1. LISTENING SKILL

2. WHAT IS LISTENING? Some various definitions of listening are presented below to highlight its different aspects: Listening is the process of receiving, constructing meaning from and responding to spoken and/or non-verbal messages (Brownell, 2002). Listening is an active, purposeful process of making sense of what we hear (Helgesen, 2003). Listening is an active and interactional process in which a listener receives speech sounds and tries to attach meaning to the spoken words. The listener tries to understand the intended message of the oral text to respond effectively to oral communication.

3. Listening sources Various listening sources can be used in a language classroom. These are teacher talk, student talk, textbook recordings, TV, video, DVD, radio, songs and the internet (Wilson,2008) Technological improvements have increased the types of listening resources in recent years. Both: teachers and students can access listening materials easily via the internet (Garrett, 1991, p. 95). Another way of exposing students to an authentic conversation is inviting guest speakers to the classroom, which provides learners a chance to interact in a more authentic way.

4. Micro and macro listening skills Some Brown’s (2007) listening comprehension micro-skills for conversational discourse are as follows: 1. Retain chunks of language of different lengths in short-term memory. 2. Discriminate among the distinctive sounds of English. 3. Recognize reduced forms of words. 4. Recognize grammatical word classes (nouns, verbs, etc.),

5. Some Brown’s (2007) macro-skills for conversational discourse are: 1. “Recognize cohesive devices in spoken discourse. 2. Recognize the communicative functions of utterances, according to situations, participants, goals. 3. Infer situations, participants, goals using real-world knowledge. 4. From events, ideas, etc., describe, predict outcomes, infer links and connections between events, deduce causes and effects. 5. Distinguish between literal and implied meanings.

6. Listening sub skills There are various types of listening sub-skills to help listeners make sense of the listening text. Most commonly used listening sub-skills in language classrooms are: Listening for-gist: listening to get a general idea Listening for specific information: listening just to get a specific piece of information Listening in detail: listening to every detail, and try to understand as much as possible Listening to infer: listening to understand how speakers feel Listening to questions and responding: listening to answer questions

7. The aim or purpose of listening the aim of listening determines the priority. To illustrate the point, think about the two situations given below: 1.You are chatting with your friend, and she tells you a story about an exam that she failed. You listen to your friend to say something that will console her. 2. One evening, a friend of yours calls and invites you to her birthday party. You carefully take note of the address, time and day of the activity.

8. Some activities to teach listening Fill in the blanks : here you can use Songs, conversations, isolated sentences and so forth. The teacher plays the selected material and students have to fill in the gaps, the teacher decides how many times the material will be played, it depends on the grade of difficulty. Order the sequence: here you can use Fairy tales, short tales, historic events, biographies, or any other material that presents a sequence. The teacher presents the sequence in a messy way, students order the sequence.

9. Listen and draw: here you can use your own voice and dictate. Imagine you are teaching food, numbers prepositions, or any set of vocabulary words. Students can practice both with this activity: listening and vocabulary Summarizing what you listen: After having listened to any piece of listening (a tale, a short story, a conversation etc) students have to summarize what they listened. Listen and choose the best alternative: Any kind of pieces of listening are suitable here ( radio programmes, tv shows, songs etc)There could be three or four alternatives. Dictation (Teacher’s voice) T uses her/his own voice and keeps the pace of the dictation according to students’s level,

10. Listen and tick: Here the teacher can present a list of ítems or different pictures like the example below, students have to discriminate information and tick the correct alternative.

11. Listen and complete the chart Students listen twice or three times and complete the chart

12. Listen and write true or false Students listen twice or three times and write true or false, sometimes they have to correct the false sentences like the example below.

13. Listen and match Students listen twice or three times and match ( letters and numbers, pictures, names etc, any combination is possible)

14. Listen and answer the questions Students listen twice or three times and answer the questions

15. STAGES IN TEACHING LISTENING SKILLS Pre – listening While listening Post- listening