TEFL I

                                                               TEACHING LISTENING

   A.    What is Listening

Listening is an active, purposeful process of making sense of what  we have language skills are often categorized as receptive or productive. Listening is very active. As people listen, they process not only what they hear but also connect it to other information they already know. Since listeners combine what they hear with their own ideas and experiences, in a very real sense they are “creating the meaning” in their own minds.  As Buck (1995) points out the assumption that listeners simply decode messages is mistaken. “(meaning is not in the text (text=whatever is being listened to) –but is something that is contructed by listeners based on a number of different knowledgesorces)”. Among those sources are knowledge of language, of what has already been said, of context, and general background knowledge. Listening is meaning based.

Listening is often compared to reading, the other receptive skill. While the two do share some similarities, two major differences should be noted from the start. Firstly, listening usually happens in real time. That is, people listen and have to comprehend what they hear immediately. There is no time to go back and review, look up unknown words, etc. Secondly, althought listening is receptive, it very often happens in the midst of a conersation something which requies productive, spoken responses. To understand how listeing works and how to teach it more effectively start by thinking about your own listening. Listening is the ability to identify and understand what others are saying. This involves understanding a speaker's accent or pronunciation, his grammar and his vocabulary, and grasping his meaning (Howatt and Dakin). An able listener is capable of doing these four things simultaneously. Willis (1981:134) lists a series of micro-skills of listening, which she calls enabling skills. 

Listening to and understanding speech involves a number of basic processes, some depending upon linguistic competence, some depending upon previous knowledge that is not necessarily of a purely linguistic nature, and some depending upon psychological variables that affect the mobilization of these competence and knowledge in the particular task situation. The listener must have a continuous set to listen and understand, and as he hears the utterance, he may be helped by some kind of set to process and remember the information transmitted. His linguistic competence enables him, presumably, to recognize the formatives of the heard utterance, i. e. , to dissect out of the wave form of the morphemes, words, and other meaning-bearing elements of the utterance. Listening is a receptive skill, and receptive skills give way to productive skills. If we have our students produce something, the teaching will be more communicative. This brings us to the must of integrating language skills. 

   B.     Background to the teaching of listening

  Ø  Historically, learning a foreign language meant learning to read and write. Listening was virtually ignored. Then in the late 1800s, interest in using children’s learning of their first language aas a model for foreign language teaching grew. This method was significant because it was the first in which listening played a major role in language teaching methodology. Still later, the direct method, often associated with Charles Berlitz, promoted the teaching of listening comprehension and the idea that new teaching points should be introduced orally. In the years follwing World War II, the audiolingual method came to dominate foreign language teaching. The method, which was heavily influenced by behavioral psychology of the day, emphasized MIM/MEM (mimicry/memorization) of new structures. As in the direct method, these were presented orally before the learners saw the written form.  In the 1970 and early 1980s, the idea the student learns though the act of communication- increased the role of listening. In the 1970s, the Communicative Language Teaching stressed the importance of listening under the influence of the input hypothesis of Stephen Krashen. The input hypothesis says, “for language learning to occur, it is necessary for the learner to understand the input language which contains linguistic items that are slightly beyond the learner’s present linguistic competence.” (Richards, et al. 1985)

   C.    Principles for teaching listening

1.      Expose students to different ways of processing information: bottom-up vs top-down

To understand how people make sense of the stream of sound we all hear. It is helpful  to think about how we process the input. A useful metaphor often used to explain reading but equally applicable to listening is “bottom-up vs top-down processing,” proposed  by Rumelhart and Ortony (1977) and expanded upon by Chaudron and Richard (1986) , Richard (1990), and others. The distinction is based on the ways learners attempt to understand what they or hear. With bottom-up processing, student start with the component parts: wors, grammar, and the like. Top down processing is opposite. Learners stars from their background knowledge, either content schema (general information based on previous leaning and life experience) or textual schema (awareness of the kinds of information used in given situation) ( See Long, 1989).  Many students especially those with years of “school english” – have learned via method s that stress the “parts” of English: vocabulary and grammartical structures. It is not suprising, therefore, that athese learners try to process English from the bottom up. It can be difficult to experience what beginning level learners go through. It is especially challenging to understand what they experience when listening to an article which you are reading. Hovewer, a reading task can be used to understand the nature of bottom-up processing. The opposite type of processing, “top-down,” begins with the listeners life knowlegde.

