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Teaching Listening
QUESTIONS TO THINK ABOUT
1. What do you think are the reasons for using listening in the classroom?
2. What makes listening difficult?
3. What are the many things listeners listen for?
4. Recall the time you were in school. Did you panic when your teacher of English brought a tape-recorder? Did your teacher ask you to respond to the content of a listening? How many times did the teacher play a tape? Did you like to listen to tapes in the classroom?
CHAPTER OUTLINE
· Reasons for Getting Students to Listen to English
· The Kind of Listening That Teachers Use in Classrooms
· Factors That Make Listening Difficult
· Types of Classroom Listening Materials
· Examples of Listening Material
· Dealing With Listening Problems
· Making Your Own Tapes
CHAPTER GOALS
After completing this chapter, you should be able to
1. name eight factors that make listening difficult
2. name and describe six types of classroom listening materials
3. give examples of listening materials
4. explain how teachers can deal with listening problems in the classroom
5. design your own listening exercises
KEY WORDS
listening performance; listening materials; redundancy; spontaneous speech; script dictation; listening problems; listening to tapes
· Reasons for Getting Students to Listen to English
One of the main reasons for getting students to listen to spoken English is to let them hear different varieties and accents – rather than just the voice of their teacher. In today’s world, they need to be exposed not only to one variety of English (British English, for example) but also to varieties such as American English, Australian English, Caribbean English, etc. Despite the desirability of exposing students to many varieties of English, however, common sense is called for. The number of different varieties will be a matter for the teacher to judge, based on the student’s level, where the classes are talking place etc. But even if they only hear occasional (and very mild) varieties of English which are different from the teacher’s, it will give them a better idea of the world language which English has become.
The main method of exposing students to spoken English (after the teacher) is through the use of taped material which can exemplify a wide range of topics.
The second major reason for teaching listening is because it helps students to acquire language subconsciously even if teachers do not draw attention to its special features. Exposure to language is a fundamental requirement for anyone wanting to learn it. Listening to appropriate tapes provide such exposure and students get vital information not only about grammar and vocabulary but also about pronunciation, rhythm, intonation, pitch and stress.
Lastly, just as with reading, students get better at listening the more they do it! Listening is a skill and any help we can give students in performing that skill will help them to be better listeners.
· The Kind of Listening That Teachers Use in Classrooms
The debate about the use of authentic listening material is just as fierce in listening as it is in reading. If, for example, we play a tape of a political speech to complete beginners, they won’t understand a word. You could argue that such a tape would give them a feel for the sound of the language, but beyond that it is difficult to see what they would get out of it. If, on the other hand, we give them a realistic (though not authentic) tape of a telephone conversation, they may learn much more about the language – and start to gain confidence as a result.
Listening demands listener engagement, too. Long tapes on subjects which students are not interested in at all will not only be demotivating, but students might well ‘switch off’ – and once they do that it becomes difficult for them to tune back into the tape. Comprehension is lost and the listening becomes valueless.
Everything depends on level, and the kind of tasks that go with a tape. There may well be some authentic material which is usable by beginners such as pre-recorded announcements, telephone messages etc. More difficult material may be appropriate for elementary students provided that the questions they are asked do not demand detailed understanding. Advanced students may benefit from scripted material provided that it is interesting and subtle enough – and provided the tasks that go with it are appropriate for their level.
Since listening to tapes is a way of bringing different kinds of speaking into the classroom, we will want to play different kinds of tape to them, e.g. announcements, conversations, telephone exchanges, lectures, ‘plays’, news broadcasts, interviews, radio programmes, stories read aloud etc.
· Factors That Make Listening Difficult:
As teachers are preparing lessons and techniques that are exclusively for teaching listening, a number of special characteristics of spoken language need to be taken into consideration. Students need to pay special attention to these characteristics or factors because they influence the understanding of speech and can even make listening comprehension very difficult. These factors are the following.
1. Clustering
In written language we are conditioned to attend to the sentence as the basic unit of organization. In spoken language we break down speech into smaller groups of words. In teaching listening comprehension, therefore you need to help students to pick out manageable clusters of words; or they will err in the direction in trying to attend word in an utterance.
2. Redundancy
Spoken language, unlike most written language, has a good deal of redundancy. The next time you’re in a conversation, notice the rephrasing, repetitions, elaborations, and little insertions of “I mean” and “you know” here and there. Such redundancy helps the hearer to process meaning by offering more time and extra information. Learners can train themselves to profit from such redundancy by first becoming aware that not every new sentence of phrase will necessarily contain new information and by looking for the signals of redundancy.
3. Reduced forms
While spoken language does indeed contain a good deal of redundancy, it also has many reduced forms. Reduction can be phonological, morphological, syntactic, pragmatic. These reductions pose significant difficulties especially to classroom learners who may have initially been exposed to the full forms of the English language.
