Teaching Listening

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 Teaching Listening
Dr. John Trent
Associate Professor
Department of English Language Education
Email: jtrent@ied.edu.hk
Office: B4-2/F-04
Telephone: 2948 7375

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 Teaching Listening
Introduction / Warm-up
Look through the partial script of a lesson for
low-intermediate Ss.
After reading, find a partner and consider these
questions:
• What do you think of the approach to listening
taken by this teacher? What do you see as the
pros and cons of this lesson?
• Would you do anything differently and why?

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 Teaching Listening
Because you don’t what to have to listen to me
talking non-stop for 2 hours……
We are going to start with a quick pair / group
work activity…..
So, can we please stay in pairs / small groups???

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 Teaching Listening
Do you agree with these statements? Why /
why not?
1. Listening is a passive skill.
2. Listening is a one-way process.
3. Listening and speaking are separate skills.
4. Listening practice should be based on native
speaker models.
5. Learners should be able to understand
everything in the text.

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 Teaching Listening
1. Listening is a passive skill.
• This view suggests that information passes
from sender to receiver.
• However, it is now thought that the listener
gains meaning by interpreting messages in
relation to the context.

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 Teaching Listening
2. Listening is a one-way process.
• This is also based on a transmission view of
information from speaker to listener.
• However, listening involves different kinds of
roles.
• The listener might be in a communicative
relationship with the speaker.
• Here, listening plays an important part in
constructing the ongoing speech.
• Listening can be one-way (listening to a speech…)
• The purpose here is to listen for meaning.
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 Teaching Listening
3. Listening and speaking are separate skills.
• In some courses, these skills are taught
separately.
• “Today is the listening lesson”.
• Contemporary approaches to teaching aim to
integrate skills to better reflect what occurs in
communication outside the classroom.

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 Teaching Listening
4. Listening practice should be based on native
speaker models.
• Many learners and teachers believe they
should aim for a native-speaker model.
• In many cases this is unrealistic.
• Not many learners will need native-speaker
competency to communicate in English.
• Exposing students to activities that use a
variety of different accents can be heard is
now thought to be helpful in language
learning.
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 Teaching Listening
5. Learners should be able to understand
everything in the text.
• This is unrealistic for classroom listening
activities.
• In real life situations, we only pay attention /
understand a relatively small percentage of
what we hear.
• Contemporary approaches to teaching
listening emphasize certain skills and
contexts rather than expecting students to
recall everything in a listening text.
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 Teaching Listening

Some principles for teaching listening….

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K21mag4
VnDI

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 Teaching Listening
From the video…
• Bottom-up processing
• Top-down processing
• Will students be able to use background
knowledge?
• What help will they need to access the text?
• Schema.
• Language-based processing.
• Meaning-based processing.
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 Teaching Listening
From the video…
Implications for teaching listening:
• Not just teaching language-based processing.
• Activate background knowledge.
• Encourage Ss to guess, make predictions, to
draw on their knowledge of the world…
• To enable them to listen as people do in
authentic situations.

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 Teaching Listening
To summarize…
Listening is complex……
Task
Think about this question:
What factors do you think come into play when
we are trying to understand spoken language
that might influence how successful we are?
Let’s start by looking at a few possibilities….

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 Teaching Listening
Can you fill in some more under each of the
categories below??
Listener factors
• What purpose does the listener have?
Linguistic factors
• What variety of English is the speaker using?
(American, British, Singaporean, Indian?.....)
Situational factors
• Where is the communication taking place?

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 Teaching Listening
Listener factors
• What purpose does the listener have?
• How proficient is he / she in English?
• How familiar is he / she with the topic?
• How interested is he / she in the topic?
• What strategies does he / she make use of
while listening?

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 Teaching Listening
Linguistic factors
• What varieties of English is the speaker using?
• How fast is the speaker speaking?
• How many speakers are there?
• What are their relationships to each other?
• How long is the spoken segment of language?
• What kind of discourse is involved (casual
conversation, discussion, interview, lecture….)?

