Day 8 teaching listening

TEFL
TEACHING LISTENING
Elih Sutisna Yanto
ENGLISH EDUCATION
PROGRAMME UNIVERSITAS
SINGAPERBANGSA KARAWANG,
West-Java, Indonesia
elihsutisnayanto@gmail.com
TEFL-LISTENING-ELIH SUTISNA YANTO-UNSIKA-WEST JAVA-
INDONESIA

The topics to be discussed:
1. What is listening?
2. Listening development in the first language
3. Why is listening?
4. Types of listening
5. Background to the teaching listening
6. Listening process
7. Principles for teaching listening
8. Classroom techniques and tasks
9. Listening strategies.
INDONESIA

THINK…
What is LISTENING?
TEFL-LISTENING-ELIH SUTISNA YANTO-
UNSIKA-WEST JAVA-INDONESIA

1. What is LISTENING?
 It has been claimed that over 50 percent of
the time that students spend functioning in
a foreign language will be devoted to
listening (Nunan, 1998)
 Listening is an active, purposeful process of
making sense of what we hear.
 Marc Helgesen2003:24
 Listening is very active. As people listen,
they process not only what they hear but
also connect it to other information they
already know.TEFL-LISTENING-ELIH SUTISNA YANTO-UNSIKA-WEST JAVA-
INDONESIA

Cont...
 The ability to hear is a natural process that develops
in all normal infant. Indeed, most of us begin to hear
sounds before we are even born. (John Florwerdew
& Lindsay Miller 2005:21)
 The physical components of the listening process
combine with the cognitive development in a child,
resulting in sophisticated listening skills. (John
Florwerdew & Lindsay Miller 2005:21)
 Buck (1995) points out, the assumption that listeners
simply decode messages is mistaken, “Meaning is not in
the text (text= whatever is being listened to) – but is
something that is constructed by listeners based on a
number of different knowledge sources.”
INDONESIA

2. Listening Development in the
First Language
 The process of listening and discriminating what we hear
begins before we are even born and develops rapidly during
the first year of childhood. Baby in utero (the organ in women
in which babies develops before they are born) have the
capacity to listen and discriminate (John Flowerdew & Lindsay
Miller 2005:21)
 Studies by De Casper and Spence (1986) demonstrated that
unborn babies could be “programmed” to recognize speech
patterns.
 These researchers had expectant mothers read out loud the
same short children’s story every day for six week prior to
giving birth. Once born, the infants were played two short
stories recorded by their mothers: the one their mother had
read out loud each day and another unheard story. The result
showed that the newborn infants attended to the story they had
heard in utero more than they attended to the new story.
INDONESIA

3. Why is LISTENING?
In second language learning,
several writers and
researchers in the early 1980s
suggested that listening had a
very important role
(Winitz,1981)
INDONESIA

Cont...
 Approaches that gave more importance to
listening were based on different ideas.
Nord (1980:17) expresses this view clearly:
Some people now believe that learning a
language is not just learning to talk, but rather
that learning a language is building a map of
meaning in the mind. These people believe that
talking may indicate that the language was
learned, but they do not believe that practice in
talking is the best way to build up this “cognitive”
map in the mind. To do this, they feel, the best
method is to practice meaningful listening.TEFL-LISTENING-ELIH SUTISNA YANTO-UNSIKA-WEST JAVA-
INDONESIA

Cont...
 In this view of language learning, listening
is the way of learning the language.
 It gives the learner information from which
to build up the knowledge necessary for
using the language.
 When this knowledge is built up, the learner
can begin to speak. The listening-only
period is a time of observation and learning
which provides the basis for the other
language skills.TEFL-LISTENING-ELIH SUTISNA YANTO-UNSIKA-WEST JAVA-
INDONESIA

Cont...
 Gary and Gary (1981) described the many benefits
of delaying speaking and concentrating on listening.
These benefits include the following:
1. The learners is not overloaded by having to focus
on two or more skills at the same time – a
cognitive benefits.
2. Speed of coverage – receptive knowledge grows
faster than productive knowledge. It is possible to
experience and learn much more of the language
by just concentrating on listening. If learners had
to be able to say all the material in the lesson,
progress would be very slow.
3. It is easy to move very quickly to realistic
communicative listening activities. This will have a
strong effect on motivation.TEFL-LISTENING-ELIH SUTISNA YANTO-UNSIKA-WEST JAVA-
INDONESIA