4. Performance variables (hesitation, reformulation, topic change)
In spoken language, except for planned discourse (speeches, lectures, etc), hesitations, false starts, pauses, and corrections are common. Native listeners are used from very young ages to such performance variables whereas they can easily interfere with comprehension in foreign language learners.
Everyday casual speech by native speakers also commonly contains ungrammatical forms. Some of these forms are simple performance slips.
5. Colloquial language
Learners who have been exposed to standard written English and/or “textbook” language sometimes find it surprising and difficult to deal with colloquial language. Idioms, slang, reduced forms, shared cultural knowledge are all manifested at some point in conversations. Colloquialisms appear in both monologues and dialogues.
6. Rate of delivery
Virtually every language learner initially thinks that native speakers speak too fast! Actually the number and length of pauses used by a speaker is more crucial to comprehension than sheer speed. Learners will nevertheless eventually need to be able to comprehend language delivered at varying rates of speed and, at times, delivered with few pauses. Unlike reading, where a person can stop and go back to reread something, in listening the hearer may not always have the opportunity to stop the speaker. Instead, the stream of speech will continue to flow!
7. Stress, rhythm, and intonation
The prosodic features of the English language are very important for comprehension. Also, intonation patterns are very significant not just for interpreting such elements as questions and statements and emphasis but more subtle messages like sarcasm, endearment, insult, solicitation, praise, etc.
8. Interaction
Classroom techniques that include listening components must at some point include instruction in the two-way nature of listening. Students need to understand that good listeners (in conversation) are good responders. They know how to negotiate meaning, that is, to give feedback, to ask for classification, to maintain a topic, so that the process of comprehending can be complete rather than broken by insufficient interaction.
· Types of Classroom Listening Materials
1. Reactive
Sometimes you simply want a learner to listen to the surface structure of an utterance for the purpose of repeating it back to you. While this kind of listening performance requires little meaningful processing, it nevertheless may be legitimate, even though a minor, aspect of an interactive, communicative classroom. This role of the listener as merely a “tape-recorder” must be very limited. The only role that reactive listening can play in an interactive classroom is in brief choral or individual drills that focus on pronunciation.
2. Intensive
Techniques whose only purpose is to focus on components (phonemes, words, intonation, discourse markers, etc) of discourse may be considered to be intensive – as opposed to extensive – in their requirement that students single out certain elements of spoken language. Examples of intensive listening performance include:
o students listen for cues in certain choral or individual drills
o the teacher repeats a word of sentence several times to “imprint” it in the student’s mind
o the teacher asks students to listen to a sentence or a longer stretch of discourse and to notice a specified element, e.g., intonation, a grammatical structure, etc.
3. Responsive
A significant proportion of classroom listening activity consists of short stretches of teacher language designed to elicit immediate responses. The students’ task in such listening is to process the teacher talk immediately and to give an appropriate reply. Examples include:
o asking questions (“How are you today?” “What did you do last night?”)
o giving commands (“Take out a sheet of paper and a pencil.”)
o seeking clarification (“What was that word you said?”)
o checking comprehension (“So, how many people were in the park?”)
4. Selective
In longer stretches of discourse such as monologues the task of the student is not to process everything that was said but rather to scan the material selectively for certain information. The purpose of such performance is not to look for global or general meanings, necessarily, but to be able to find important information. Selective listening differs from intensive listening in that the discourse is in relatively long lengths. Examples of such discourse include:
o speeches
o media broadcasts
o stories and anecdotes
o conversations in which learners are “eavesdroppers”
Techniques promoting selective listening skills could ask students to listen for:
o people’s names
o dates
o certain facts of events
o location, situation, context, etc
o main ideas and/or conclusion
5. Extensive
This sort of performance, unlike the intensive processing described above, aims to develop global understanding of spoken language. Extensive performance could range from listening to lengthy lectures to listening to a conversation and deriving a comprehensive message or purpose. Extensive listening may require the student to use other interactive skills (e.g., notetaking, discussion) for full comprehension.
6. Interactive
Finally, there is listening performance that can include all five of the above types as learners actively participate in discussions, debates, conversations, role-plays, and other pair and group work. Their listening performance must be integrated with speaking.
· Examples of Listening Material
The teaching of listening skills will follow the methodological model in the same way as for the teaching or reading skills. But training students in listening skills presents problems for both teacher and student which are not found with reading material.
Listening as a skill certainly shares many similarities with reading. But the differences are there, too. Most importantly, the text itself is different.
A written text is static. It can be consumed at the speed of the reader, and read again and again. Not so spoken text: if it is on audio or video tape it can be repeated, but it still happens at its speed, not the listener’s. Of course in conversation a listener can ask the speaker to repeat what is being said. But the same is not true of a lecture you are listening to.
Spoken language differs markedly from written text too. We have already discussed factors that make listening difficult. You should bear in mind that such speech phenomenon as hesitation reformulation, redundancy, pauses, reduced forms, and topic change and a natural part of spontaneous speech.
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