LISTENING

HARMER

A - Extensive and intensive listening

A1 - Extensive listening

- Just as we can claim that extensive reading helps students to acquire vocabulary and
grammar and that, furthermore, it makes students better readers.
- In order for extensive listening to work effectively with a group of students - or with groups
of students we will need to make a collection of appropriate tapes, cd’s, podcasts, clearly
marked for level, topic and genre
- We need to explain the benefits of listening extensively and come to some kind of
agreement about how much and what kind of listening they should do. We can recommend
certain CDs or podcasts and get other students to talk about the ones which they have
enjoyed the most.
- They can record their responses to what they have heard in a personal journal or fill in
report forms which we have prepared, asking them to list the topic, assess the level of
difficulty and summarise the contents of a recording, etc

A2 - Intensive listening: using audio material

Many teachers use audio material on tape, CD or hard disk when they want their students to
practise listening skills. This has a number of advantages and disadvantages.

• Advantages: ​recorded material allows students to hear a variety of different voices apart
from just their own teacher's. It gives them an opportunity to 'meet a range of different
characters, especially where 'real' people are talking. They offer a wide variety of situations
and voices. Audio material is portable and readily available. Now that so much audio
material is offered in digital form, teachers can play recorded tracks in class directly from
computers.
• Disadvantages:​ in big classrooms with poor acoustics, the audibility of recorded material
often gives cause for concern. Another problem with recorded material in the classroom is
that everyone has to listen at the same speed, a speed dictated by the recording, not by the
listeners. It is less satisfactory when students have to take information
from the recording. Nor can they, themselves, interact with the speakers on the audio track
in any way and they can't see the speaking taking place.

- We need to check audio and machine quality before we take them into class.
- We need to change the position of the tape recorder or CD player (or the students) to offset
poor acoustics or, if this is feasible, take other measures such as using materials to deaden
echoes which interfere with good sound quality
- It is certainly true that extracting general or specific information from one listening is an
important skill, so the kind of task we give students for the first time they hear an audio track
is absolutely critical in gradually training them to listen effectively.
- If students are to get the maximum benefit from a listening, then we should replay it two
or more times, since with each listening they may feel more secure, and with each listening
(where we are helping appropriately) they will understand more than they did previously
- However, we do not want to bore students by playing them the same recorded material
again and again, nor do we want to waste time on useless repetition.
- As with reading, a crucial part of listening practice is the lead-in we involve students in
before they listen to recorded material. What students do before they listen will have a
significant effect on how successfully they listen, especially when they listen for the first time.
- To give students background knowledge before listening is more successful than letting
them preview questions or teaching them some key vocabulary.
- Activating students’ schemata and giving them some topic help to assist them in making
sense of the listening is a vital part of our role.

A3 - Who controls the recorded material?

• Students control stop and start:​ some teachers get students to control the speed of
recorded listening. They tell the teacher when they want the recording to be paused and
when they are happy for it to resume. Alternatively, a student can be at the controls and ask
his or her classmates to say when they want to stop or go on.
• Students have access to different machines:​ it is a very good idea to have students
listen to different machines in small groups. This means that they can listen at the speed of a
small group rather than at the speed of the whole class.
• Students work in a language laboratory or listening centre:​ in a language laboratory
all the students can listen to material at the same time if they are in lockstep (that is all
working with the same audio clip at the same time). However, a more satisfactory solution is
to have students working on their own. All students can work with the same recorded
material, but because they have control of their own individual machines, they can pause,
rewind and fast forward in order to listen at their own speed.

A4 - Intensive listening: live' listening

- A popular way of ensuring genuine communication is live listening, where the teacher
and/or visitors to the class talk to the students. This allows students to practise listening in
face-to-face interactions and, especially, allows them to practise listening 'repair' strategies,
such as using formulaic expressions, repeating up to the point where communication
breakdown occurred, using a rising intonation, or rephrasing and seeing if the speaker
confirms the rephrasing

Live listening can take the following forms:

• Reading aloud:​ an enjoyable activity, when done with conviction and style, is for the
teacher to read aloud to a class. This allows the students to hear a clear spoken version of a
written text and can be extremely enjoyable if the teacher is prepared to read with
expression and conviction.
• Story-telling:​ teachers are ideally placed to tell stories which, in turn, provide excellent
listening material. At any stage of the story, the students can be asked to predict what is
coming next, to describe people in the story, etc.
• Interviews:​ live interview, especially where students themselves think up the questions. In
such situations, students really listen for answers they themselves have asked for - rather
than adopting other people's questions.
• Conversations:​ if we can persuade a colleague to come to our class, we can hold
conversations with them about English or any other subject. Students then have the chance
to watch the interaction as well as listen to it.

