HOW TO TEACH LISTENING COMPREHENSION

A. The Importance of Listening

1. Listening is the most common communicative activity in daily life: "we can expect to listen twice as much as we speak, four times more than we read, and five times more than we write." (Morley, 1991, p. 82)

2. Listening is also important for obtaining comprehensible input that is necessary for language development.

B. What is involved in listening comprehension?

Speech perception (e.g., sound discrimination, recognize stress patterns, intonation, pauses, etc.)

Word recognition (e.g., recognizes the sound pattern as a word, locate the word in the lexicon, retrieve lexical, grammatical and semantic information about the word, etc.)

Sentence processing (parsing; e.g., detect sentence constituents, building a structure frame, etc.)

construct the literal meaning of the sentence (select the relevant meaning in case of ambiguous word)

hold the information in short-term memory

recognize cohesive devices in discourse

infer the implied meaning and intention (speech act)

predict what is to be said

decide how to respond

Bottom-up

Top-down

Conclusion: listening is not a passive process. It involves both bottom-up and top-down processes and requires the use of non-linguistic as well as linguistic knowledge.

C. Principles of Teaching Listening

1. Listening should receive primary attention in the early stage of ESL instruction.

2. Maximize the use of material that is relevant to students' real life.

3. Maximize the use of authentic language.

4. Vary the materials in terms of speakers' gender, age, dialect, accent, topic, speed, noise level, genre,

5. Always ask students to listen with a purpose and allow them to show their comprehension in a task.

6. Language material intended to be used for training listening comprehension should never be presented visually first.

A. Listening and Performing Actions and Operations

1. Drawing a picture, figure, or design

2. Locating routes of specific points on a map

3. Selecting or identifying a picture of a person, place, or thing from description

4. Performing hand or body movements as in songs and games such as "Simon Says" or "Hokey Pokey"

5. Operating a piece of equipment, such as a camera, a recorder, a microwave oven, a pencil sharpener

6. Carrying out steps in a process, such as steps solving a math problem, a science experiment, a cooking sequence. D. Listening, Evaluation, and Manipulating Information

1. Writing information received and reviewing it in order to answer questions or to solve a problem

2. Evaluating information in order to make a decision or construct a plan of action

3. Evaluating arguments in order to develop a position for or against

4. Evaluating cause-and-effect information

5. Projecting from information received and making predictions

6. Summarizing or "gist zing" information received

7. Evaluating and combining information

8. Evaluating and condensing information

9. Evaluating and elaborating or extending information

10. organizing unordered information received into a pattern of orderly relationship --chronological sequencing, spatial relationships, cause-and-effect, problem-solution

B. Listening and Transferring Information

1. Listening and taking a telephone or in-person message by either transcribing the entire message word-for-word or by writing down notes on the important items

2. Listening and filling in blanks in a gapped story game (in order to complete the story)

3. Listening and completing a form or chart

4. Listening and summarizing the gist of a short story, report, or talk

5. Listening to a "how to" talk and writing an outline of the steps in a sequence (e.g., how to cook something, how to run a piece of equipment, how to play a game)

6. listening to a talk or lecture and taking notes E. Interactive Listening and Negotiating Meaning Through Questioning/Answering Routines

Question Types

1. Repetition: Could you repeat the part about...?

2. Paraphrase: Could you say that again? I don't understand what you mean by...

3. Verification: Did I understand you to say that...? In other words you mean.... Do you mean...?

4. Clarification: Could you tell me what you mean by...? Could you explain...? Could you give us an example of...?

5. Elaboration: What about...? How is this related to...?

6. Challenge: What did you base ... on? How did you reach...? Why did you...?

C. Listening and Solving Problems

1. Word games in which the answers must be derived from verbal clues

2. Number games and oral story arithmetic problems

3. Asking questions in order to identify something, as in Twenty Questions

4. Classroom versions of password, jeopardy, twenty questions in which careful listening is critical to questions and answers or answers and questions

5. "Minute mysteries" in which a paragraph-length mystery story is given by the teacher (or a tape), followed by small group work in which students formulate solutions

6. A jigsaw mystery in which each group listens to a tape with some of the clues, then shares information in order to solve the mystery

7. riddles, logic puzzles, intellectual problem-solving F. Listening for Enjoyment, Pleasure, and Sociability

Listening to songs, stories, plays, poems, jokes, anecdotes, teacher chat.

Integrating Metacognitive Strategies

Before listening: Plan for the listening task

• Set a purpose or decide in advance what to listen for

• Decide if more linguistic or background knowledge is needed

• Determine whether to enter the text from the top down (attend to the overall meaning) or from the bottom up (focus on the words and phrases)

During and after listening: Monitor comprehension

• Verify predictions and check for inaccurate guesses

• Decide what is and is not important to understand

• Listen/view again to check comprehension

• Ask for help

After listening: Evaluate comprehension and strategy use

• Evaluate comprehension in a particular task or area

• Evaluate overall progress in listening and in particular types of listening tasks

• Decide if the strategies used were appropriate for the purpose and for the task

• Modify strategies if necessary

Using Authentic Materials and Situations

Authentic materials and situations prepare students for the types of listening they will need to do when using the language outside the classroom.