Cont...
4. Learners will not feel shy or worried about
their language classes. Having to speak a
foreign language, particularly when you
know very little, can be a frightening
experience. Listening activities reduce the
stress involved in language learning – a
psychological benefit.
5. Listening activities are well suited to
independent learning through listening to
recordings.TEFL-LISTENING-ELIH SUTISNA YANTO-UNSIKA-WEST JAVA-
INDONESIA

4. Types of Listening
We can distinguish two broad types of
listening:
1. One-way listening – typically associated
with the transfer of information
(transactional listening)
2. Two-way listening – typically associated
with maintaining social relations
(interactional listening)
INDONESIA

Cont...
 Traditionally, listening was associated with
transmission of information, that is with one-
way listening. This can be seen in the
extensive use of monologues in older listening
materials.
 While this is fine if we are relating primarily to
listening in academic contexts for example, it
fails to capture the richness and dynamics of
listening as it occurs in our everyday
interactions (two-way listening).
 Most contemporary materials reflect this re-
emphasis with a move towards natural
sounding dialogues.TEFL-LISTENING-ELIH SUTISNA YANTO-UNSIKA-WEST JAVA-
INDONESIA

THINK…
Background to the teaching of
listening

5. Background to the teaching of listening
• Interest in using children’s learning in their first
language as a model for foreign language
teaching grew.
• One of the result was Gouin’s series method. It
featured action and oral presentation of new
language.
In the late 1800s
• Promoted ideas such as the teaching of
spoken, as opposed to written, learners should
hear language before seeing it in written form.
• Charles Berlitz promoted the teaching of
listening comprehension and the idea that new
teaching points should be introduced orally. -
Direct Method
The reform
movement
• The Audiolingual method came to dominate
foreign language teaching.
• It emphasized MIM/MEM
(mimicry/memorization) of new structures
• The popularity of the audiolingual method
paralleled the establishment of language
laboratories for dialogue and pattern practice
drills
In the years
following World War
II
Marc Helgesen 2003:25
INDONESIA

Cont...
• The introduction of communicative language
teaching – the idea the students learns through
the act of communication – increased the role
of listening
In the 1970s and
early 1980s
• Stephen Krashen’s input hypothesis made a
major impact on language teaching.
• The input hypothesis says that, “for language
learning to occur, it is necessary for the
learner to understand input language which
contain linguistic items that are slightly
beyond the learner’s present linguistic
competence.
• We acquire language by meeting language
that is a bit higher than our current level.
• Listening was seen as a major source of
comprehensible input
• Language learning textbooks began including
listening activities.
During this period
Marc Helgesen 2003:26TEFL-LISTENING-ELIH SUTISNA YANTO-

6. Listening Process
1. Bottom-
up Process
 These are the processes the listener uses to
assemble the message piece-by-piece from the
speech stream, going from the parts to the whole.
 Bottom-up processing involves perceiving and
parsing the speech stream at increasingly larger
levels beginning with auditory-phonetic, phonemic,
syllabic, lexical, syntactic, semantic, propositional,
pragmatic and interpretive (Field,2003:326)
 Bottom-up processing refers to using the incoming
input as the basis for understanding the message.
(Richard 2006:4).
 Comprehension begins with the data that has been
received which is analyses as successive levels of
organization – sounds, words, clauses, sentences,
texts – until meaning is arrived at. Comprehension is
viewed as a process of decoding, to find the
meaning of something.
INDONESIA

We can illustrate this with example
Imagine I
said the
following to
you:
 “ The guy I sat next to on the
bus this morning on the way to
work was telling me he runs a
Thai restaurant in Chinatown.
Apparently it’s very popular at
the moment.”
INDONESIA

