Listening Skill By Marc Helgesen Lecture # 23

Review of the last lecture Yesterday we had discussion on Principles for Teaching Language Methodology. Focus on the learner: Make instructional goals clear to learners Help learners to create their own goals Ask them to use their second language outside of the class Help leaners to become more aware of learning processes and strategies. Give learners opportunities to make choices between different options in the classroom. Teach learners how to create their own learning tasks. Develop your personal methodology Build instructional sequences based on pretask, task and follow up task. We also talked about Listening skills.

Background to the teaching of Listening Historically, learning a foreign language meant learning to read and write. Listening was virtually ignored in 1800, for the first time……. Charles Berlitz promoted the teaching of listening skills comprehension and the idea that new teaching points should be introduced orally. After World War II the audio-lingual method came to dominate foreign language teaching. Language labs……

Background to the teaching of Listening In 1970s and early 1980s, the introduction of CLT- Listening plays a key role for communicative ability. Stephen Krashen’s input Hypothesis made a major impact on language teaching: For language learning to occur, it is necessary for the learner to understand input language which contains linguistic items that are slightly beyond the learner’s present linguistic competence.

Principles for Teaching Listening 1) Expose Students to different ways of Processing information: Bottom-up Vs Top-down The approach is proposed by Rumelhar and Ortony(1977) expanded upon by Chaudron and Richards (1986). With Bottom up processing, students start with the component parts; words, grammar etc. Top-down processing is the opposite. Learners start from their background knowledge, either content, schema (general information based on previous learning and life experience) or textual schema. Interactive processing: the use of the combination of top-down and bottom up data is known as interactive processing. (Peterson, 2001)

Principles for Teaching Listening 2: Expose Students to different types of Listening It is not what listeners listen to, It is what they listen for Listening for specific information e.g. names, time, specific language form etc. Global or gist listening: Another critical type of listening is inference. This is listening between the lines. 3: Teach a variety of tasks:

Principles for Teaching Listening 4: Consider Text, difficulty, and authenticity Brown and Menasche suggest looking at two aspects of authenticity: Task Authenticiy i) Simulated: modeled after a real life; nonacademic task such as filling in a form ii Minimal : checks understanding, but in a way that isn’t usually done outside of the classroom; numbering pictures to show a sequence of events or identifying the way something is said are examples.

Principles for Teaching Listening Input Authenticity: Genuine: Altered Adapted Simulated Minimal/incidental

Principles for Teaching Listening 5: Teach Listening Strategies: Predicting: Inferring Monitoring Clarifying Responding Evaluating

Classroom Techniques and Task Dictation with a difference Do-it-yourself: Modifying material to add “ listening for specific information” Micro listening Bits and pieces What do I want to know Dictation and close What are they talking about? Listening for gist.

Classroom Techniques and Task Listening for main ideas What is the order? Which picture? Listening between the lines: inference tasks

Listening in Class Room A warm-up activity that integrates top-down and bottom up data/Pre-listening? A main listening task A speaking task related to the previous task

Summary Today’s lecture emphasized on listening skill as an active, purposeful process. It involved processing information based on both overall top down schema and the bottom-up “building blocks “ of language such as vocabulary and grammar. Pre-listening is suggested as ways to integrate a learner’s processing. Exposing learners to variety of tasks and different types of listening is helpful