One-Way Communication

Materials:

• Radio and television programs

• Public address announcements (airports, train/bus stations, stores)

• Speeches and lectures

• Telephone customer service recordings

Procedure:

• Help students identify the listening goal: to obtain specific information; to decide whether to continue listening; to understand most or all of the message

• Help students outline predictable sequences in which information may be presented: who-what-when-where (news stories); who-flight number-arriving/departing-gate number (airport announcements); "for [function], press [number]" (telephone recordings)

• Help students identify key words/phrases to listen for

Two-Way Communication

In authentic two-way communication, the listener focuses on the speaker's meaning rather than the speaker's language. The focus shifts to language only when meaning is not clear. Note the difference between the teacher as teacher and the teacher as authentic listener in the dialogues in the popup screens.

TEACHING LISTENING

Teaching listening skills is one of the most difficult tasks for any ESL teacher. This is because successful listening skills are acquired over time and with lots of practice. It's frustrating for students because there are no rules as in grammar teaching. Speaking and writing also have very specific exercises that can lead to improved skills. This is not to say that there are not ways of improving listening skills; however they are difficult to quantify.

One of the largest inhibitors for students is often mental block. While listening, a student suddenly decides that he or she doesn't understand what is being said. At this point, many students just tune out or get caught up in an internal dialogue trying translating a specific word. Some students convince themselves that they are not able to understand spoken English well and create problems for themselves.

They key to helping students improve their listening skills is to convince them that not understanding is OK. This is more of an attitude adjustment than anything else, and it is easier for some students to accept than others. Another important point that I try to teach my students (with differing amounts of success) is that they need to listen to English as often as possible, but for short periods of time.

I like to use this analogy: Imagine you want to get in shape. You decide to begin jogging. The very first day you go out and jog seven miles. If you are lucky, you might even be able to jog the seven miles. However, chances are good that you will not soon go out jogging again. Fitness trainers have taught us that we must begin with little steps. Begin jogging short distances and walk some as well, over time you can build up the distance. Using this approach, you'll be much more likely to continue jogging and get fit

Students need to apply the same approach to listening skills. Encourage them to get a film, or listen to an English radio station, but not to watch an entire film or listen for two hours. Students should often listen, but they should listen for short periods - five to ten minutes. This should happen four or five times a week. Even if they don't understand anything, five to ten minutes is a minor investment. However, for this strategy to work, students must not expect improved understanding too quickly. The brain is capable of amazing things if given time; students must have the patience to wait for results. If a student continues this exercise over two to three months their listening comprehension skills will greatly improve.

Teaching listening better: is listening being taught as well as it could be?

In Listening classes, students are usually given practice in listening but they are not actually taught listening. Practice is not enough.

Research and case studies have told us many things about how listening should be taught. But often, this knowledge has not made the jump into classroom practice. While many classes are based on the idea of giving students lots of practice with English, research tells us that we also need to teach listening.

In addition to giving students plenty of listening practices. We should also break the skill of listening into micro-skill components and make sure that our students are aware of what they need to know to understand how to listen to English.

A teacher’s checklist

Students need to know and understand:

• How word links together (liaison)

• How vowels weaken (the central vowel)

• How sounds mix together (assimilation)

• How sounds disappear (elision)

• How syllables disappear (ellipsis)

• How helping sounds are used between vowel sounds (intrusion)

• How intonation helps with coversational turn taking (intonation)

• How stress signals new information (prominence)

• How to use grammar to help guess meaning (strategies)

• How to use dicourse knowledge to help guess meaning (strategies)

• How to use knowledge of intonation and stress to guess meaning (strategies)

Do your students know all these features of natural English? They should.

Everyone knows that many Japanese say that 'listening' is their weak point with English. There is a very simple reason for this. Most Japanese students have never been taught how to listen to English. They have had practice but they have never actually been taught or given guidance about how to listen to English.

We, along with many of you, want to change this.

What do we teach when we teach Listening?

When we teach listening we need to teach not only English, but we also need to teach how it is used. We need to teach both:

1. The language system, (our knowledge of language: grammar and vocabulary etc.) and

2. The use of the language system, (the skills of language use)

The problem with most listening classes is that they get stuck at number 1. Too many classes concentrate on teaching the language system and miss the skills of language, in this case listening.

Our knowledge of the language system includes our knowledge of words, how these words are properly put in order (syntax or grammar), how these words are said in connected streams (phonology), how these words are strung together in longer texts (discourse) and so on.

Using the language system involves how we apply this knowledge of the language system to understand or convey meaning and how we apply particular skills to understanding and conveying meaning.