How to
understand
this
utterance?
 In order to understand this
utterance using bottom-up
processing, we have to mentally
break the utterance down into its
components.
 This is referred to as “chunking” and
here are the chunks that guides us
to the underlying core meaning of
the utterances.
INDONESIA

The guy
I sat next to on the bus
this morning
was telling me
he runs a Thai restaurant in Chinatown
apparently it’s very popular
at the moment
INDONESIA

The chunks help us identify the underlying propositions the
utterances expresses, namely,
I was on the bus.
There was a guy next to me.
We talked
He said he runs a Thai restaurant.
It’s in Chinatown
It’s very popular now.
 It is these units of meaning which we remember, and not
the form in which we initially heard them. Our knowledge of
grammar helps us find the appropriate chunks, and the
speaker also assist us in this process through intonation
and pausing.TEFL-LISTENING-ELIH SUTISNA YANTO-UNSIKA-WEST JAVA-
INDONESIA

Teaching bottom-up Processing
 Learners need a large vocabulary and a good working
knowledge of sentence structure to be able to process texts
bottom-up.
 Exercises that develop bottom-up processing help the
learner to do such things as the following
 Retain input while it is being processes
 Recognize word and clause divisions
 Recognize key words
 Recognize key transitions in a discourse
 Recognize grammatical relations between key elements in
sentences
 Use stress and intonation to identify word and sentence
functionsTEFL-LISTENING-ELIH SUTISNA YANTO-UNSIKA-WEST JAVA-
INDONESIA

 Many traditional classroom listening
activities focus primary on bottom-up
processing.
 For examples, exercises such as dictation,
cloze listening, the use of multiple choice
questions after a text and similar activities
which require close and detailed recognition
and processing of the input and which
assume that everything the listener needs to
understand is contained in the input.TEFL-LISTENING-ELIH SUTISNA YANTO-UNSIKA-WEST JAVA-
INDONESIA

 Kinds of tasks that develop bottom-up listening skills :
 Identifying the referents of pronouns in an utterance
 Recognize the time reference of an utterance
 Distinguish between positive and negative statements
 Recognize the order in words occurred in an utterance
 Identify sequence markers
 Identify key words that occurred in a spoken text
 Identify which modal verbs occurred in a spoken text
INDONESIA

Some examples of listening task that
develop bottom-up processing
a) Students listen to positive and negative
statements and choose an appropriate form of
agreement.
INDONESIA
Students hear: Students choose the correct
response
Yes No
That’s a nice camera.
That’s not a very good
one.
This coffee isn’t hot
This meal is really tasty.

Cont...
b) The following exercise practice listening for word stress as a marker
of the information focus of a sentence. Students listen to questions
that have two possible information focuses and use stress to identify
the appropriate focus. (words in italic are stressed)
INDONESIA
Students hear: Students check information
focus
Where When
The bank’s downtown
branch is closed today.
Is the city office open on
Sunday?
I’m going to the museum
today.

Cont...
c) The following activities helps students develop the ability to
identify key words.
INDONESIA
Students hear:
My hometown is a nice place to visit because it is close to
a beach and there are lots of interesting walks you can do
in the surrounding countryside.
Students’ task:
Which of these words do you hear? Number them in the order
you hear them.
Beach shops walks hometown countryside schools
nice
I’m going to the museum
today.

2.Top-down
Process
 Top-down processes involve the
listener in going from the whole-
their prior knowledge and their
content and rhetorical schemata –
to the parts.
 In other words, the listener uses
what they know of the context of
communication to predict what the
message will contain, and uses
parts of the message to confirm,
correct or add this. The key
process here is inferencing.
INDONESIA

2.Top-down
Process
 According to Richards (2006), top-down
process refers to the use of background
knowledge in understanding the meaning
of a message.
 Whereas bottom-up processing goes
from language to meaning, top-down
processing goes from meaning to
language.
 It may be previous knowledge about the
topic of discourse, it may be situational or
contextual knowledge, or it may be
knowledge in the form of “schemata” or
“scripts” – plans about the overall
structure of events and the relationships
between them.TEFL-LISTENING-ELIH SUTISNA YANTO-UNSIKA-WEST JAVA-
INDONESIA

