENING
SUBSKILLS /MICROSKILLS
There are so many strategies. There are literally books full of them. One
approach is to choose a select number of strategies and to teach them
repeatedly:
• Predicting what people are going to talk about.
• Guessing at unknown words or phrases without panic.
• Using one's own knowledge of the subject to help one understand.
• Identifying relevant points; rejecting irrelevant information.
• Retaining relevant points (by note-taking, summarizing,etc).
• Recognizing discourse markers (e.g.,well, oh, now, finally,etc).
• Recognizing cohesive devices, (e.g. linking words, pronouns, references, etc).
• Understanding different intonation patterns and uses of stress, etc., which
give clues to meaning and social setting.
• Understanding inferred information (e.g.speakers' attitude or intentions).
(Willis,1981)

Arlenne M. Fernández
 LISTENING FOR ACQUISITION
• According to Krashen´s approach, the optimal goal of L2
listening development is to allow for the L2 to be acquired
through listening, not only to allow the learner to understand
spoken messages in the L2.
• For language development to take place two conditions are
necessary: noticing features of the input (what the learner hears)
and trying to use new linguistic items in oral production in order
to “incorporate” them into his / her language repertoire.
• In other words, learners need to take part in activities that
require them to try out and experiment in using newly noticed
language forms in order for new learning items to become
incorporated into their linguistic repertoire (J.C Richards, 2008)
 References
• Brown, Steven. “Teaching Listening”. Cambridge University
Press, 2006.
• “L2 acquisition: The role of listening”. Retrived on 07/16/10
http://www.latcomm.com/articles/l2listeningacquisition.html
• Saricoban, Arif.”The teaching of listening”. The Internet TESL
Journal, Vol. V, No. 12, December 1999.
http://iteslj.org/Articles/Saricoban-Listening.html
• Richards, Jack C. “Teaching Listening and Speaking: from
theory to practice”. Cambridge University Press, 2008.
• Rubin, Joan. “A review of Second Language Listening
Comprehension Research”. The Modern language Journal 78,
1994.
• Richards, Jack C. “Teaching Listening: from Comprehension to
Acquisition”. Oxford University Press, 2008.
• Omaggio, Alice. “Teaching language in context: Proficiency-
oriented instruction”. Boston Heinle & Heinle, 1986.
• Richards, Jack C. “Current trends in teaching Listening and
Speaking”. Oxford University Press.July, 2003.
Let´s Exercise now!!!!
 Taken from: Impact
Listening 1 Unit 1.
Pearson Longman

Arlenne M. Fernández