Learners need to integrate both means of processing; they have to adopt interactive processing (Peterson 2001) by means of pre-listening activities such as brainstorming vocabulary or inventing a dialogue related to the given exercise.

Two points of caution:

Ø  According to Buck (1995), pre-listening & listening activities must be balanced, and we need pre-listening activities to “do two things: provide context for interpretation and activate background knowledge that will help interpreting.

Ø  Tsui and Fullilove (1998) suggested that learners need to make use of their top-down knowledge but keep re-evaluating information to avoid missing new information that contradict their knowledge. Learners need specific work on bottom-up processing to become less reliant on guessing from the context.

This top down/bottom up intergrated happened by accident. In the classroom, pre-listening activities are a good way to make sure it happens. Before listening, learners can, for example, brainstorm vocabulary related to a topic or invent a short dialogue relevant to functions such as giving directions or shopping. In the process, they  base their information on their knowlodge of life (top-down information) as they  generate vocabulary and sentences )bottom-up data). The result is a more integrated attempt at processing. The learners are activating their previous knowledge. This use of the combination of top down and bottom-up  data is also called interactive processing (Peterson, 2001).

2.      Expose Students to Different Types of Listening

Any discussion of listening tasks has to include a consideration of types of listening. Here tasks as well as text should be considered. When discussing listening text refers to whatever the students are listening to, often  a recording. The most common type of listening exercise in many textbooks is listening for specific information. This usually involves catching concrete information including names, time specific language forms, etc. At other times students try to understand in a more general way. This is global or gist listening. In the classroom, this often involves tasks such as identifying main ideas, nothing a sequence of events and the like. Listening specific information and listening for gist are two important types of listening, but, of course, they don’t exist in isolation. We move between the two. For example, many students have been subjected to lonng, less than exciting lectures. They listen globally to follow that the speaker is talking about. Then they are hear something that seems important ( “this sounds like it will be on the test!”) and focus in to get the specifi information. Another critical type of listening is inference. This is “listening between the lines” that is, listening for meaning that is implied not stated directly. Inference is different from gist and specific information listening in that it often occurs at the same as some other types of listening. He learner’s main task might well be to catch specifices or to understand a text generally when they come across information that isn’t stated directly. Because inference requires somewhat abstract thinking, it is a higher level skill. However, it is a mistake to put off working on inference until learners are at an intermediate level or above. Indeed, it is often at the beginning level when students lack much vocabulary, grammar, and functional routines that student tend to infer the most.

3.      Teach a Variety of Tasks

Learners of listening need to work with a variety of tasks. Since learners do the task as they listen, it is important that the task itself does not demand too much production of the  learner. If for example a beginning level learner hears a story and is asked to write a summary in English, it could well be  that the learner understood the story but is not yet at the level to be able to write the summary. It may also be the case that they fail to respond even though they do understand. It may so happen that they understood at the time but forgot by the time they got to the exercise. In this example of a summary task based on a story, it may be better to have a task such as choosing the correct summary from two or three choices.

4.      Consider text, difficulty, and authenticity.

Spoken languages are very different from written language. It is more redundant, full of false starts, rephrasing and elaborations. Incomplete sentences, pauses, and overlaps are common. Learners need exposure to and practice with natural sounding language. When learners talk about text difficulty, the first thing many mention is speed, indeed which can be a problem. But the solution is not to give them unnaturally slow, clear   recordings. Those can actually distort the way the language sounds. Speed, however, is not the only variable. Brown (1995) talks about “cognitive load” and describes six factors that increase or decrease the ease of understanding.

·         The number of individuals or objects in a text.

·         How clearly the individuals or objects are distinct from one another.

·         Simple relationships are easier to understand than complex ones.

·         The order of events.

·         The number of inferences needed.

·         The information is consistent with what the listener already knows.