For example consider how we respond to
the following utterance:
“ I heard on the news there was a big earthquake
in Los Angeles last night.”
 On recognizing the word “earthquake” we
generate a set of questions we want to hear or
obtain responses to:
 Where exactly was the earthquake?
 How big was it?
 Did it cause a lot of damage?
 Were many people killed or injured?
 What rescue efforts are under way?
INDONESIA

For example consider how we respond to
the following utterance:
“ I heard on the news there was a big earthquake
in Los Angeles last night.”
 On recognizing the word “earthquake” we
generate a set of questions we want to hear or
obtain responses to:
 Where exactly was the earthquake?
 How big was it?
 Did it cause a lot of damage?
 Were many people killed or injured?
 What rescue efforts are under way?
INDONESIA
These questions guide us
through
the understanding of any
subsequent
discourse that we hear and they
focus our listening on what is
said about the questions.

Consider this example. Imagine I say the following to a
colleague at my office one morning:
“ I am going to the dentist this afternoon.”
 This utterance activates a schemata for “going to the
dentist”. This schemata can be thought of as organized
around the following dimensions:
 A setting (e.g. the dentist’s surgery)
 participants: (e.g. the dentist, the patient, the dentist’ assistant)
 Goals: (e.g. injections, drilling, rinsing)
 Outcomes: (e.g. fixing the problem, pain, discomfort)
 When I return to my office the following exchange takes places
between my colleague and I: “So how was it?”
“Fine. I didn’t feel a thing”.
INDONESIA
Because speaker and hearer share understanding of the “going to the dentist
schemata” the details of the visit need not be spelled out. A minimum amount of
information is given to enable the participants to understand what happened.

Teaching Top-down Processing
 Exercises that require top-down processing develop the
learner’s ability to do the following:
 Use key words to construct the schemata of a discourse
 Infer the setting for a text
 Infer the role of the participants and their goals
 Infer causes or effects
 Infer unstated details of a situation
 Anticipate questions related to the topic or situation
INDONESIA

The following activities develop top-down
listening skills:
 Students generate a set of questions they expect to hear
about a topic and listen to see if they are answered.
 Students generate a list of things they already know about
a topic and things they would like to learn more about. Then
listen and compare.
 Students read one speaker’s part in a conversation, predict
the other speaker’s part, then listen and compare.
 Students read a list of key points to be covered in a talk,
then listen to see which ones were mentioned.
 Students listen to part of a story, complete the rest of it,
then listen and compare endings.
 Students read news headlines, guess what happened,
then listen to the news items and compare.TEFL-LISTENING-ELIH SUTISNA YANTO-UNSIKA-WEST JAVA-
INDONESIA

7. Principles for teaching listening
1. Expose
students to
different
ways of
processing
information:
bottom-up
vs. top
down and
interactive
 The distinction is based on the
way learners attempt to
understand what they read or
hear.
 With bottom-up processing,
students start with the
component parts: words,
grammar, and the like.
INDONESIA

Cont...
1. Expose
students to
different
ways of
processing
information:
bottom-up
vs. top
down and
interactive
 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 (awareness of
the kinds of information used in
a given situation)
INDONESIA

Cont...
1. Expose
students to
different
ways of
processing
information:
bottom-up
vs. top
down and
interactive
 In the classroom, prelistening
activities are good way to make
sure top-down/bottom-up
integration happens.
 Before listening, learners can,
for example, brainstorm
vocabulary related to a topic or
invent a short dialogue relevant
to functions such as giving
directions or shopping.
INDONESIA

Principles for teaching listening

Cont...
2. Expose
students to
different
types of
listening
 Listening for specific information.
This usually involves catching
concrete information including
names, times, specific language
forms, etc.
 Listening for gist/global. Students
try to understand in a more
general way. (What is the main
topic?)
 Listening between the lines
(inference). Listening for meaning
that is implied but not stated
INDONESIA

