Listening is a difficult skill for language learners to acquire. Traditional listening lessons focus on answering comprehension questions after listening but neglect important pre-listening and post-listening stages. Learners struggle because listening requires segmenting speech, remembering words, and constructing meaning. It is an active process involving understanding sounds, grammar, vocabulary, discourse and context to comprehend. Teachers should model metacognitive strategies like planning, monitoring and evaluating to develop students' listening abilities through frequent practice with one-way and two-way listening tasks.

2. •Listening is a
demanding skill for
many language
learners.
•It is also challenging
for teachers to teach.
•WHY ?

3. • Most teachers don’t know what
listening entails and how
comprehension is achieved.
•TYPICAL LISTENING LESSON
•1)Listening to an audio text (dialogue,
narration, news.. Etc.
•2) Answering questions
•3) Checking answers
What about pre-listening, post-
listening?

4. Many language learners
experience difficulty because
1) they miss key words or mishear the key words.
2) they segment individual words in a stream of
speech.
3) they have problems with remembering key
words long enough for meaning to be
constructed or transferred to long-term
memory.

6. Listening is not just hearing.
Listening is an active process.
Meaning is not extracted only from sounds.
Understanding is not only the results of the
recognition of sounds.
Understanding is the result of active construction
occurring at all levels of text.
LEVELS OF TEXT
a) Sounds
b) Grammar
c) Lexis
d) Discourse structure

7. • CONTEXT
1) The topic
2) Participants
3) Communication purpose
4) The place or setting for the interaction
5) Time
An active listener realizes when more
information is needed and asks for the needed
information.
In face to face conversations, listener
contributes to his/her own comprehension by
asking questions and asking for clarifications.

8. • When direct interaction is absent (films,
videos, other recorded materials, tv and
radio programs) listeners have to find
other ways to fill in the gaps in their
comprehension.

9. • Like all language
communication skills, listening
is goal-oriented and purposeful.

10. ACTIVE LISTENING
One-way (Non-participatory)
TV & Radio prog, Audio
recordings, films, ..etc
The listener has to rely on
his/her own linguistic,
nonlinguistic, paralinguistic,
and communicative
knowledge to comprehend
Two-way (Interactive)
Face-to-face
conversations,
telephone
conversations,
interviews..etc.

11. • Listening skills are acquired
abilities.
• Listening skills enable a person to
listen without great deal of
deliberate effort or conscious
planning

12. COGNITIVE PROCESSES
The Three Phases
1) Perception: Listeners match sounds to words (Also
known as decoding and sound-script recognition)
2) Parsing: Decoded words are simultaneously analyzed
in larger units according to grammar and lexical cues.
3) Utilization: This is necessary for higher level process.
Information processed at phonological, grammatical
and lexical levels is related to the listener’s prior
knowledge of the facts and listening context to enable
them to interpret the meaning and functions of the
utterances.
If the constructed meaning is not needed
immediately, it is sent to the long term memory.
But, in interactive listening, listeners have to
hold the meaning in their working memory while they
are formulating a response.
For native speakers “perception” and “parsing”
are automatized.

13. PHOLOLOGICAL LOOP
holds the sounds (verbal information) long enough to
be processed during perception phase.
EPISODIC BUFFER:
Information is integrated and represented as a single
mental representation in the system known as the
“episodic buffer”.
The sounds that are perceived and parsed are
interpreted semantically. This enables the listeners to
arrive at an understanding of the overall message for
utilization.

14. • Listening skills are the result of frequent practice and
comprehension is automatized. Bottom-up is
automatized.
LISTENING SKILS
1) Listen for details
2) Listen selectively
3) Listen for global understanding
4) Listen for main ideas.
5) Listen and infer
6) Listen and predict

15. 1) Planning
2) Focusing attention
3) Monitoring
4) Evaluation
5) Inference
6) Elaboration
7) Prediction
8) Contextualization
9) Reorganizing
10) Using linguistic and learning sources
11) Cooperation
12) Managing emotions
(See p.79 for detailed definitions)

16. ONE-WAY and TWO-WAY LISTENING TASKS
(Examine Table 1 and Table 2
on p. 82 and 83)

17. Strategy Approach
Strategy Approach focuses
on helping students use strategies
to enhance their listening
processes and develop their
listening metacognitive awareness
about listening.

18. Teachers are advised to model the metacognitive
strategies of “PLANNING”, “MONITORING” and
“EVALUATING”.
Pre-communication activities are recommended for
raising learners’ awareness about listening processes:
1) Listening Diaries (students listen to various audio or
video-audio materials at scheduled times and write their
comments and reactions)
2) Group Dialogues.

19. Task-based Approach suggests
that students should do a lot of
listening practice.
Students engage in
metacognitive processes such as
1) planning
2) monitoring
3) evaluation
in order to be more self-
regulated in their listening
development.

20. RISKS !!
 ! Background knowledge is useful but it sometimes
distracts learners and leads them to ignore useful cues in
the text.
 !If students rely on bottom-up too much, they most
probably miss the gist of the audio text and the main ideas
in it.