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How To (really) teach
Listening
Objectives
What listening is not
What listening actually is
Is it possible to teach listening?
The importance of context
Top-down or bottom-up?
The neglected skill
Listening is frequently viewed as an
enabling skill not worthy of attention
on its own.
Scarcella & Oxford, 1992
What listening is not
• Easy
Rather than thinking of listening as a single
process, it is more accurate to conceive of it
as a bundle of related processes. (…) Usually
we are unaware of these processes in our
own language; achieving comprehension
seems relatively effortless unless we
encounter unhelpful conditions.
Lynch & Mendelsohn, 2002
• Unimportant
Despite a gradually increasing acceptance of
the importance of listening comprehension for
second or foreign language learners, the
teaching of listening comprehension remains
a somewhat neglected and poorly taught
aspect of English in many ESL or EFL programs.
Osada, 2004
What listening is not
What does “passive” mean?
• Passive
What listening is not
Why is listening not passive?
adjective
1. Accepting or allowing what happens or what others do,
without active response or resistance
Oxford Online Dictionary, 2012
If we were to take the ability to remember a
message as the ‘acid test’ of comprehension,
we would in some ways be adopting a view
of listening in which the listener acts as a tape
recorder.
Anderson & Lynch, 1988
• Memory
What listening is not
• Challenging
We only become aware of what remarkable
feats of listening we achieve when we are in
an unfamiliar listening environment, such as
listening to a language in which we have
limited proficiency.
Anderson & Lynch, 1988
What listening actually is
You are going to watch a movie snippet which shows two people having a conversation. List how many mental processes these people need to be
able to do while listening in order to maintain the
conversation going.
How many of the listed things do students need to consider
when:
o performing a traditional listening activity (students listen
to recorded audio and perform a task)?
What listening actually is
o having a whole-group classroom discussion?
• Active
Meanings are shaped by context and
construed by the listener through the act of
interpreting meaning rather than receiving it
intact.
Nation & Newton, 2008
What listening actually is
• Crucial for communication
Speaking
Reading
Writing
Listening
What listening actually is
9 million 5%
Effective Listening
Brazilians with
some hearing
impairement
That is
Of the Brazilian
population
Source: IBGE – Census 2010
What listening actually is
• Task-based
Author & Author, 1900
What listening actually is
o Our purpose to listening will shape our
expectations.
o “In real life when we listen to someone
talking we have a definite non-linguistic
reason for doing so”.
Using the given listening transcript, think of two
appropriate tasks that can be used:
• with a beginner group
• with an intermediate group
• with an advanced group
Taken from: Cotton, D., Falvey, D., Kent, S., Lebeau, I., Rees, G. (2010). Language Leader – Advanced – Coursebook and
CD-ROM. Essex, England: Pearson Longman
What listening actually is
Is it possible to actually teach
listening?
Yes! Sort of.
An approach aimed at teaching listening (…)
starts from the premise that the students’
comprehension is blocked by specific
features of the language or listening process,
and that in our lessons we can focus on those
features one at a time and improve the
students’ ability to deal with them.
Swift, 2007
Is it possible to actually
teach listening?
Activate schemata
A schema could be defined as a mental
structure, consisting of relevant individual
knowledge, memory, and experience, which
allows us to incorporate what we learn into
what we know.
Anderson & Lynch, 1988
The importance of context
Imagine you’re going to use the following video
snippet with an intermediate group. They are
going to answer some true/false questions and
then take notes on topics mentioned.
What difficulties can you anticipate that this
snippet may present to your students?
The importance of context
Which of these pre-listening activities would you
assign your students before they watch the snippet
and why? Rank them from 1 (most useful) to 5
(least useful).
Have students predict the answers to the true or false questions
Pre-teach some expressions that appear in the video
Review verb forms used to talk about routine
Exploit what students know about Irish Travellers and their opinion of them and of other modern nomadic cultures
Have students read a short text on Irish Travellers and discuss it briefly
The importance of context
Top-down or Bottom-up?
Bottom-up processing is when we achieve
comprehension starting from the smaller units (words
and sounds) and gradually build up to an
understanding of the whole message.
Top-down processing happens when expectations
and previous world knowledge are used to build
comprehension of a message.
Anderson & Lynch, 1988
Let’s see some listening exercises taken from
course books.
Are they more focused on top-down or
bottom-up processing? Do any of them work
exclusively with one type of processing?
Top-down or Bottom-up?
Top-down or Bottom-up?
Taken from: Spencer, D. (2006). Global Teen – Combined Edition. São Paulo, Brazil: Macmillan
Top-down or bottom-up? Why?
Top-down or Bottom-up?
Taken from: Cotton, D., Falvey, D., Kent, S., Lebeau, I., Rees, G. (2010). Language Leader – Advanced –
Coursebook and CD-ROM. Essex, England: Pearson Longman
Top-down or bottom-up? Why?
Top-down or Bottom-up?
Taken from: Clanfield, L., Pickering, k. (2010). Global – Elementary Coursebook . Oxford, England:
Macmillan
Top-down or bottom-up? Why?
Top-down or Bottom-up?
Taken from: Redston, c., Cunningham, G. (2008). Face to Face – Intermediate. Cambridge, England:
Cambridge University
Top-down or bottom-up? Why?
Top-down or bottom-up? Why?
Taken from: Clanfield, L., Pickering, k. (2010). Global – Elementary Coursebook . Oxford, England:
Macmillan
Top-down or Bottom-up?
Listening as interaction
How can students be made aware of the listening
practice they receive when listening to the teacher
and classmates?
What strategies for coping with listening in the
context of a conversation can we teach our
students?
To keep in mind
Listening is not: easy, unimportant, passive, memory
Listening actually is: challenging, crucial, active, task-based
It is possible to teach listening in the form of strategies for more effective listening
Context is important and should always be worked on
Know which activities are top-down and bottom-up
Questions?
Thank you!