Cont...
2. Expose
students to
different
types of
listening
 In the following example 1:
A: Let’s go outside. We could go for a
walk. Maybe play tennis.
B: Look out the window. It’s raining.
A: Raining. Oh, no.
(Helgesen & Brown,1994)
 “Do the speakers go outside or not?”
Of course they don’t. It’s raining. The
text doesn’t say that directly. It doesn’t
need to. Learners can infer the
information.TEFL-LISTENING-ELIH SUTISNA YANTO-UNSIKA-WEST JAVA-
INDONESIA

Cont...
2. Expose
students to
different
types of
listening
 Inference is different from gist
and specific information
listening. Because inference
requires somewhat abstract
thinking, it is a higher level skill.
 Listening for specific
information and listening for gist
are two important types of
listening, but of course, they
don’t exist in isolation.
INDONESIA

Cont...
3. Teach a
variety of
tasks
 A beginning level learners hears a
story and is asked to write a
summary in English.
 According to Just and Carpenter’s
capacity hypothesis (1992), when
people are listening in a second or
foreign language, they are having
to process not only the meaning of
what they are listening to but also
the language itself.
 This can lead to an overloaded.
INDONESIA

Cont...
4. Consider
text,
difficulty,
and
authenticity
 Spoken language is more
redundant, full of false starts,
rephrasing, and elaborations.
Incomplete sentences, pauses,
and overlaps are common.
 Learners need exposure to and
practice with natural sounding
language.
INDONESIA

Cont...
4. Consider
text,
difficulty,
and
authenticity
 To overcome speed, a more
useful technique is to simply put
pauses between phrases or
sentences.
 As Rost (2002,p.145) points
out, “By pausing the spoken
input (the tape or the teacher)
and allowing some quick
intervention and response.
INDONESIA

Cont...
4. Consider
text,
difficulty,
and
authenticity
 Some people speak quickly,
some more slowly.
 The average for native speakers
of English seems to be 165-180
words per minutes (wpm), but
sometimes it jumps to 275 wpm.
Even native speakers can get
lost at that speed (Rubin, 1994).
INDONESIA

Cont...
4. Consider
text,
difficulty,
and
authenticity
 Brown (1995) talks about “cognitive
load” and describes six factors that
increase or decrease the ease of
understanding:
• The number of individuals or objects in
a text (e.g., More voices increase
difficulty)
• How clearly the individual or objects
are distinct from one another (e.g., A
recording with a male voice and a
female voice is easier than one with
two similar male voices or two similar
female voices.
INDONESIA

Cont...
4. Consider
text,
difficulty,
and
authenticity
• Simple, specific spatial
relationships are easier to
understand than complex ones.
(e.g., In recording giving
directions, information like turn
right at the bank is easier to
understand than go a little way on
that street.)
• The order of events (e.g. It is
easier when the information given
follows the order it happened in,
as opposed to a story that includes
a flashback about events thatTEFL-LISTENING-ELIH SUTISNA YANTO-UNSIKA-WEST JAVA-
INDONESIA

Cont...
4. Consider
text,
difficulty,
and
authenticity
• The number of inferences
needed (e.g., Fewer are easier
than more.)
• The information is consistent
with what the listener already
knows (e.g., Hearing someone
talk about a film you have seen
is easier to understand than
hearing the same type of
conversation about one you
haven’t seen.)
INDONESIA

Cont...
4. Consider
text,
difficulty,
and
authenticity
 Everything that students work
with should be authentic.
 Brown and Menasche (1993)
suggest looking at two aspect of
authenticity: the task and the
input.
INDONESIA

Cont...
4. Consider
text,
difficulty,
and
authenticity
1. Task authenticity
• Simulated: modeled after a real-
life; nonacademic task such as
filling in a form.
• Minimal/incidental: 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 examplesTEFL-LISTENING-ELIH SUTISNA YANTO-UNSIKA-WEST JAVA-
INDONESIA

Cont...
4. Consider
text,
difficulty,
and
authenticity
2. Input authenticity
• genuine: created only for the
realm of real life, not for
classroom, but used in language
teaching
• altered: no meaning change, but
the original is no longer as I was
(glossing, visual resetting,
pictures or colors adapted)TEFL-LISTENING-ELIH SUTISNA YANTO-UNSIKA-WEST JAVA-
INDONESIA