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 Teaching Listening
Situational Factors
• Where is the communication taking place?
• Does the situation give clues about the
content?
• How does the situation affect what people say
to each other?
• What are the roles of the participants?
• What are they doing and why?

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 Teaching Listening
Developing students learning processes
Prepare students to listen in different kinds of situations.
One thing we need to do is to prepare learners for different kinds of
listening:
• Casual conversations
• Telephone conversations
• Lectures
• Classroom lessons
• Movies
• Songs
• Announcements
• Instructions……

The handout ( Number 1) summarizes some of the possibilities

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 Teaching Listening
Prepare students to listen in different kinds of
situations
What can we do as teachers?
• Examine activities in your textbook to see if the
tasks engage Ss in a variety of situations and
roles.
• Many books do not do this.
• They simply asks Ss to listen and report on
something.
• We should not discard these but we can
supplement them with other activities.

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 Teaching Listening
Prepare students to listen in different kinds of
situations
For example, students could:
• Listen to recorded messages that give instructions
and be asked to react to the instructions.
• Watch parts of a movie and discuss the main
events.
• Find a favourite song on YouTube and listen to the
words.

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 Teaching Listening
Look through the textbook…
What listening situations are Ss asked to engage
with?
Compare this with the list on the handout (1).
Is the coverage adequate?
If not, what could you do about it?

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 Teaching Listening
Provide opportunities for Ss to use bottom-up
processing
• As we saw in the video, listening is a process that
makes use of different kinds of information.
• Some information comes from what the speaker
says…the words and sentences spoken.
• Comprehension moves from the bottom (sounds,
words, phrases…)
• To the top (meanings)
• Therefore, its called ‘bottom-up processing’.

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 Teaching Listening
Provide opportunities for Ss to use bottom-up
processing
What does this process look like??
Imagine you heard this:
The guy I sat next to on the bus this morning on
the way to work was telling me he runs an
Italian restaurant downtown. Apparently its
very popular at the moment.

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 Teaching Listening
Provide opportunities for Ss to use bottom-up
processing
To understand this using bottom-up processing,
we break it down into components (called
chunking).
So, we end up with something like this:

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 Teaching Listening
Provide opportunities for Ss to use bottom-up
processing
The guy
I sat next to on the bus
This morning
was telling me
he runs an Italian restaurant downtown
apparently its very popular at the moment

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 Teaching Listening
Provide opportunities for Ss to use bottom-up
processing
These chunks help me determine the meanings:
I was on the bus
There was someone next to me
We talked
He runs an Italian restaurant
Its downtown
Its very popular now.
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 Teaching Listening
Provide opportunities for Ss to use bottom-up
processing
What can the teacher do?
• A transcript of a listening text can be used to
show Ss how these types of boundaries of
words occur.

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 Teaching Listening
Provide opportunities for Ss to use bottom-up
processing
Use classroom activities that they begin from a
general orientation…
and then move into listening for specific
information.
Some examples are distributed in class:
(Handout 2).

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 Teaching Listening
Provide opportunities for Ss to use bottom-up
processing
Some examples for the classroom:
The following activities require intensive
listening from Ss
Handout 3……

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 Teaching Listening
Provide opportunities for Ss to use top-down
processing
Top-down processing describes how the
listener’s background knowledge affects
listening.
From this, we can make predictions about the
topic and what we are likely to hear.

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 Teaching Listening
Provide opportunities for Ss to use top-down
processing
In this approach we refer to schemas.
These provide questions to which we expect to
find answers in the text.
So, as the video suggested, if we mention
“earthquake”, we might ask ourselves:
Where did it occur?
When did it occur?
How serious was it?.....

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 Teaching Listening
Provide opportunities for Ss to use top-down
processing
When we apply our schema, top-down
processing guides us towards the meaning.
For example, hearing the expressing “good luck”
can have different meanings in different
situations:
Going to the casino
Going to the dentist
Going to a job interview.