Any discussion of listening text probably needs to deal with the issue of authentic texts. Virtually no one should disagree that texts students work with should be realistic. However, some suggest that everything students work with should be authentic. However the issue of authenticity is not so simple as it sounds. Most of the recordings that accompany textbooks are made in recording studios. And recordings not made in the studio are often not of a usable quality. Brown and Menasche (1993) suggest looking at two aspects of authenticity. They suggest this breakdown:

a)      Task authenticity

Simulated: modeled after a real life; nonacademic task such as feeling in a form

Minimal/ incidental: checks understanding, but in a way the isn’t usually down out side of the classroom; numbering pictures to show a sequence of events or identify the way something is said examples.

b)      Input authenticity

-          Genuine: created only for the realm of real life, not for classroom, but used in the language teaching.

-          Altered: no meaning change, but the original is no longer as it was ( glossing, visual resetting, pictures, or color a adapted)

-          Adapted: created for real life ( words and grammatical structures changed to simplify the text)

-          Simulated: written by the author as if the material is genuine; many genuine characteristics

-          Minimal /incidental : created for the classroom ; no attempt to make the material seem genuine.

5.      Teach listening strategies.

In considering listening, it is useful to note the items Rost (2002, p. 155) identifies as strategies that are used by successful listeners.

·         Predicting: Effective listeners think about what they will hear.

·         Inferring: It is useful for the listeners to listen between the lines.

·         Monitoring: Good listeners notice what they do and do not understand.

·         Clarifying: Efficient learners ask questions and give feedback to the speaker.

·         Responding: Learners react to what they hear.

·         Evaluating: They check on how well they have understood.

   D.    Classroom techniques and tasks

Dictation with a difference: For many teachers listening for specific information means dictation. Dictation as it is usually done presents some problems because it is completely bottom up- students need to catch every word. So dictation is often asking students to do something in a foreign language that is unnatural and very difficult even in the first language. A related problem is that since dictation is a word level exercise, the learners do not need to think about overall meaning. So suitable exercises should be found out to deal with those problems.

Ø  Do-it-yourself: Modifying materials to add “Listening for specific information”:

While listening for specifics is the most common type of listening in textbooks, teachers sometimes want to add their own activities. The followings are some ways of listening for specifics.

·         Micro listening (usually done after they know the main topic of the recording, but before they have began the main listening tasks) choice the view target that occur several times on the recording. Example might be names of color, people, place etc.

·         Bits and Pieces (before the main tasks) tell the students what the topic will be. In small group or as whole class, the brainstorm vocabulary likely to came up on the recording. Each  learner makes a list. Then listen to the recording and circle the words they hear.

·         What do I want to know? ( before the main task) tell the students the topic and enough about what they will hear for them to imagine the situation. In pairs or small group, they write two or three questions about the information they think will be given. Then the listen and see how many of the question they are able to answer.

·         Dictation and Cloze. Many books feature cloze ( fill in the blanks) dictation as listening. If you are using a book that has such exercise, have the student try to fill in the blanks before they listen. The read the passage and make the their best guesses. Then, when they  listen to the text.  They  have an actual listening tasks; to see if the they were right.

Ø  Do it youself: Adding gist tasks:

Even though many textbooks concentrate on listening for specific information exercises sometimes transforming them into global listening tasks are as simple as asking “What are they talking”? What words gave you the hints? Here are some other ways to add gist listening.

·         Main ideas: write the main idea for the recording on the board, along with three four distracters. Often subtopoint within the corversation make a good distracters. In the second example above, the main point is “ she feels sick” and the distracters could be rellen day go to bed, and take some aspirin. Students listen and identify the main idea.

·         What is the order?

When the listening text is a story, list five or six events from the story. Students listen and put the items in order. It is often useful to tell them which item is number one to help them get started. It is also useful to have at least one items as a distracter that is not used. Otherwise, the last item is obvious without listening.

·         Which picture? If picture are available (e.g., one from the particular listening page of your textbook and distracters from elsewhere in the book) students can listen and identify the one that goes with what they are hearing.

Ø  Listening between the lines: Inference tasks. As mentioned earlier, students often find infering meaning challenging because it requires abstract processing. Consider the following task: stay to the left and elevator.

Ø  Do it yourself inference

Inference depends as much on the text a- what is being said- as it does on the task. However, teachers should try to be aware of inference and look for opportunities to work with it. The following are two places to start:

·         Focus on emotions: How do the speakers feel? How do you know that?

·         Look for background information: Has one or more of the speakers been here/done that/ tried this before? Why do you think so?