Cont...
4. Consider
text,
difficulty,
and
authenticity
2. Input authenticity
• adapted: created for real life
(words and grammatical structures
changed to simplify the text)
• simulated: written by the author as
if the material is genuine; many
genuine characteristics
• minimal/incidental: created for the
classroom, no attempt to make the
material seem genuine.
INDONESIA

Cont...
5. Teach
listening
strategies
 Rost (2002,p.155) identifies strategies that are used
by successful listeners.
• Predicting: Effective listeners think about what they
will hear. This fits into the ideas about prelistening
mentioned earlier.
• Inferring: It is useful for learners to “listen between
the lines.”
• Monitoring: Good listeners notice what they do and
do not understand.
• Clarifying: Efficient learners ask questions (What
does___ mean? You mean____?) and give
feedback (I don’t understand yet.) to the speaker.
• Responding: Learners react to what they hear.
• Evaluating: They check on how well they have
understood.
INDONESIA

8. Classroom techniques and tasks
Dictation
with a
difference
 For many teachers, listening for
specific information means
dictation.
 Dictation is a “word level”
exercise, the learners don’t need
to think about overall meaning. It
is almost completely bottom-up
– students need to catch every
word.
INDONESIA

STEP 1…
A road went through a forest. A woman was walking down the road. Suddenly she
saw a man. He was wearing a shirt, pants, and a hat. He smiled and said something.
In class, students hear the passage and imagine the story. Then they listen again, but
this time, at several points, they hear a bell. As they listen, they fill in a cloze (fill in the
blanks) dictation sheet. Each time they hear the bell, they write any word that fits the
story as they imagined it. The imagined words go in the boxes
 Listen again. Write the missing words on the lines.
When you hear the bell, write any word in the circle that makes sense.
A long road went through a..................... ......................
A ....... .............. .................was ...........................down
the ................... Suddenly she........................a ................ ..............
He was..................................a ............................ .................................
......................... ......................, and a..................... ..................................
He............................and .......................
“........................................”

The script, as they hear it this time is as follows. The dots (.) show the points
where the learners hear the bell.
Step 2
A . Road went through a . Forest. A . Woman was walking down the road.
Suddenly she saw a . man. He was wearing a . shirt, . Pants and a . hat. He
smiled and said .
(Helgesen and Brown,1995)
While the students have the accuracy work of the dictation – writing the
missing words (forest, woman, walking, etc.) – they are also getting the top
down experience of imagining the story and describing their version of it.
Some see a dark forest. Some see it as green, old, a rainforest, etc.
Since everyone’s image of the story will be somewhat different, it provides
a good reason for them to compare stories after they finish their writing. This,
of course, means they continue listening – this time to their partners.

Cont...Classroom techniques and tasks
Do-it
yourself:
Modifying
materials to
add
“listening
for specific
information”
Some ways of modifying listening tasks to add or
increase listening for specifics
Micro-listening (usually done after they
know the main topic of the recording, but
before they have begun the main listening
task) Choose a few target items that occur
several times on the recording. Examples
might be names of colors, people, places, etc.
In class, tell the students the topic of the
recording. Ask them to listen for the target
items. Each time they hear one, they should
rise their hands. Play the recording. Students
listen and raise their hands. The showing of
hand is a good way for those who caught the
items to give a cue to those who didn’tTEFL-LISTENING-ELIH SUTISNA YANTO-UNSIKA-WEST JAVA-
INDONESIA

Do-it
yourself:
Modifying
materials to
add
“listening
for specific
information”
Bits and pieces (before the main
task) Tell the students what the
topic will be. In small groups or as
a whole class, they brainstorm
vocabulary likely to come up on the
recording. Each learner makes a
list. Then they listen to the
recording and circle the words they
hear.TEFL-LISTENING-ELIH SUTISNA YANTO-UNSIKA-WEST JAVA-
INDONESIA

Do-it
yourself:
Modifying
materials to
add
“listening
for specific
information”
What do I want to know
(before the main task) Tell the
students the topic and enough
about what they will hear for them
to imagine the situations. In pairs
or small groups, they write two or
three questions about the
information they think will be given.
Then they listen and see how many
of the questions they are able to
answer.
INDONESIA

