For teaching professionals.

1. How to Teach Listening
Chapter 1: Listening in the World and in
Language Learning
Lecturer: Kong Seang Eng

2. Why and how of listening-motivation and mechanics
Do you know that animals can listen?
Frogs, kangaroos, bats, for example, are able
to listen for different purposes.
What about human?

3. Why and how of listening-motivation and mechanics
The basic purposes for us are information-
gathering and pleasure, and some other
reasons.
In addition to these basic purposes, hearing
sounds can arouse the imagination and enrich
lives for human.

4. Why and how of listening-motivation and mechanics
Our listening can be classified as:
1. Listening for gist
2. Listening for specific information
3. Listening in detail
4. Inferential listening

5. The characteristics of spoken English
Because of the new recent trend of text-
messaging and chat rooms, writing has become
to take the some of the features of speaking:
- informality
- lack of attention to punctuation
- transience (being temporary)
- real time interaction

6. The characteristics of spoken English
Even though both listening and reading are
receptive skills, there are some significant
differences between them.
- First, reading takes place over space, while
listening takes place over time.

7. The characteristics of spoken English
- Then, oral data has no recorded and invisible
ink.
- This data is based on spontaneous
performance and disappear so soon.
- As listening takes place over time, not space,
the gaps between words in writing are not seen.

8. The characteristics of spoken English
Some other key differences:
1. Elision: When sounds are omitted, usually
at the beginning or end of a word, in order to
make pronunciation of the utterance easier for
the speaker.
Ex: She sat next to the wall.
In here, the t of next is elided into the t of
to (neksta)

9. The characteristics of spoken English
- Assimilation: takes place when the first of a series of
sound changes to accommodate subsequent sounds.
Ex: Tony’s a heart breaker.
The t sound in heart changes to either a glottal stop or
a p in this context.
(hapbreaker)

10. The characteristics of spoken English
- Intrusion: when a sound is added in order to
allow the speaker to link up the two words
more easily.
Ex: He doesn’t have an original idea in his
head.
Here, an intrusive r is actually between
idea and in (aidiarin)

11. The characteristics of spoken English
- Another important feature is that formulaic
phrases are often chucked, which means that
the phrases are said rapidly as if they are one
word.
Ex: know what I mean? (nouwodaimi:n)

12. The characteristics of spoken English
- And some other sound systems and
phonological concerns are also to be noticed.
Ex: Stress, intonation, tone, voice
volume.............

13. Why listening is difficult
 All in all, we may be able to conclude that
listening is a more difficult task than reading.
 And the difficulties can be: characteristics of
the message, the delivery, the listener and the
environment.

14. Why listening is difficult
1. Characteristics of the message
- Words or phrases spoken out can be
confusing.
- There are, of course, ‘slips of the
ear’—simple mishearing.

15. Why listening is difficult
- Linguistic difficulties, such as unknown words,
lexical density (short spaces of time between
content words, forcing the listener to concentrate
harder) and complex grammatical structure.

16. Why listening is difficult
- Also, there are non linguistic
characteristics of the message include
familiarity of the topic, text type and
cultural accessibility may also be the
factors.

17. Characteristics of the delivery
2. Characteristics of the delivery
Mode of delivery is a vital factor.
Here, we will focus on reciprocal and
non-reciprocal listening.

18. Characteristics of the delivery
- Reciprocal listening involves interaction
between two or more than two people,
which means that there is a conversation.

19. Characteristics of the delivery
- Repair strategy (speakers can
react/ask to slow down......) is
available here.

20. Characteristics of the delivery
- While for nonreciprocal listening, the
listeners has no opportunities to do that
as they are in a situation which they can
only listen, such as watching TV,
listening to a radio and so on.

21. Characteristics of the delivery
- In these circumstances, the listeners
cannot control over the input, which
means that they cannot react directly
to the speakers.

22. Characteristics of the delivery
- So surprising that when American shows were
first shown on British TV, British people did not
understand much because of American accent.

23. Characteristics of the delivery
- Therefore, nonreciprocal listening is more difficult
than the reciprocal one.
- And there are actually more characteristics of
delivery, such as: organization, duration, number
of speakers, and accent.

24. Characteristics of the environment
 Environmental conditions: temperature,
background noise, defective equipment and
so on may affect the listening performance.
 Another major problem which is not usually
listed is the role of memory of the listeners.

25. Characteristics of the environment
 While words are being processed, others
are coming.
 So, the mind is being flooded with words.
 So, how can we help listeners to avoid
being overloaded?