A5 - Intensive listening: the roles of the teacher

As with all activities, we need to create student engagement through the way we set up
listening tasks. We need to build up students' confidence by helping them listen better, rather
than by testing their listening abilities. We also need to acknowledge the students'
difficulties and suggest ways out of them

• Organiser:​ we need to tell students exactly what their listening purpose is and give them
clear instructions about how to achieve it. One of our chief responsibilities will be to build
their
confidence through offering tasks that are achievable and texts that are comprehensible.
• Machine operator: ​On a CD or DVD player, we need to find the segment we want to use.
It means testing the recording out before taking it into class so that we do not waste time
trying to make the right decisions or trying to make things work when we get there. We
should be prepared to respond to the students needs in the way we stop and start the
machine.
If we involve our students in live listening, we need to observe them with care to see how
easily they can understand us. We can then adjust the way we speak accordingly
• Feedback organiser:​ when our students have completed the task, we should lead a
feedback session to check that they have completed it successfully. We may start by having
them compare their answers in pairs and then ask for answers from the class in general or
from pairs in particular.
• Prompter:​ when students have listened to a recording for comprehension purposes, we
can prompt them listen to it again in order to notice a variety of language and spoken
features.

B - Film and video

There are many good reasons for encouraging students to watch while they listen. In the
first place, they get to see language in use'. This allows them to see a whole lot of
paralinguistic behaviour. For example, they can see how intonation matches facial
expression and what gestures accompany certain phrases, and they can pick up a range of
cross-cultural clues. Film allows students entry into a whole range of other communication
worlds: they see how different people stand when they talk to each other or what sort of food
people eat. Unspoken rules of behaviour in social and business situations are easier to see
on film than to describe in a book or hear on an audio track.

B1 - Viewing techniques

• Fast forward:​ the teacher presses the play button and then fast forwards the DVD or video
so that the sequence shoots past silently and at great speed, taking only a few seconds.
When it is over, the teacher can ask students what the extract was all about and whether
they can guess what the characters were saying.
• Silent viewing (for language):​ the teacher plays the film extract at normal speed but
without the sound. Students have to guess what the characters are saying. When they have
done this, the teacher plays it with sound so that they can check to see if they guessed
correctly.
• Freeze frame:​ at any stage during a video sequence we can 'freeze' the picture, stopping
the participants dead in their tracks. This is extremely useful for asking the students what
they think will happen next or what a character will say next.

B2 - Listening (and mixed) techniques

• Pictureless listening (language):​ the teacher covers the screen, turns the monitor away
from the students or turns the brightness control right down. The students then listen to a
dialogue and have to guess such things as where it is taking place and who the speakers
are.
• Picture or speech: ​we can divide the class in two so that half of the class faces the screen
and half faces away. The students who can see the screen have to describe what is
happening to the students who cannot
• Subtitles:​ there are many ways we can use subtitled films. John Field suggests that one
way to enable students to listen to authentic material is to allow them to have subtitles to
help them.

C - Listening (and film) lesson sequences

C1 - Examples of listening sequences

Example 1: Interviewing a stranger Activity: live listening

Skills: predicting; listening for specific information; listening for detail
Age: any Level: beginner and above

Where possible, teachers can bring strangers into the class to talk to the students or be
interviewed by them. The teacher takes the visitor into the classroom without telling the
students who or what the visitor is. In pairs or groups, they try to guess as much as they can
about the visitor. Based on their guesses, they write questions that they wish to ask. The
visitor is now interviewed with the questions the students have written. As the interview
proceeds, the teacher encourages them to seek clarification where things are said that they
do not understand. During the interview the students make notes. When the interview has
gone, these notes form the basis of a written follow-up. The students can write a short
biographical piece about the person, etc

Example 2: Sorry I'm late

Activity: getting events in the right order
Skills: predicting; listening for gist Age: young adult and above
Level: lower intermediate
A popular technique for having students understand the gist of a story - but which also
incorporates prediction and the creation of expectations - involves the students in listening
in order to put pictures in the sequence in which they hear them.
They are given a chance, in pairs or groups, to say what they think is happening in each
picture. The teacher will not confirm or deny their predictions. Students are then told that
they are going to listen to a recording and that they should put the pictures in the correct
chronological order (which is not the same as the order of what
ETC

