Chapter 9 Teaching Listening

Warming up questions  What are our problems in listening in English?  Do you think listening is very difficult for English learners in China?  How do most teachers teach listening? What do you think of this kind of eaching?

Main Contents: What makes listening so difficult? What do we listen to in our everyday life? What are the characteristics of the listening process? How do people process information in listening comprehension? What are the principles for teaching listening? How can we teach listening effectively?

I.What makes listening so difficult? Task : Task : In your English learning experience, did you find listening more difficult? What are the main difficulties you have encountered? Can you think of any reasons why listening is a difficult skill to develop? Work in groups and pool your ideas. In your English learning experience, did you find listening more difficult? What are the main difficulties you have encountered? Can you think of any reasons why listening is a difficult skill to develop? Work in groups and pool your ideas.

Quickly forget what is heard. Do not recognize words. Understand the words but not the intended message Neglect the next part when thinking about meaning. Unable to form a mental representation about meaning. Do not understand subsequent parts of input because of earlier problems.

Listening can be difficult because: Different speakers produce the same sounds in different ways, e.g., different dialects and accents, stresses, rhythms, intonations, mispronunciations, etc.; The listener has little or no control over the speed of the input of spoken material; Spoken material is often heard only once and in most cases, we cannot go back and listen again as we can when we read; The listener cannot pause to work out the meaning of the heard material as can be done when reading; Speech is more likely to be distorted by the media which transmit sounds or background noise that can make it difficult to hear clearly; The listener sometimes has to deal simultaneously with another task while listening, such as formal note-taking, writing down directions or messages from telephone calls.

interviews instructions radio news loudspeaker announcements theatre shows telephone chats committee meetings shopping lessons lectures conversations gossips watching television story-telling II. What do we listen to in our daily life?

III. Characteristics of the listening process  Informal & spontaneous discourse  Listener expectation and purpose  Looking as well as listening  Ongoing, purposeful listener response  Speaker attention

IV. How do people process information in listening comprehension  B Bottom-up processing  Top-down processing

Bottom-up processing proceeds from sounds to words to grammatical relationships to lexical meanings, etc. to a final ‘message’. The process of comprehension begins with the message received, which is analyzed at successive levels of sounds, words, clauses, and sentences, until the intended meaning is arrived at. Comprehension is thus viewed as a process of decoding.

Examples:  Scanning the input to identify familiar lexical items  Segmenting the stream of speech into constituents – e.g. “a book of mine” consists of four words  Using phonological cues to identify the information focus in an utterance  Using grammatical cues to organize the input into constituents – for example, “the book which I lent you” → [the book] [which I lent you]

Top-down processing refers to the use of background knowledge in understanding the meaning of a message. Top-down techniques are more concerned with the activation of schemata, with deriving meaning, with global understanding, and with the interpretation of a text.

e.g. If an adult was seated on a park bench reading aloud from a book to a group of enthralled( 着迷的 ) young children, an observer would probably assume that the adult was reading a story rather than a recipe or a set of instructions on how to assemble a computer. This set of expectations is generated from the situation, from knowledge of a world populated by adults and children and typical interactions between them.

Examples:  Assigning an interaction to part of a particular event, such as storytelling, joking, praying, complaining;  Assigning places, persons, or things to categories;  Inferring cause-and-effect relationship;  Anticipating outcomes;  Inferrring the topic of a discourse;  Inferring the sequence between events;  Inferring missing details.

Schema theory ( 图式理论 ) The term schema was first used by the psychologist Bartlett (1932). Schema theory is based on the notion that past experiences lead to the creation of mental frameworks that help us make sense of new experiences.

V. What are the principles for teaching listening?  F Focus on process  Combine listening with other skills  Focus on the comprehension of meaning

VI. How can we teach listening more effectively? Pre-listening Stage While-listening Stage Post-listening Stage

5.1 Pre-listening stage This stage is to prepare the listeners for what they are going to hear, just as we are usually prepared in real life (for example, we usually have expectations about the topic, and even the language). Aims for having Pre-listening activities

 Discuss a relevant picture  Discuss relevant experiences  Associate ideas with the topic  Associate vocabulary with the topic  Predict information about the topic  Write questions about the topic

Pre-listening activities  P Predicting √using visual aids √asking leading questions √students ’ reading the listening comprehension questions before listening  S Setting the scene

5.2 While-listening stage This stage is to help the listeners to understand the text. The teacher should not expect the learners to try to understand every word but help the learners to process the information actively by involving them in practicing different listening skills.

Major listening skills  Listening for the gist (to get the general idea of what we hear)  Listening for specific information  Listening for detailed information  Inferring (to listen to what is not directly stated)  Note-taking (to combine listening and writing)

While-listening activities  Listening for the gist  Listening for specific information  Listening for detailed information  Inferring (to listen to what is not directly stated)  Note-taking (to combine listening and writing)

5.3 Post-listening stage This stage is to help the listeners connect what they have heard with their own ideas and experience, just as we often do in real life. It also allows the teacher to move from listening to another skill. For example, the listeners may practice speaking by role-play interviews similar to the one they have heard.

Post-listening activities  Give opinions  Relate similar experiences ole play a similar interaction  Write a brief report rite a similar text  Debate the topic