1. Comparative Essay
Human beings are born with a series of exceptional faculties which have the common purpose
of helping both men and women through their process of development within society, and
from the moment we are born, we are taught how to communicate and years later we go to
schools in order to fully develop skills such as reading, writing, listening and speaking. In the
following essay, we will refer to three different authors: Jeremy Harmer, David Nunan and H.
Douglas Brown and their perspectives when it comes to teaching skills, specifically to
listening. According to Nunan (2003), listening is an active, purposeful process of making
sense to what we hear; it is a receptive skill and it is remarkably relevant when learning to
develop speaking skills. The ability to listen, reproduce a language, and the process of
teaching listening skills has been studied since recent years, after the World War II, with the
audio-lingual method, which required oral responses to be evaluated. Later, researchers
realized that listening was an important skill, because learning English it is not just a matter of
translating or reading extensive texts, but also understanding the different moods and purposes
that a native speaker reflects at the moment of speaking. The current researchers mentioned in
the following essay emphasize that, instead of their suggestions and principles, the classroom
belongs to the teacher and he is free to create, or even modify activities. However, it is
important to remark that the principal aim of teaching listening is to encourage students to
respond after receiving the listening text, because listening is a communicative skill.
Listening is fundamental when it comes to the development of the ability to speak; the
exposure to a language, in our case English, should vary, in order to face the students to
different types of listening; also, teachers should apply a series of principles in order to help
the students through their process of developing their listening skills; Harmer, Nunan and H.D.
Brown agree on this matter. Listening is absolutely relevant when developing speaking,
because, in order to speak fluently, with proper intonation and rhythm, listening becomes a
relevant part of our environment, because the ability to speak in a particular way has been
directly related to imitation, so when we listen, we tend to imitate words, expressions and
different features of speech; this can be reflected, according to the previous authors, in our
students attempt to develop dialogues and further production of the pronunciation of the
words. Harmer, Nunan and Brown developed a series of very similar principles which can be
used as a commandment for English teachers, at the moment to plan a listening activity or a
class were listening is required. Our three authors, in their principles, believe that the level of
proficiency of the students must be consider when applying a task; authenticity of the
language used in listening activities and tasks can help our students to feel familiarized with
the contents and context of that particular listening, and it can also be of great motivation for
the teacher him/herself when it comes to his/her creativity.

2. According to Nunan, listening is an active skill differenced in two categories: productive and
receptive listening. On the contrary, Harmer states that listening can be divided into intensive
and extensive listening, inside the classroom and for pleasure, respectively. From the point of
view of the teacher’s role Harmer, on his fourth principle, states that teachers should
encourage the students to respond, helping them with an understanding from meaning to form
of a listening text. Notwithstanding, Brown says that teachers should be aware in how students
respond to the listening activities, being more focused in the form. Nunan suggests the
Gouin’s Method, which is based on the use of imperatives and statements that learners can see
after they hear, in order to assimilate the action with what they just heard. This
recommendation is useful because we listen to for a purpose. Nunan also says that some useful
strategies to use in the classroom could be dictation, gist tasks, and the modification of
activities, giving a sort of freedom to the teacher. On the other hand, Harmer states that the
listening activities are helpful for developing paralinguistic cues, or communicative skills,
such as inference of mood of the speakers, find specific information, and achieve a general
understanding of the text; thus, teachers should be aware to use different kind of tasks, going
from general to specific, in order to encourage students to listen as much as possible, and also
to exploit the listening texts with the major quantity of activities possible as well, because the
more applications a text have, the more the students learn.
Learning and acquiring skills represents part of the basis of our education, and as future
educators it is our aim and duty to deliver strategies, methods and provide techniques, in order
to help our future students throughout their learning process. As listening is a communicative
skill, should be developed in the better way. Teachers have that task inside the classroom, and
for these purposes there are a wide range of strategies and principles, developed by great
researchers as David Nunan, Jeremy Harmer and H. Douglas Brown. In this essay, we have
faced different definitions and categories of listening, as an active skill more than a passive
one, and that can be differenced as intensive or extensive, for academic purposes and for
entertainment, respectively. Listening can be categorized as a productive and receptive skill as
well, in the right way the learner’s development of the language. We also learned that the
different methods bottom-up and top-down can be used in an integrated way, called Interactive
Processing, which is based on the activation of background knowledge into the students, in
order to engage them through their life experiences, giving them a context before the listening
activity; this strategy can be helpful to motivate them and assure a better understanding of the
activity and the listening text.
Ma. Francisca Rojas Victoriano
Alexander González