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 Teaching Listening
Provide opportunities for Ss to use top-down
processing
What can the teacher do?
Using a textbook, ask:
• How much bottom-up and top-down
processing is needed?
• Is the text on an unfamiliar topic for my Ss?
If yes, we can do several things:

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 Teaching Listening
Provide opportunities for Ss to use top-down
processing
• Give Ss more processing time by stopping the
recording at different places to give them
more time to process information.
• Give Ss time to think about the topic in
advance.
• Build / activate Ss schema through prediction
and other pre-listening activities (which we
will discuss later).
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 Teaching Listening
Provide opportunities for Ss to use top-down
processing
• Ask Ss to brainstorm about a topic and / or
generate a set of questions that they expect to
hear answered.
As an example, look at the next handout (no. 4)
for a suggested activity.
How does it allow Ss to practice top-down
processing?

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 Teaching Listening
Provide opportunities for Ss to use top-down
processing
Look at the next examples on Handout 5…
These activities also draw upon Ss background
knowledge.

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 Teaching Listening
Provide opportunities for Ss to use interactive
processing: Moving between bottom-up and
top-down processing
Interactive processing refers to making use of
bottom-up and top-down processing while
listening.
In teaching, it is useful to use a cycle of
activities with a text so Ss can practice both
bottom-up and top-down processing.

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 Teaching Listening
Provide opportunities for Ss to use interactive
processing: Moving between bottom-up and
top-down processing
These activities should:
• Involve attention to word recognition skills.
• The use of background knowledge,
inferencing, and predicting.

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 Teaching Listening
Provide opportunities for Ss to use interactive
processing: Moving between bottom-up and
top-down processing
Ss often believe that all listening texts should be
processed bottom-up.
They often adopt a word-by-word listening
strategy.

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 Teaching Listening
Provide opportunities for Ss to use interactive
processing: Moving between bottom-up and
top-down processing
Sometimes our teaching approach can reinforce
this…..

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 Teaching Listening
Provide opportunities for Ss to use interactive
processing: Moving between bottom-up and
top-down processing
First, we play a passage…
Then, Ss answer a series of comprehension
questions…

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 Teaching Listening
Provide opportunities for Ss to use interactive
processing: Moving between bottom-up and
top-down processing
To move beyond this, we need to make sure our
listening materials and teaching approaches
make use of different types of tasks.

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 Teaching Listening
Provide opportunities for Ss to use interactive
processing: Moving between bottom-up and
top-down processing
Tasks requiring the identification of explicit
information can be followed by tasks that
require…
Inferencing…
Prediction…
Or that draw upon Ss background information.

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 Provide opportunities for Ss to use interactive processing:
Moving between bottom-up and top-down processing

The handout (No. 6) has some examples of the

type of activity that encourages Ss to use both
types of processing.

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 Provide opportunities for Ss to use interactive processing:
Moving between bottom-up and top-down processing

Task
Look at the chapters from the listening text.
Are there opportunities for Ss to practice both
types processing??
If not, how could you modify the listening
activities?

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 Activate Background Knowledge
The Pre-Listening Phase
Ss can be encouraged to apply their prior
knowledge about things, concepts, people, and
events to a particular utterance.
Then, the conversation Ss hear can be used to
confirm expectations and fill in details.

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 Activate Background Knowledge
Content schemata:
• This refers to the knowledge we have about
concepts, topics, and events.
For example:
• We have an understanding about that what
happens when we book a table in a restaurant,
what the effects of an earthquake might be….

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 Activate Background Knowledge
Formal schema:
• The knowledge we have of how different text types
are constructed.
For example:
• How we expect a report to be organized and
presented.
• If we know we are going to hear a personal recount of
some event, we might pay attention for certain
information…
• The time,
• place,
• Participants,
• events described in a chronological order…..
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 Activate Background Knowledge
What can we, as teachers, do?
• Activities that check, preview or structure
learners background knowledge can be helpful.
• As an example, see the suggested activity on
the handout (No. 7).

