Quick Question

Why do my students find it difficult when I use listening comprehension tasks in class?

If you want your learners to develop their listening skills and become better L2 listeners, as a teacher, you need to give them practice in various listening sub-skills, strategies and different cognitive processes similar to those used in L1 listening. Simply giving them lots of listening comprehension practice is not an effective solution for developing their listening skills.

The Bigger Picture

Listening is one of the four language skills (reading, writing, listening and speaking). Like reading, listening is a receptive skill, as it involves responding to language rather than producing it. Listening involves making sense of the meaningful sounds of language. We do this by making use of context, language and our knowledge of the world.

There are different listening sub-skills as for example, listening for gist or global understanding, listening for details, specific information, listening to infer attitude, and listening intensively and extensively.

In our everyday lives, almost half of our time spent on communicating is listening. Listening is therefore a very important communication skill, but at the same time, learners often claim that it is one of the most difficult aspects of language learning.

Learners find listening difficult for a number of reasons:

● speaking too quickly

● a lack of visual clues (e.g. gesture / body language )

● unfamiliar vocabulary

● a lack of knowledge of the topic

● problems distinguishing individual sounds

Teachers can help their learners overcome these problems by teaching listening in a way that develops the following skills and strategies:

Predicting —If the listening text is a news report about a natural disaster, before listening, the teacher can ask the learners to think about the topic, look at any visual clues such as pictures and guess the kind of words they might expect to hear. While listening, the teacher can pause the audio and have the learners predict what comes next. Prediction tasks before listening can also motivate learners by giving them a reason to listen.

Listening for gist —As the learners listen, the teacher can ask them to get a general picture of what is going on. The teacher can direct them to focus on content words (e.g. the nouns , adjectives and verbs ) that can help them create the overall picture. We call this listening for gist. If a teacher sets a gist listening task, it helps discourage learners from trying to listen to every word.

Signposting —Signposting is what speakers do to help listeners follow what is being said. It is especially common in lectures, talks and presentations. In a lecture, the speaker might say, “ Today I'll introduce four effective ways to keep fit .” Other words and phrases are used in a similar way. For instance, to clarify (e.g. in other words ); to give examples (e.g. such as , for example ). Teachers can train their learners to listen for signposting language.

Listening for details or specific information —This is the kind of listening activity that we see most often. It can include true/false questions, gap-fill or getting important details such as an address or a phone number. Listening intensively for details is best done after learners are comfortably aware of the gist.

Inferring —Teachers can ask learners to decide how a speaker feels about something from the way that they speak rather than from the exact words they use. Teachers can help learners to infer attitude by helping them to understand intonation. Other information can be inferred from words, for example, we can infer the relationship between people from the words they use.

Key Vocabulary

authentic 地道的

connected speech 连读

develop skills 拓展技能

extensive listening 泛听

facial expression 面部表情

gesture 手势

infer attitude or mood 推断态度或情绪

intonation 语调

listen for attitude 听态度

listen for detail 听细节

listen for gist 听主旨

listen for specific information 听特定信息

meaningful 有意义的

receptive skill 接受性技能

skill 技能

stress 重音

sub-skill 分项技能

Tricky Terms and Concepts

listening for details VS listening for detailed understanding

Listening for details (or specific information) is when learners are able to pull out key information from a listening text (without understanding everything in the text).

Listening for detailed understanding is when you want learners to understand all the information the text provides.

In Your Class

If you teach listening, you might follow some of the stages explained in this chapter. It's also important to develop the learners' awareness of the underlying processes involved in listening.

Try It Out

Before you teach your next listening class: Decide if your listening text is relevant and interesting to your learners. If it is, your learners will be engaged and motivated.

While you're teaching your listening class: Think about exploiting the material to its full potential. Keep listening as many times as necessary to extract as much from the text as possible.

After your next listening class: Reflect on the tasks you used. Did your tasks engage the learners in a variety of cognitive processes going beyond just answering test-style questions?

What You Might Be Tested On

TKT questions might ask you to:

» Match assessment tasks with listening skills to be assessed.

» Match listening strategy descriptions with listening sub-skills (e.g. listening for gist , predicting ).

Find Out What You Know

Match the listening tasks with the listening sub-skills listed A, B and C. You will need to use some of the options more than once.

Listening sub-skills:

A. listening for details / specific information

B. listening for attitude / to infer

C. listening for gist

Listening tasks:

1. listening to complete a gap-fill task schedule for an excursion

2. listening to select an appropriate title for the listening text

3. listening to create an overall picture of a series of events (e.g. a crime )

4. listening to guess the relationship between two speakers

5. listening to deduce how a speaker feels about a news item

Key: 1. A 2. C 3. C 4. B 5. B

Inspiration

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