D - The sound of music

A piece of music can change the atmosphere in a classroom or prepare students for a
new activity. It can amuse and entertain, and it can make a satisfactory connection between
the world of leisure and the world of learning in the classroom.
However, it is worth remembering that not everyone is keen to have music in the background
at all times, and even if they are, they may not necessarily like the teacher's choice of music.
It makes sense, therefore, to let students decide if they would like music in the background
rather than just imposing it on them (however well-intentioned this imposition might be). We
should allow them to say what they think of the music we then play since the whole point
of playing music in the first place is make students feel happy and relaxed.

PENNY UR

Unit One: What does real-life listening involve?

Characteristics of real-life listening situations

1. Informal spoken discourse

Informal speech has various interesting features:

Brevity of chunks: ​It is usually broken into short chunks. In a conversation, for example,
people take turns to speak, usually in short turns of a few seconds each.
Pronunciation: ​The pronunciation of words is often slurred, and noticeably different from
the phonological representation given in a dictionary. EG: ​can’t​ instead if ​cannot
Vocabulary: ​The vocabulary is often colloquial. EG: ​guy or kid i​ nstead of ​man or child.
Grammar: ​Informal speech tends to be somewhat ungrammatical: utterances do not usually
divide neatly into sentences; a grammatical structure may change in mid-utterance;
unfinished clauses are common.
‘Noise’: ​There will be a certain amount of ‘noise’: bits of the discourse that are unintelligible
to the hearer. This may be because the words are not said clearly, or not known to the
hearer, or because the hearer is not attending, etc.
Redundancy: ​The speaker normally says a good deal more than is strictly necessary for the
conveying message. Redundancy includes such things as repetition, paraphrase,
self-correction, etc.
Non-repetition: ​The discourse is normally heard only once, though this may be
compensated for by the redundancy of it, and by the possibility of requesting repetition or
explanation.

2. Listener expectation and purpose

We normally have some objective in listening beyond understanding for its own sake - to find
out something, for example. And we expect to hear something relevant to our purpose.

3. Looking as well as listening

Only a very small proportion of listening is done ‘blind’-to the radio or telephone, for
example. Normally, we have something to look at that is linked to what is being said: usually
the speaker him-or herself, but other visual stimuli as well, EG: a map, scene or object etc.

4. Ongoing, purposeful listener response

The listener is usually responding at intervals as the discourse is going on.

5. Speaker attention
The speaker usually directs his or her speech at the listener, takes the listener’s character,
intentions, etc. into account when speaking, and often responds directly to his or her
reactions, whether verbal or non-verbal, by changing or adapting the discourse.

Unit Two: Real-life listening in the classroom

Activities should give learners practice in coping with at least some of the features of real-life
situations.
It is worth noting also that listening activities based on simulated real-life situations are likely
to be more motivating and interesting to do than contrived textbook comprehension
exercises.

Guidelines

1. Listening texts

Informal talk:​ ​Most listening texts should be based on discourse that is either genuine
improvised, spontaneous speech, or at least a fair imitation of it.
Speaker visibility; direct speaker-listener interaction: ​It is useful to the learners if you
improvise at least some of the listening texts yourself in their presence. Video also makes a
positive contribution to the effectiveness of listening practice, in that it supplies the aspect of
speaker visibility and the general visual environment of the text.
Single exposure: ​The discourse must be redundant enough to provide the most important
information more than once than in the original text; and where possible hearers should be
able to stop the speaker to request a repeat or explanation

2. Listening tasks
Expectations: ​Learners should have in advance some idea about the kind of text they are
going to hear. EG: “You are going to hear about…” The latter instruction activates learners’
relevant schemata (their own previous knowledge) and enables them to use this previous
knowledge to build anticipatory ‘scaffolding’ that will help them understand.
Purpose: ​A listening purpose should be provided by the definition of a pre-set task, which
should involve some kind of visible or audible response. We should give a specific
instruction such as “Listen and find out where…”. The definition of a purpose enables the
listener to listen selectively for significant information.
Ongoing listening response: ​The task should usually involve intermittent responses during
the listening; learners should be encouraged to respond to the information they are looking
for as they hear it.