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 Provide Necessary Vocabulary Support
Research shows that providing Ss with vocab
support before and during listening can assit Ss in
understanding texts….
For example:
At the pre-listening phase, the teacher can…
• Determine which words are central to the
understanding of the text.
• Determine which words can be guessed from
context.
• Determine which words can be ignored because
they are not essential to understanding the
meaning of the text.
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 Provide Necessary Vocabulary Support
• Words that you decide to preteach will often
be content words..
• These are necessary to understand the main
ideas in the listening text.
• Make sure that preteaching does not turn into
a lesson in itself!!
• It should be a relatively short segment….

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 Provide Necessary Vocabulary Support
An example of a vocabulary building activity is
on handout No. 8.

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 Finding Good Listening Activities
What to look for Focus questions
Text demands • Does the text place any special
demands on the listener? (speed,
accent, unfamiliar topic…).
• Is the text type familiar to your Ss?

Vocab knowledge • Do your Ss have the appropriate level

of vocab for the listening activity?
• Do aspects of vocabulary need
preteaching?

Background knowledge • Do your Ss have the necessary

background knowledge to complete
the listening activity?

Listening strategies • Are there specific listening strategies

that you could highlight for Ss before
they listening (top-down / bottom-up
processing….)
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 While Listening: Address Ss difficulties
There are a lot of factors that can lead to Ss
misunderstanding meanings.
According to Field (2008) this can happen when
a Ss:
• Does not know the word;
• Knows the written form but not the spoken
form;
• Focuses on irrelevant information;
• Wrongly infers the meaning of a word from
the context;
• Lack sufficient knowledge about the topic.
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 While Listening: Address Ss difficulties
What can teachers do?
Teachers can:
• Help Ss to monitor their responses to listening
activities.
• This might involve a short questionnaire /
class discussion.
• Ss can be asked to judge how much they
understood,
• Whether they found the topic interesting;
• To identify areas in the listening text they
found difficult.
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 While Listening: Address Ss difficulties
What can teachers do?
By making Ss aware of some of the features of
listening (speed, accent, vocab…),
They can be asked to rate the difficulty of a task.
For example, the activities on the handout (9)
could be used to address common listening
problems.

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 Post-Listening: Using follow-up
Follow-up activities
• In authentic contexts, listening is usually not
an end in itself.
• Listening can have different purposes…
• To entertain.
• To get information.
• To interpret conversation clues (for example,
listening to questions or taking a turn at the
right moment in a conversation).

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 Post-Listening: Using follow-up
Follow-up activities
• In the same way, classroom listening activities
can be made more meaningful…
• For example, they can be linked to other
activities as a follow-up.
• Ss can make use of the information they
obtained from listening.

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 Post-Listening: Using follow-up
Follow-up activities
• For example….
• Ss could complete an information sheet in the
while-listening phase as they listen to a job
interview.
• Post-listening, Ss could role-play a job
interview based on the information they
obtained.

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 Post-Listening: Using follow-up
Follow-up activities
• The example on the handout (no. 10) shows
one way in which listening can be combined
with other skills.

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 Post-Listening
Textbook Analysis
Are sufficient and appropriate follow up
activities included in the textbook?
What are Ss asked to do?
What is your assessment of the follow-up
activities? Are they appropriately linked to the
listening activity?
If you were using this textbook, would you
modify the follow-up activities in any way????
If yes, what would you do?
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 More classroom activities
Again, we don’t need to use recorded materials
that come with textbooks…
See the activities on the next handout (No 11).

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 Reviewing some suggested activities
• Look through the four lesson outlines
distributed in class (Handout 12).
• In small groups, select ONE for discussion.
• In terms of the different aspects of listening
we discussed today, can you make a brief
assessment of the activity.
• What do you think are the strengths and
weaknesses of the lesson?
• Would you modify it in any way for use with
your own students?
• If yes, what modifications would you make?
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Ways of Teaching Listening

Thank You…
Q&A

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