Teaching listening better

Or

Recognising that you may already do a lot to help listening which you take for granted!

• What’s the difference between listening and hearing?

• What do you do to improve students’ ability to hear?

• What do you do to improve listening skills?

You’re not listening!

Students listen! The problem is:• They can’t hear the word because they don’t know

it. • They can’t hear the word because they can’t

distinguish sounds.• They can hear the words but they can’t group

words appropriately.• They can hear the words (and even expressions)

but can’t process meaning quick enough.

Doing a listening…

Listening activities include:• Listen to public announcements• Listening to media• Listening as a member of a live audience• Listening to overheard conversations, etc.In each case the user may be listening for:• Gist• Specific information• Detailed understanding• Implications

(from CEF, p65, CUP)

Top-down processing…

Getting students to predict content:

• from pictures

• from the situation

• based on what they know already

Any others?

For complex social and psychological reasons, [learners] are less sure they have grasped the topic being spoken of, the opinion being expressed about it, and the reasons for the speaker wanting to talk about it. They are less sure of the relevance of their own experience in helping them to arrive at an interpretation. On top of all that they are less sure of the forms of the language… for all these reasons learners are less able to bring to bear top down processing in forming an interpretation and hence are more reliant on bottom up processing.

Brown quoted in Jenkins, 2001 OUP

• We should’ve left the car at home.

• What are you having for starters?

• I think I might go for the seared salmon on a bed of fennel.

• The tree crawls slowly on the whale.

• Do bater spolt tant ob by candbac

Hearing, memory and listening

Listening activities include:• Listen to public announcements• Listening to media• Listening as a member of a live audience• Listening to overheard conversations, etc.In each case the user may be listening for:• Gist• Specific information• Detailed understanding• Implications

Listening and listenership

• Listening is also part of speaking and interaction.• Range of automaticity, related to the

frequency/typicality of the exchange (greetings, buying/selling conversations about jobs, etc.) Also chunks.

• May allow to fill in gaps we don’t hear, but more importantly help process meaning quicker.

Good listeners

• Know nearly all, if not all, of the words they’re listening to.

• Process words in chunks

• Hear the words when they listen to them

• Understand words/chunks they hear automatically as a result of repeated over-learning

Some principles

• We need to teach more of the language they are likely to hear / use and that includes using listening activities as an opportunity to teach language.

• Teach language in context all the time! And help students recognise/hear words in chunks.

• Help with problem sounds (working back from the chunk)

• Make sure words/chunks, exchanges, conversations get recycled