Implementing the guidelines: some specific practical implications

1. Listening texts: ​(at least some of your students’ listening practice should be based on a
text which you yourself improvise)
Advantages: ​Less recorded material means less of the expense, inconvenience and
occasional breakdown that the frequent use of tape-recorders entails.
Problems or reservation: ​Many teachers lack confidence in their own ability to improvise
fluently in the target language, or are worried their spoken language is not good enough
model for students to listen to.
Another problem is that if learners only hear you , they will not have the opportunity to
practice listening to different voices and accents. Finally, if learners can do the task after one
listening, you may wish to let them hear the text again, for the sake of further exposure and
practice and better chances of successful performance.
Conclusion: ​It is important for foreign language teachers to be able to improvise speech in
the target language, ​(resumen de lo anterior)

2. Listening tasks: expectations and purpose:

Advantages: ​Providing students with some idea of what they are going to hear and what
they are asked to do with it helps them to succeed in the task, as well as rising motivation
and interest.
Problems or reservations: ​Occasionally, we may wish to ask students to find out with the
passage is about without any previous hint: for the sake of the fun and challenge.
Conclusion: ​If there is no pre-set task we should be careful to ensure that the text itself is
stimulating enough and of an appropriate level.

3. Ongoing listener response:

Advantages: ​The fact that learners are active during the listening rather than waiting to the
end keeps them busy and helps to prevent boredom.
Problems or reservations: ​You cannot hear and monitor the spoken responses of all the
class together. Most answers will have to be in the form of physical movements, which can
be monitored visually, or by written responses.
Conclusion: ​Check the activity by doing it yourself before administering it: make sure that
the task is bo-able.

Unit Three: Learner problems

1. Trouble with sounds: ​They are often themselves unaware of inaccurate sound
perception.
2. Have to understand every word: ​The effort to understand everything often results in
ineffective comprehension, as well as feelings of fatigue and failure. We may need to give
learners practice in selective ignoring of heard information.
3. Can’t understand fast, natural native speech: ​Learners will often ask you to slow dawn
and speak clearly. They should be exposed to as much spontaneous informal talk as they
can successfully understand as soon as possible.
4. Need to hear things more than once: ​In real-life they are often going to have to cope
with ‘one-off’ listening; and we can certainly make a useful contribution to their learning if we
can improve their ability to do so.
5. Find it difficult to keep up: ​The learner feels overloaded with incoming information. The
solution is not to slow the discourse but rather to encourage them to relax., stop trying to
understand everything.
6. Get tired: ​This is one reason for not making listening comprehension passages too long.

Unit Four: Types of activities

Types of listening activities

1. No overt response: ​The learners do not have to do anything in response to the listening;
however, facial expression and body language often show if they are following or not.
Stories: ​tell a joke or a real-life anecdote. If the story is well-chosen, learners are likely to be
motivated to attend and understand in order to enjoy it.
Songs: ​Sing a song yourself, or play a recording of one.
Entertainment: films, theatre, video.: ​if the content is really entertaining learners will be
motivated to make the effort to understand without the need for any further task.

2. Short responses:
Obeying instructions: ​Learners perform actions, or draw shapes or pictures, in response to
instructions.
Ticking off items: ​A list, text or picture is provided: listeners mark or tick off
words/components as they hear them within a spoken description, story or list of items.
True/false
Detecting mistakes
ETC

3. Longer responses:
Answering questions
Note-taking: ​Learners take brief notes from a short lecture or talk.
Paraphrasing and translating: ​learners rewrite the listening text in different words.
Summarizing
ETC

4. Extended responses:
Problem-solving: ​A problem is described orally; learners discuss how to deal with it, and/or
write down a suggested solution.
Interpretation: ​An extract from a piece of dialogue or monologue is provided, with no
previous information; the listeners try to guess from the words, kind of voices, tone and any
other evidence what is going on.

SCRIVENER

1 - Task-based listening

It’s actually not necessary to understand every word in order to understand the information
you might need from a recording. We need to show students this important fact - help them
to worry less about understanding everything and work more on catching the bits they do
need to hear. Often when listening in everyday life, we may need to listen to:
● get a general overview of the main story or message of a conversation
● catch specific details such as names, numbers, addresses, etc.

1. The activity must really demand listening

2. It mustn’t be a simply memory test
3. Tasks should be realistic or useful in some way
4. The activity must actively help them to improve their listening
5. It shouldn’t be threatening
6. Help students work about difficulties to achieve specific results.

