TANTALIZING THE TEACHING OF LISTENING

Listening is one of the most important skills a language learner must handle because we can not develop speaking skills unless we also develop listening skills; to have a successful conversation, students must understand what is said to them. Later, the ability to understand spoken English may become very important (for listening to the radio, understanding foreign visitors, studying, etc). To develop this ability, students need plenty of practice in listening to English spoken at normal speed.

Listening to spoken English is an important way of acquiring the language – of “picking up” structures and vocabulary. In a situation where learners are living in a country where English is not spoken as the first language, they need to be given the opportunity to listen to spoken English as much as possible.

What are some of the problems that a student trying to understand spoken English could encounter?

To native speakers, listening is such a natural and easy task that it is easy for us to underestimate how difficult listening in a foreign language is. However, a student trying to understand spoken English is confronted with an impressive range of obstacles and has to learn to:

1. Hear small differences between English sounds; for example the vowel sounds in fear, fair, fire, far and fur.

2. Comprehend reduced forms of pronunciation, which are very common in normal spoken English.

3. Attend to intonation or emphasis cues. 4. Adjust to regional, class or group accents.5. Understand a great deal of vocabulary when they hear it.6. Understand grammar structures.7. Develop a range of cultural background knowledge.

How do learners cope with the difficulties at understanding spoken English?

Teaching listening – San Juan de Pasto Dec 2010 William Sastoque V

When we consider all of the ways in which a spoken English sentence can trip up students, it may seem miraculous that students ever learn to understand English at all. Fortunately, students do not need to be able to cope with every utterance to be able to comprehend. The process of comprehension is much like that of completing a puzzle. Learners do not need to have every piece of the picture in place in order to make sense of it; at some point the pieces of the puzzle that the learners do understand allow them to make a guess about what the whole picture should look like, and this hypothesis guides the process of completing the picture.

Listeners deal with the comprehension problem in two ways:

BOTTOM-UP PROCESS, which means using the smaller pieces of the picture to make a guess at the larger picture. For example, when a student sees the teacher and hears a muffled sentence starting with “How . . . today?”, the words which the listener does understand provide the clues to the whole utterance.

TOP-DOWN PROCESS, involves using the background knowledge to guess what goes in the blank spots in the picture. The context makes it fairly likely that the teacher's utterance was some kind of greeting, and this knowledge can help students to fill in the missing words.(Taken from: TEACH ENGLISH A Training Course for Teachers Doff Adrian, 1988)

PRE-LISTENING ACTIVITIESSet general and specific goals for the task.Have students predict what they will hear.Use visual or environmental clues.Have students personalize the information.BrainstormingDiagrams

WHILE-LISTENING ACTIVITIESListen for emphasis and intonation.Ignore unknown words.Take notes.

Teaching listening – San Juan de Pasto Dec 2010 William Sastoque V

Use TPR when listening to key words.Grab the word

POST-LISTENING ACTIVITIESRelate the situations to your own experience.Paraphrase.Keep track of new vocabulary.Dissapearing dialoguesSummarizing

ALWAYS KEEP IN MIND

MATERIAL * Do I have all the material I need?

LINK: Is the activity connected to the topic I'm teaching? Is the activity related to my students knowledge?

INTEREST: Is the topic or the activity appealing?

LEVEL: Is my activity OK for the level I'm teaching? Have my students done this activity before?

PURPOSE: What do I want my students to do? What are they supposed to achieve?

STRATEGIES: Do my students know the kind of strategies needed to complete the task? STAGES: Did I plan pre, while and post listening activities?

SOME USEFUL LISTENING ACTIVITIES

SELECTIVE CHART: Beforehand, have students brainstorm words related to the topic of the listening. Have them listen and identify those words that are included in the listening.

WHO SAID WHAT: Make a chart with the names of the people in the conversation and some of the things they said. Students select who

Teaching listening – San Juan de Pasto Dec 2010 William Sastoque V

said what.

COOPERATIVE LISTENING: Divide your listening excerpt into two or three parts. Have groups of students listen to different parts and then put the information together.

LISTENING BAZAAR: Have students record conversations and create comprehension questions. Listen to conversations with the whole group and answer making corrections with the whole.

THE RIGHT ORDER: Write a sequence of events based on a listening and have students organize the sequence.

SEQUENCED REPORT: Students listen to a story or a dialogue and then report by writing a narrative of what it was said.

BINGO STORY: Choose some key words from a conversation and play bingo with the students having them circle words in a chart.

T/F STATEMENTS: Make up statements based on a listening excerpt and after listening to it, have students complete to guess which ones are true or false.

TWIN SENTENCES: Select some sentences from the piece of listening and make up some others including minimal pairs in them. Have students choose the ones that are in the listening.

CRAZY PUNCTUATION: There are two ways to go about it. Provide students with a conversation and no punctuation, have them listen to it and come up with the right punctuation. The other one, dictate the conversation including the punctuation and have students come up with the right intonation.

FOLLOW THE INSTRUCTIONS: Convert a conversation into instructions on how to say whatever it expresses. Have students come up with their versions and then listen to compare.

Teaching listening – San Juan de Pasto Dec 2010 William Sastoque V

FAST HANDS: Make two groups and get some representatives to listen to a statement. Whoever writes it correctly first gets a point.

SYNONYMS FIT: Come up with a conversation in which some words have been replaced by synonyms. Have students think of the words that could replace those words. Finally, have students listen and find out if their guesses were right.

GUESS THE QUESTION: Have students listen to some answers taken from a conversation and work on the questions that might have been asked.

CLONING THE DIALOGUE: Students listen to a conversation and try to “clone” it by recording it using the same intonation.

SURPRISE QUESTIONS: Record some questions on a tape including your students names and play it to start your class. Leave some room for students to answer.

Teaching listening – San Juan de Pasto Dec 2010 William Sastoque V