26. Characteristics of the environment
 A technique that helps reduce the memory
load is the process of activating listeners’
prior knowledge.
 And this process is also called activating
schemata.

27. Characteristics of the environment
This will get listeners into the topic and
help them develop their expectations of
the input, which is a very crucial factor
for them to be bale to predict the
content.

28. Bottom-up versus top-down approaches to listening
 While listening can be very difficult,
researchers have two listening models to
introduce: bottom-up and top-down.
 The bottom-up model focuses on the
meanings of each small pieces of the
language in the text

29. Bottom-up versus top-down approaches to listening
 Top-down model is to do with use of the
background knowledge to predict content.
 So, the top-down model is, at least in part,
based on the listeners; much of the
comprehension relies on what happens in mind
even before the listening has begun.

30. Bottom-up versus top-down approaches to listening
 Whereas the bottom-approach depends more on
the sounds heard.
 There has been much debate recently about
which models.
 Until recently, it is revealed that most errors
caused by the mishearing of the individual
words, which is a failure of the bottom-up
approach.

31. Bottom-up versus top-down approaches to listening
 Some research, on the other hand, hints
that it is the top-down approach which
causes the mistakes in listening tasks.
 In this, it says that students know the topic
and hear some familiar words. Then, they
make wild guesses about the content.

32. Bottom-up versus top-down approaches to listening
However, it is still a matter of ongoing
research.
But what we are sure is that we use both
models when we listen. This is a called
interactive model, a combination of the
two.

33. Why students should listen to English
 Access the world
 Pleasure
 Travel/tourism
 Work purposes and academic reqiurement

34. The place of listening in language teaching
 Among the four macro skills, listening is
probably the least understood, the least
researched and historically the least valued.
 But because of the trend of giving
importance to listening, the method of
audiolinugalism has been introduced.

35. The place of listening in language teaching
The method uses recorded drills, and
put the listening as the utmost
importance of the teaching language
pedagogy.

36. The place of listening in language teaching
 What has been in essential factor in helping to building up listening
capability.
 So, what does aural input consist of?
1. Target grammar/vocabulary
2. Discourse markers
3. Examples of pragmatic use of language
4. Features of intonation .......etc.

37. The place of listening in language teaching
 There is a distinction between roughly-tuned
and finely-tuned input.
- Roughly-tuned input: It is approximately at
students’ level; it allows them to actually
understand the message even though there may
be some aspects of the message that goes
beyond the comprehension.

38. The place of listening in language teaching
 Finely-tuned input is more carefully
controlled. It does not have complex
grammatical or vocabulary items far beyond
the students’ current levels.
 And is usually designed not to distract the
students from the target grammar or
vocabulary.

39. Communicative Language Teaching (CLT)
Assuming that all of you are quite
familiar with CLT.
But why CLT with Listening?
CLT brought with it significant
development in terms of listening to L2.

40. Communicative Language Learning (CLT)
It focuses more on authenticity of
materials, contexts and responses.
It uses findings from research into
pragmatics, discourse analysis and
sociolinguistics in order to show how
real communication takes place.

41. Communicative Language Learning (CLT)
 In CLT, it involves you more in personal,
emotional or critical responses to the
content, and less drilling and repetition.
 Listening in CLT has a communicative
purpose in that students are expected to
use the information they hear, just as we
do when listening outside the classroom.

42. Hearing English in context
The characteristic product of language
teaching is fragments no matter what
methodology or approach we use.
So, learning a language is like
assembling a jigsaw puzzle.

43. Hearing English in context
Likewise, listening to a piece of
extended discourse gives the students
the whole, complete view of what
English sounds like.
Then, listening can bring together the
fragments.

44. Listening and language learning (six myths)
 We have begun talking about some facts
about listening.
 And there are a number of myths:
1. You can’t teach people how to listen.
2. Listening is a passive skill.
3. It is easier for students to understand native
speakers of English than foreign speakers of
English.

45. Listening and language learning (six myths)
4. The skills involved in listening to a foreign
language are the same as those that we use for
listening to our native language.
5. While listening in class, students shouldn’t
try understand every word.
6. Students shouldn’t be allowed to read the
scripts of recordings.

46. Conclusion
 In this chapter we have:
- looked at how the ears and brain work when we listen.
- examined the characteristics of the spoken English.
- talked about some difficulties in listening.
- discussed bottom-up, top-down and interactive models.
- looked at reasons for students listening to English.
- examined the place of listening in language teaching.
- talked about listening as input and as a model for one’s own
speech.
- discussed about how students’ confidence can be boosted.
- examined some myths.