The Listening Skills (an all too often forgotten skill set)

Listening skills are often divided into two groups:

• Bottom up listening skills and

• top down listening skills

Bottom up listening skills, or bottom up processing, refers to the decoding process, the direct decoding of language into meaningful units, from sound waves through the air, in through our ears and into our brain where meaning is decoded. To do this student need to know the code. How the sounds work and how they string together and how the codes can change in different ways when they're strung together. And most students have never been taught how English changes when it's strung together in sentences.

Top-down processing refers to how we use our world knowledge to attribute meaning to language input; how our knowledge of social convention helps us understand meaning.

These are the skills that listening teachers should be teaching in their classes but all too often are not. (Unless of course you are already using our listening textbook!!!) To offer a quote: "An understanding of the role of bottom-up and top-down processes in listening is central to any theory of listening comprehension".

The Default Method

In most classrooms around Japan, the common way to teach listening is to have students listen to some language tape, and then the teacher asks a few comprehension questions. Did the students understand? No? Well ok, play the tape again. Ask the question again. Did they understand? No. Ok, well . . . tell them to practice and one day they'll get used to English and will be able to understand. Practice practice! Practice makes perfect.

Or you might pick out a particular grammar point. This passage uses the present perfect quite a bit, so you might go over some of the differences between the simple past and the present perfect. Maybe write a formula or two up on the board. This is the approach taken by most teachers and it is insufficient.

This might very well be a good grammar lesson but it's not listening. Students need to be told how English works and also how to use their knowledge to improve their skills. Yes practice makes perfect. But instruction can make this process happen much more efficiently. We need to teach our students.

Well known SLA (Second Language Acquisition) expert Richard Schmidt, has put forward a theory called the "Noticing Hypothesis", which states that learners have to notice something before they can learn it. And as such, we need to help our students notice language points. Teachers need to teach.

"There is support in the literature for the hypothesis that attention is required for all learning. Learners need to pay attention to input and pay particular attention to whatever aspect of the input (phonology, morphology, pragmatics, discourse, etc) that you are concerned to learn" (Schmidt: 1995)

An ideal listening class should thus provide both practice and instruction. Students need practice in listening for meaning and also some instruction about how to do so effectively.

"Classroom data from a number of studies offer support for the view that form focused instruction and corrective feedback provided within the context of communicative programs are more effective in promoting second language learning than programs which are limited to a virtually exclusive emphasis on either accuracy or fluency". (Lightbrown & Spada)

What Listening Teachers Need to Do

Give students practice in listening which ask students to interpret and understand meaning, together with listening which teaches learners about how English is actually spoken. That is, students need practice in listening for meaning and instruction about how to do this, (a focus on form).

Such an approach has been the recommended method for teaching listening for years and yet the "Practice makes perfect plus a little grammar" approach is still common. We want to change this!

You've read our views. We'd now like to hear your views. Send us your comments and we'll post them here. Let's start a dialog and move our teaching forward. Help us to make things better.

Listening comprehension is one of two sections on English National Final Examination for SMA level. National curriculum (KTSP) has commanded English teacher to teach Listening comprehension in English to students. Based on investigation to some students, they stated that listening is difficult.

One of alternative teaching and learning model is game education. The aim of this teaching and learning program using education game is to convey the material of listening comprehension of English in the form of game, so that students immerse on situation and without any intention, students will study some utterances in English. Furthermore, this game gives alternative in teaching learning model that active, creative, innovative, effective and enjoy.

Goals and Techniques for Teaching Listening

Instructors want to produce students who, even if they do not have complete control of the grammar or an extensive lexicon, can fend for themselves in communication situations. In the case of listening, this means producing students who can use listening strategies to maximize their comprehension of aural input, identify relevant and non-relevant information, and tolerate less than word-by-word comprehension.

Focus: The Listening Process

To accomplish this goal, instructors focus on the process of listening rather than on its product.

• They develop students' awareness of the listening process and listening strategies by asking students to think and talk about how they listen in their native language.

• They allow students to practice the full repertoire of listening strategies by using authentic listening tasks.

• They behave as authentic listeners by responding to student communication as a listener rather than as a teacher.

• When working with listening tasks in class, they show students the strategies that will work best for the listening purpose and the type of text. They explain how and why students should use the strategies.

• They have students practice listening strategies in class and ask them to practice outside of class in their listening assignments. They encourage students to be conscious of what they're doing while they complete listening tape assignments.

• They encourage students to evaluate their comprehension and their strategy use immediately after completing an assignment. They build comprehension checks into in-class and out-of-class listening assignments, and periodically review how and when to use particular strategies.

• They encourage the development of listening skills and the use of listening strategies by using the target language to conduct classroom business: making announcements, assigning homework, describing the content and format of tests.

• They do not assume that students will transfer strategy use from one task to another. They explicitly mention how a particular strategy can be used in a different type of listening task or with another skill.

By raising students' awareness of listening as a skill that requires active engagement, and by explicitly teaching listening strategies, instructors help their students develop both the ability and the confidence to handle communication situations they may encounter beyond the classroom. In this way they give their students the foundation for communicative competence in the new language.