1. Challenges and
Demands in the
Teaching of Listening
What makes listening
difficult?
Junnie Armel T. Salud
UST Graduate School

2. We have to make listening a priority
– WE NEED TO CHOOSE TO LISTEN!

4. What do we do then
as language
teachers?
• Teach effective listening in the
classroom.
• Listening skills should be
developed to enable students to
comprehend, analyze, respond to,
assess and benefit from what they
listen to.

5. What does it mean to
learn a language?

6. Nord (1980):
“Some people now believe that learning a
language is not just learning to talk, but
rather that learning a language is building
a map of meaning in the mind. These
people believe that talking may indicate
that the language was learned, but they
do not believe that practice in talking is the
best way to build up this ―cognitive‖ map in
the mind. To do this, they feel the best
method is to practice meaningful
listening.”

7. Delaying Speaking
Concentrating on
Listening
Gary and Gary (1981):
• 1. The learner is not overloaded by having
to focus on two or more skills at the same
time—a cognitive benefit.
4. Learners will not feel shy or worried
• 2. Speed of coverage—receptive about their language classes.
knowledge grows faster than productive
• Having to speak a foreign language,
• knowledge. It is possible to experience particularly when you know very
and learn much more of
• little, can be a frightening experience.
• the language by just concentrating on Listening activities reduce the
listening. If learners had to be
• stress involved in language learning—a
• able to say all the material in the lessons, psychological benefit.
progress would be very
• 5. Listening activities are well suited to
• slow. independent learning through
• 3. It is easy to move very quickly to listening to recordings.
realistic communicative listening
activities. This will have a strong effect on
motivation.

8. • Teaching listening-speaking as
separate units. (Delay speaking.
Concentrate on listening)
• Listening-speaking should be
interrelated.

9. What Makes Listening
Difficult? (Dunkel, 1991; Richards, 1983; Ur, 1984)
• Clustering (Chunking) –breaking
down speech into smaller group of
words.
*In teaching listening comprehension,
therefore, you need to help students pick
out manageable clusters of words;
sometimes second language learners
will try to retain overly long sentences or
they will err in the other direction in
trying to attend to every word in an
utterance.

10. • Redundancy -rephrasing,
REPETITIONS, elaborations, and little
insertions of ―I mean‖ and ―You
know‖.
*Such redundancy helps the
listener to process meaning by
offering more time and extra
information.
Consider the following excerpt of a
conversation...

11. Amos: Hey, Andy, how’s it going?
Andy: Pretty good, Amos. How was your weekend?
Amos: Aw, it was terrible, I mean worst you could
imagine. You know what I mean?
Andy: Yeah, I’ve had those days. Well, like what
happened?
Amos: Well, you’re not gonna believe this, but my
girlfriend and I –you know Rachel? I think you met
her at my party-- anyway, she and I drove up to
Point Reyes, you know, up in Marin County? So we
were driving along minding our own business, you
know, when this dude in one of those four-
wheelers, you know, like a Bronco or something,
comes up like three feet behind us and like
tailgates on us on these crazy mountain roads up
there-- you know what they’re like. So, he’s about
to run me off the road, and it’s all I can do to just
concentrate...

12. • Reduced Forms -can be:
~Phonological
(“Djeetyet” –Did you eat yet?)
~Morphological
(contractions like I’ll – I will)
~Syntactic
(elliptical forms like
“When will you be back?”
―Tomorrow, maybe.‖ )
~Pragmatic
(Phone rings in a house, child answers and yells
to another room:
“MOM! PHONE!” )

13. • Performance Variables (Fillers) –can
easily interfere with comprehension in
second language learners. Imagine
listening to the following verbatim
excerpt of a sportsman talking about his
game:
―But, uh—I also –to go with this course if you’re
playing well –if you’re playing well then you get uptight
about your game. You get keyed up and it’s easy to
concentrate. You know you’re playing well and you
know... in with a chance then it’s easier, much easier
to –to you know get in there and –start to... you don’t
have to think about it. I mean it’s gotta be automatic.‖

14. • Colloquial Language --idioms, slang, etc.

15. • Rate of Delivery
-Jack Richards (1983) points out that
the number and length of pauses used
by a speaker is more crucial to
comprehension than sheer speed.
Learners will nevertheless eventually
need to be able to comprehend
language delivered at varying rates of
speed and, at times, delivered with
pauses. Unlike reading, where a person
can stop and go back to reread.

16. • Stress, rhythm, and
intonation
-the prosodic features of
the English language are
very important for
comprehension. Intonation
patterns are very
significant not just for
interpreting straightforward
elements such as
questions, statements, and
emphasis but for
understanding more subtle
messages like sarcasm,
insult, praise, etc.

17. • Interaction (including non-verbal)
-plays a large role in listening
comprehension. Conversation is
especially subject to all the rules of
interaction: negotiation, clarification,
attending signals, turn-taking, etc.
-to learn to listen is also to learn to
respond and to continue a chain of
listening and responding.
-students need to understand that
good listeners are good responders.
-listening should always be a two-
way process.

18. Not to let a word get in the way of its
sentence.
Nor to let a sentence get in the way of
its intention.
But to send your mind out to meet the
intention as a guest;
THAT is understanding.

19. Conclusion
• Language teachers should consider the importance of
listening and developing active listening skills in their
students. Listening is arguably the least understood and the
most overlooked of the four macro skills and listening plays a
critical role in effective communication. In 1981, Gary and
Gary stressed the importance of delaying speaking and
concentrating on listening. According to them, the learner
should not be overloaded by having to focus on two or more
skills at the same time. But the trend nowadays in teaching
listening and speaking is develpmental, learners need not
separate each of the macro skills but he learns the skills
progressively (spiral). Language teachers should also have to
consider the factors as to why listening can be very difficult
to learn (especially to L2 learners) so the teachers can attend
to these factors to help the stream of conversation to flow
WITH FULL COMPREHENSION.

20. References
• Brown, Douglas. (1994). Teaching
by Principles. California: Longman
• Newton, Jonathan et al. (2009).
Teaching ESL/EFL Listening and
Speaking. NY: Routledge

21. LISTENING SELF
ASSESSMENT