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Mark each of these statements before and after you read the chapter.
Mark each statement
✓ if you agree.
X if you disagree.
? if you are undecided.
1. Listening is a passive skill.
2. Listening is a receptive skill.
3. Students should never listen to a tape for more than two minutes.
4. A tape of natural English confuses students.
5. Listening is very important for elementary students.
1. Listening can be divided into sub-skills
Teachers recognise that speaking is a complex process and frequently cor
rect students’ mistakes in different areas — pronunciation, structure, stress, intonation. In the same way when students write, a wide variety of mistakes are noted and corrected. With the receptive skills — listening and reading, however, there is a tendency to use only general, global, questions. Like the productive skills, listening and reading can be sub-divided, so that it is not sufficient to ask, after students have listened to something, Did you understand that? nor even enough to follow up with a series of conventional comprehension questions. Listening is more complicated than that.
Among the sub-skills of listening are:
— ability to follow the general trend of what is said
— ability to understand specific details
— ability to check a specific piece of pre-knowledge against what is said
— ability to understand the speaker’s intention (why did/(s)he say something?)
— ability to understand the speaker’s attitude (how (s)he felt)
Students’ listening skills will be improved more efficiently if teachers aim to teach sub-skills, as well as global listening comprehension.
2. Direct students’ listening, particularly if it is taped
When using language outside the classroom, the user has many clues to help him or her to anticipate what will be said — the context, what was said earlier in the conversation, knowledge of the other participant(s) in the conversa
tion, etc. It is artificially difficult to ask students to do listening practices without providing them with preparation which will allow them to use anticipation.
The amount of preparation which may be necessary varies according to the class, the level of difficulty of the material and the students’ language level. It ought, however, always to include two elements — first, some kind of general, thematic introduction — the students should be told “what it is about”; secondly, they should be given some kind of guidance on the structure of what they are going to hear. This is done most effectively by giv
ing them two or three questions in the correct order before they listen, so that the basic sequence of ideas mentioned in the passage is clear to them.
It may also be helpful to do vocabulary exercises, for example, asking students to call to mind words which are suggested by a particular topic; or
Techniques — Listening even to provide examples of vocabulary or rhetorical devices which occur in the listening material. Listening materials should not be intended to trick stu
dents. Their listening is more likely to be more effective, and their listening skills developed more efficiently if their interest and linguistic expectations are aroused in advance.
3. Listening to a tape is difficult
Most teachers will readily recognise the difference between speaking a foreign language face-to-face with a native speaker, and speaking the same language on the telephone. Most people would agree that the second is con
siderably more difficult. There are many reasons for this — some to do with the technical changes in sound made by the machine, some much more straightforward — you cannot see the speaker’s facial expression or watch lip movements and, most importantly of all, you cannot interrupt and ask for a repeat or clarification.
Listening to tape-recorded material, no matter how good the quality of the taping, shares all of these difficulties. Many students, including those who could converse reasonably effectively face-to-face, find extended listening to tape recordings extremely demanding. The warning for teachers is clear — first, the students’ listening must be prepared; secondly, no students should be asked to listen for more than a very short period at one time. Two or three minutes is the maximum that students can listen to the tape before concen
tration wanders. For many students at lower levels the concentration span is to be measured in terms of 20 seconds and so-called listening practices which go on for long periods are a waste of everyone’s time, and can be counter-productive.
4. Let students hear “the real thing” from early in their course
A moment’s reflection reveals that when learning your mother-tongue you begin by listening. Foreign language teaching has usually been very different.
Because it has been based on careful structural progression, and people rarely speak for more than a sentence or two using file same structure, listen
ing has either not been taught, or been introduced relatively late in the course.
Most courses will benefit from the introduction of a little natural listening material at an early stage. Such material helps, providing teachers bear in mind, and make very clear to their students that they do not need to understand everything, and that there will be a lot that they will not understand. Providing teachers set elementary tasks based on the material (for example, given a set of instructions for how to find an unknown place, the task may be to decide only whether th eirs/step is to turn left or right) — the fact that the speaker gives a great deal more information is not necessar
ily a bad thing. One of the skills of listening is to extract from a great deal of unwanted information a small piece of information which is of use to the listener.
As teachers increasingly understand that listening can be taught, rather than simply acquired, and that it can be divided into sub-skills, so they should be more willing to introduce short pieces of authentic listening into all courses at an early stage.
5. Make sure students can hear the difference between similar sounds
Students need to recognise differences before they can be expected to pro
duce the difference themselves. The students’ native language may perhaps not have one or other (or perhaps either) of the sounds /k /, /g/.
To test if they can hear the distinction, write a minimal pair containing the difference on the blackboard.
1 2
Cot Got
and then give this instruction:
Listen, cot, cot (pointing to the word on the board) cot, c o t...
Listen, got, got (pointing to the word on the board), got, g o t...
Listen again (pointing to the appropriate word each time as you say it) cot, cot, got, got, cot, g o t Look, (pointing to the board) cot is number one, cot, cot.
Got is number two (pointing) got, g o t... Now I’ll say one of the words. If I say this word (pointing) you say 1 ... If I say this word (pointing) you say number 2 . . . Are you ready? Cot.
As the class call out (chorally) you can tell how many of the class can hear the distinction.
6. Use a variety of listen and respond activities
In real life we listen for only one reason — to understand a message. In lan
guage learning, we can listen for the message, but for many other things which will help the language learning process. Here are some things stu
dents can listen for:
Words and phrases which are understood but not familiar Words and phrases that are familiar but not understood
A particular grammatical feature — personal pronoun, present continu
ous, expressions with o f etc.
Words connected with a particular theme
In each case you could invite the students to respond non-verbally — by, for example, raising a hand — as they notice the feature they are listening for.
In addition, more imaginative responses can be called for by asking stu
dents who are listening to a dialogue to, for example:
Imagine where the speakers are/what they look like
Form a question they would like to ask one of the speakers Note where they agree/disagree with one of the speakers Imagine a continuation of the dialogue
You learn to speak by good listening; good listening means the listeners are actively involved. The teacher’s task is to devise techniques which help stu
dents to be involved, and give you the opportunity to monitor involvement.
You should have little difficulty in adding many alternatives to the short lists of ‘things to listen for’ presented here.