This document outlines the various aspects and significance of listening skills, emphasizing their importance for 21st-century learners. It details different types of listening, key comprehension skills, and factors that influence listening such as speaker characteristics and listener attributes. Additionally, it discusses cognitive processes involved in listening comprehension, including perception, parsing, and utilization, along with strategies to enhance listening outcomes.

2. At the end of this presentation, we should be
able to;
A. identify the different aspects of listening
skills,
B. describe the different purposes and
processes of listening and its
significance for the 21st century learners,
C. solicit ideas about the importance of the
different factors that influences learners
listening.

3. 1. Listening as a skill
2. Listening as a product
3. Listening as a process
4. Factors that influence learners
listening

4. PURPOSEFUL LISTENING
5 Important Factors to be considered.
1. Discriminative – Basic to all listening purposes and a
listening to distinguish auditory
and/visual stimuli.
2. Comprehensive - Listening to understand the message.
3. Therapeutic – Listening to provide someone the
opportunity to talk through a problem.
4. Critical – Listening to evaluate the messages.
5. Appreciative – Listening to obtain enjoyment through
the works and experiences of others.
(Andrew Wolvin and Carolyn Coakely, 1996)

5. Listening Comprehension skills – the key
listening comprehension skills are;
a. Listening for details
b. Listening for gist
c. Drawing inferences
d. Listening selectively
e. Making predictions
The term ‘enabling skills’ is sometimes used to
refer to these skills.

6. Examples of Listening Outcomes
Follow instructions Transfer information into graphic form
Organize and classify
information
Identify information in pictures
Take effective notes Reconstruct original text
Take dictation Make appropriate oral responses

7. Cognitive model of listening comprehension.
1. Attention
2. Perception
3. Memory
How our brain processes linguistic information.
Attend signals (sound or print) and identify them as
words. Process information in the most efficient
way. Draw on knowledge stored in the long term
memory to act on the new information.
(Eysenck,1993)

8. Perception – (also called perceptual processing) is the
encoding of sound signals. Listeners hear and recognize
sounds as words that they know. The aural information is
stored for very short in the working memory. If it is not
process further, it will be permanently displaced by other
incoming sounds.
Parsing – is the process by which an utterance is
segmented according to syntactic structures or semantic
(meaning) cues to create a mental representation of the
combined meaning of the words.
Utilization – occurs when listeners relate mental
representations of the input to existing knowledge stored in
the long term memory. They also make inferences or use
the mental representation to respond to the speaker.

9. 1. Bottom-up – listening refers to a process by
which sounds are used to build up
increasingly larger units of information, such
as words, phrases, clauses and sentences
before the aural input is understood.
2. Top-down –processing is used to refer to
this application of background knowledge for
facilitating and enhancing comprehension.

10. Inference Comprehension monitoring
Prediction Cooperation
Elaboration Visualizing
Confidence building Selective Attention
Attention monitoring Comprehension evaluation

11. TEXT
Features can affect listening:
1. Acoustic Feature – such as phonological
modification and speech rate.
2. Discourse Feature – macro- and micro-markers,
linear and non-linear organization of information,
difficult vocabulary, colloquialism, sentence
length and complexity, visual support, and
explicitness of information.
3. Clear Influence – news broadcasts, lecturers
and conversations, abstract versus non-abstract
topics, static versus dynamic relationships.

12. TASK
Complexities of listening tasks are influenced by
types of question,
e.g.
Literal
Inferential
The amount of time available for processing
information, and whether or not the listener
can get the information repeated.

13. INTERLOCUTOR (Speaker)
It can affect the degree and quantity of
comprehension. Speaker characteristics
that have been known to play a part
include accent, fluency, standard or non-
standard usage, and gender.

14. LISTENER
Listeners characteristics that can influence
comprehension include language
proficiency, gender, memory, interest,
purpose, prior knowledge, attention,
concentration, accuracy of pronunciation,
physical and psychological states,
knowledge of context, topic familiarity, and
established learning habits.

15. PROCESS
The types of processing that listeners engage in
directly affect listening comprehension. These
refer to whether the process have been
predominantly top down or bottom up, or an
effective combination of both. The types of
listening strategy and the individual tactics for
releasing each strategy can also play significant
part.
It has been found that learners experience specific
problems in each phase of comprehension (Goh,
2000)

16. Perception Parsing Utilization
Do not recognize words
they know
Quickly forget what is heard Understand words but not
the intended message
Neglect the next part when
thinking about meaning
Unable to form a mental
representation from words
heard
Confused about key ideas
in the message
Cannot chunk streams of
speech
Do not understand
subsequent parts of input
because of earlier problems
Miss the beginning of texts
Concentrate too hard or
unable to concentrate

17. 3 sources of information that is crucial to listening:
1. Schematic (background knowledge)
2. Contextual (knowledge of situation and co-text)
3. Systemic ( knowledge of the language system)
(Anderson & Lynch, 1988)
Views learners as a ‘model builder’ who uses
background knowledge as well as the text to build
up a mental model or an overall interpretation.

18. 1. Cognitive – process, interpret, store and recall
information.
2. Metacognitive – manage and facilitate mental
process; cope with difficulties during listening.
3. Social-affective – enlist the help of others to
facilitate comprehension; manage one’s
emotions when listening.

19. Christine C. M. Goh (2008)Teaching Listening
in the Language Classroom, RELC Portfolio
Series 4. Singapore: SEAMEO Regional
Language Center