This chapter discusses developing listening skills in preschoolers. It outlines five types of listening: appreciative, purposeful, discriminative, creative, and critical. It then discusses teaching techniques that promote good listening habits, such as ensuring instructions are clear. The chapter also addresses planning listening activities and how music, phonological awareness, and phonemic awareness activities can help develop listening skills.

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Chapter 7
Developing Listening Skills

2. Chapter Highlights
A. Types of Listening
B. Purposeful Listening Activities
C. Appreciative Listening Activities
D. Critical Listening Activities
E. Discriminative Listening Activities
F. Teacher Skills
G. Auditory Perception
H. Listening Centers
I. Phonological Awareness
1. Phonemic Awareness
2. Phonemic Awareness Activities
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3. Chapter Highlights (cont.)
Teacher Goals – Phonology
A. Emphasizes Sounds in Daily Interactions
1. rhyme sounds
2. notices beginning, middle, ending word sounds
3. segments syllables in a word
4. blends sounds into words.
B. Talks About Alphabet Letters
1. points out characteristics
2. labels letters while pointing
3. answers questions about letter sounds
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Objectives
 In this chapter, we will investigate:
 Five types of listening
 Teaching techniques that promote good listening
habits
 How to plan an activity that promotes a listening skill
 Presenting a listening activity to a group of
preschoolers
 How to tell a story that involves purposeful child
listening

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Listening and Hearing
 Listening
The first language arts skill learned
Develops before the child can speak
A learned behavior, a mental process
 Hearing
The facility or sense by which sound is
perceived

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Types of Listening
 Appreciative: pleasure and entertainment
 Purposeful: follows direction and replies
 Discriminative: sound difference awareness
 Creative: imagination and emotion
 Critical: understands, evaluates, makes
decisions, and formulates opinions

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Language Features in Songs
 Vocabulary
 Predictability
 Rhyming
 Repetition
 Concept development
 Cultural literacy
 Discriminative listening
 Creative listening

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Critical Listening
 Discussion of a problem
 Discussion of likes and dislikes
 Detection of errors
 Predicting the feelings of others
 Discovering inconsistencies

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Discriminative Listening
 Discerning sounds that are same or different
 Decoding in early reading
 “Listening Detectives”
 Imitating clapping patterns
 Identifying rhymes

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Creative Listening
 Activities that create emotional responses
 Discussion of feelings about a read-aloud
 Expression of feelings through art and drama
 Encourage formation of mental images when
listening to music or stories

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Teaching Techniques that Promote
Good Listening Habits (1 of 3)
 Awareness of teachers’ own listening habits
and abilities
Factors that may impact
 Teacher’s own experience—effective examples
 Teacher is so busy sharing knowledge
 Teacher instructions clear and simple

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Teaching Techniques that Promote
Good Listening Habits (2 of 3)
 Teachers promote good listening habits
Using body-movement activities to help
capture attention
Encouragement and smiles
By using statements at the beginning, middle,
and end of an activity to focus attention

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Teaching Techniques that Promote
Good Listening Habits (3 of 3)
 Children will listen better if teachers:
Speak with natural volume
Focus child’s attention on speaker
Explain figures of speech
Check for understanding
Reduce classroom noise

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What Impacts Listening?
 Auditory perception
Provide auditory activities
 Prepare your setting for listening
Minimum distractions
Heating and lighting
Do not force
 Teacher behaviors

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Planning an Activity
to Promote Listening Skills
 Talk-listen group time
Goal: opportunity to participate
 Children sit in circle facing the speaker
 Teacher announces and names activity
 Introduce chart depicting topics to discuss
 Teacher models and activity begins
 Have a group evaluation

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Music as a Listening Activity
 The use of music promotes
Listening to sounds, words, pitch, tone
Singing, child responses, and silence
Cognitive abilities
 Memorizing songs, poems
 Auditory discrimination
 Intellectual progressing

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Phonological Awareness
 May predict a child’s future reading success
 Developmental—develops in stages (Opitz)
 Begins at age three and improves over many
years (Snow, Burns, Griffin)
 Phonemic awareness
 Alliteration

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Phonemic Awareness Skill
 Phoneme segmentation
Skill allows the child to hear phoneme
segments in words
 Hearing individual phonemes is not easy.
 Continuant
Children hear and isolate letters
 Needed to make connections
Single alphabet letters and sound

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Encourage Listening Activities
 Plan and implement many listening activities
Author’s chair or child picture book sharing
Listening riddles for guessing
Listen and follow directions
 Stories and games