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Teaching Listening

1) Listening is the most important of the four language skills and is used most often in everyday communication. 2) Traditional listening lessons involved short dialogues, dictation, and recognizing words and sounds, but now listening is recognized as its own skill to be developed. 3) Effective listening instruction includes teaching strategies like planning, monitoring comprehension, and clarifying meaning, and integrating both top-down and bottom-up processing.

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Teaching Listening Brandy Barter Brittni Driver EDUC 8620: Practicum Dr. De Costa
Say What? "We listen ... twice as much as we speak, four times as much as we read, and five times as much as we write" (Morley, 1999)
What is Listening? • Listening is the most important of the four language skills. It is the... o First skill to develop o Language skill used most often in everyday communication (Ashcraft & Tran, 2010) • Listening as a skill: o “The ability to respond accurately to questions or to the demands of a task is a reliable indication of listening competence and the appropriate goal for a lesson” (Burns & Richards, 2012).
Say What?
Background • Relatively new in terms of its history. • A means of presenting a new grammar point o Short, contrived dialogues • Mostly dictation o Word & phoneme recognition • 1960’s listening was recognized as a skill to be practiced on its own right. o Tape and cassette recordings (Burns & Richards, 2012)
Listening Activity #1!!! Ask and answer these questions with a pair: • What kinds of movies do you like? • Have you been to the movies recently? • What was the last movie you saw? • Was it an evening movie or a matinee?
What were the steps in the listening lesson?
Listening Lesson Format • Prelistening • Extensive listening • Preset questions or task • Intensive listening • Language of the recording • Final play Field (2008; 2012)
Comprehension Approach • Exposes learners to wide range of voices. • Hear L2 speakers interacting. • Gives them practices in particular types of listening (auditory scanning). • Tests like TOEFL and TOEIC use this format.
Comprehension Approach Evaluated • What is missing in the CA approach? o Tests listening without ever teaching it o Provides extensive exposure without honing the skills/strategies of the learner  Listening, like reading, is an operation that takes place in the mind of the language user  Emphasizes product over process
Activity #2! • Checklist for listening strategies. • Directions: In groups, put each of the strategies into the correct category.
Types of Strategies Metacognitive Cognitive Socioaffective Used to determine Used to manipulate Using others to help us one's own information and make understand: comprehension: sense of what we hear: -Planning -Responding -Cooperative learning -Monitoring -Organization -Questioning for -Evaluating -Summarization comprehension -Elaboration -Managing one’s emotions -Clarifying in the learning situation *Adapted from Peterson (2001) and Lynch (2009).
Discussion Question: • How might you adapt the comprehension approach in order to include listening strategies and processes? Talk with a pair for 2 minutes and then share with the class.
How to Teach Listening Strategies • Find out what strategies your students already use. • Not all listening tasks require the same strategies and that they need to be flexible. • Focus on a small number of strategies. • Use yourself as a model for using a strategy. • Follow-up with a 'debriefing' discussion.
Higher-level processes TOP-DOWN nature of the world nature of the text context topic sounds words phrases BOTTOM-UP Lower-level processes
Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater!
Conclusion: • Listening is an important skill to teach. o It doesn't have to be taught in isolation. • Comprehension approach is valid and effective but insufficient. o We need strategy instruction. o Integrate top-down and bottom-up processes.
Online Resources • Lyrics Training (lyricstraining.com): Dictation style task where learners listen to music videos and in real time type in lyrics and receive instant feedback. • Randall’s ESL Cyber Listening Lab (esl-lab.com): Website with hundreds of listening activities that include pre- and post-listening exercises. • TFL Chinese Lingomi (lingomi.com): Helps Chinese learners get better tones. Gives you useful products that help improve your listening and pronunciation • skills. Sesame Street China (sesamestreetchina.com.cn/): Great for young chinese learners or adults who are “kids at heart.”
Discussion Question: • What are some other technology based resources you could use?
References Ashcraft, N. & Tran, A. (Eds.). (2010). Teaching listening: Voices from the field. Alexandria, VA: Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages, Inc. Field, J. (2008). Listening in the language classroom. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Field, J. (2012). Listening instruction. In Burns, A. & Richards, J. C. (Eds.), The Cambridge guide to pedagogy and practice in second language teaching (pp. 207-217). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Lynch, T. (2009). Teaching second language listening. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Morley, J. (1999). Current perspectives on improving aural comprehension. ESL Magazine, 2(1), 16-19. Retrieved from http://www.eric.ed.gov/PDFS/ED436958.pdf.