By giving students the questions before the recording is played, you will give students the
opportunity to listen with a clear aim in mind. By giving the learners a clear purpose in
listening, you turn the exercise from a memory text into a listening task.

● Set questions
● Play recording
● Check if the students have found the answers
● If not, play the recording again as often as necessary

The word ‘task’ reminds us that the activity the students are asked to do may be something
more useful, more realistic, more motivating than simply finding answers to comprehension
questions.

Some ideas:
● Students must decide whether the conversation is between two friends, two
colleagues or two people who don’t know each other.
● From a selection of telephone numbers in the book, students pick out the correct one
said by the receptionist
● Students have a copy of the dialogue, but with sentences in the wrong order; they
may listen and arrange them in the correct order. ETC
Choosing the right task

(get a general overview of the main story or message of a conversation - catch specific
details such as names, numbers, addresses, etc)
It’s usually better to divide these different kinds of listening into separate replays of the
listening material. EG: set the first task, then set the second task.

- It is often better to limit the amount of writing demanded of students, especially at lower
levels.

2 - The task feedback circle

By starting with a simple task, letting students do it successfully, then moving on to set a
more difficult task on the same recording, etc., the teacher can virtually let the class find its
own level, IE: you stop setting new tasks when you find the point at which they are beginning
to find it too difficult.
It involves not only setting a sequence of tasks and checking whether they can do it, but also
replaying the recording again and again.

‘Big’ / general -------> More detailed ------> Language focus

- As a general planning aid, the task-feedback circle and the ‘big-to-small’ task sequence will
work well for many standard coursebooks and classroom recordings .EG: where there is a
radio discussion or any text where it is useful to comprehend both general overall message
and smaller details.
- To make sure that a lesson is genuinely useful for students, we need to consider why
someone might listen to such text in real-life- and what kind of skills or strategies they’d use.
We then need to design tasks that either ​a) ​closely reflect what they might need to do in real
life or ​b)​ help them improve skills that will be useful to them in future.

Examples: Listen and…

● choose the correct picture
● follow the route of the map
● say a reply to each comment you hear
● decide which person is saying which sentence
ETC

- A student who finds all the correct answers on first hearing and with no difficulty has simply
not been challenged by the recording. It reflects over-simple tasks and shows that little
progress in listening has been made.
The effort that a student puts into listening and searching for an answer that is not easily
found is, however, very useful work.
- Thus the guideline is ‘process rather than product’, meaning that the going is more
important than the getting there. The goal is to work on the listening itself.
Some guidelines for listening skills work in class

● Keep the recording short

● Play the recording a sufficient number of times
● Let the students discuss their answers together
● Don’t immediately acknowledge correct answers with words or facial expressions
● Don’t be led by one strong student
● Aim to get students to agree together without your help
● Play little bits of the recording again and again until it’s clear
● Give help if they are completely stuck
● Consider giving the students control of the CD or recording
● Don’t cheat them by changing your requirements halfway
● Try to make sure the task is just within their abilities. It should be difficult but
achievable.

3 - How do we listen?

Top-down and bottom-up

Bottom-up: ​building up the messages from the individual small pieces

It seems likely that we make use of ‘bottom-up’ skills more to fill in missing gaps rather than
as a general approach to comprehension word by word.
The alternative theory is that when we listen to a new dialogue, we start processing the text
using skills associated with a second theory (​top-down​) IE: making use of what we really
know to help us predict the structure and content of the text, and getting an overall
impression of the message.
Making a good prediction of the content or the shape of a listening text will definitely help us
to make better sense of it when it happens.

Top-down and bottom-up in the classroom

- Work on both areas in useful to learners

- You need to decide your own personal theory about how people listen so that you can plan
lessons to reflect this. (EG: Top-down theory ---> so structure lessons sequences starting
with top-down work)

4 - Listening ideas

News headlines: ​It is use up-to-date recorded off the radio. This lesson would be suitable
for most classes at Intermediate level or above.
Home recording: ​Make our own short recordings for classroom use. This gives you the
chance to offer listening topics directly relevant to your course or of interest to your learners.
Live listening: ​Students get to listen to real people speaking in class, rather than to
recordings.
Guess stars: ​A short monologue in character (EG: as the Queen or some singer). We (as
actors - characters) talk about her life and they have to guess who she is.
ETC.