Do-it
yourself:
Modifying
materials to
add
“listening
for specific
information”
Dictation and close Many books
feature cloze (fill in the blanks) dictation
as listening. Very often these are not
actually listening tasks since learners can
find the answer by reading. If you are
using a book that has such exercise, have
the students try to fill in the blanks before
they listen. They read the passage and
make their best guesses. Then when they
listen to the text, they have an actual
listening tasks: to see if they were right
INDONESIA

Do-it
yourself:
Adding gist
tasks
What are
they talking
about?
Some ways to add gist
listeningMain ideas Write the main idea for
the recording on the board, along with
three or four distracters. Often,
subpoints within the conversation
make good distracters. In the second
example above, the main point is “she
feels sick” and the distracters could
be rotten day, go to bed, and take
some aspirin. Students listen and
identify the main idea.
INDONESIA

Do-it
yourself:
Adding gist
tasks
What are
they talking
about?
listeningWhat is the order? When the
listening text is a story, list five or
six events from the story. Students
listen and put the items in order. It
is often useful to tell them which
item is number one to help them
get started. It is also useful to have
at least one item as a distracter
than isn’t used. Otherwise, the last
item is obvious without listening.TEFL-LISTENING-ELIH SUTISNA YANTO-UNSIKA-WEST JAVA-
INDONESIA

Do-it
yourself:
Adding gist
tasks
What are
they talking
about?
listening
Which picture? If pictures are
available (e.g., one from the
particular listening page of your
textbook and distracters from
elsewhere in the book) students
can listen and identify the one
that goes with what they are
hearing.TEFL-LISTENING-ELIH SUTISNA YANTO-UNSIKA-WEST JAVA-
INDONESIA

Listening between the lines: Inference task
Student often find inferring meaning challenging because it requires abstract
processing. Consider the following task:
• Stay to the left
• Elevator
Example
Look at this sign. What do you think it means?
Listen to the dialogue, then circle your answer.
Now read the script to see if you were right.
Man: So the office is, what, on the fifth floor?
Woman: That’s right, fifth floor. Room 503.
Man : Where’s the – oh, there it is. Well, shall we go up?
Woman: Yeah, let’s go.
(Helgesen & Brown, 1994)

From the script, the sign means there is an
elevator. However, neither speaker ever
says the word “elevator”. They don’t need
to. By their talking about the floor the
office is on and talking about going up, the
listener is able to understand what they
are talking about and consequently what
the sign means. For that reason, asking the
learners, “How did you know?” is probably
just as important as whether or not they
got the correct answer.

Do-it
yourself
inference
The following are two places to
start:
Focus on emotion How do
the speakers feel? How do you
know that
Look for background Has
one or more of the speakers
been here/done that/tried this
before? Why do you think so?
INDONESIA

9. Listening Strategies
 According to Willing (1988:7), a learning
strategy is “ a specific mental procedure for
gathering, processing, associating, categorizing,
rehearsing, and retrieving information or
patterned skills.
 Successful listening can also be looked at in
terms of the strategies the listener makes use of
when listening.
 Does the learner focus mainly on the context of
a text, or does he or she also consider how to
listen?
INDONESIA

Cont...
 A focus on how to listen raises the issues of
listening strategies.
 Strategies can be thought of as the ways in
which a learner approaches and manages a
task and listeners can be taught effective ways
of approaching and managing their listening.
INDONESIA

Cont...
Buck (2001:104) identifies two kinds of strategies
in listening:
1. Cognitive strategies: those mental activities related to comprehending and
storing input in working memory or long-term memory for later retrieval;
 Comprehension processes: associated with the processing of linguistic and
non-linguistic input;
 Storing and memory processes: associated with the storing of linguistic and
non-linguistic input in working memory or long-term memory
 Using and retrieval processes: associated with accessing memory, to be
readied for output.
INDONESIA

Cont...
2. Metacognitive strategies: those conscious or
unconscious mental activities that perform an
executive function in the management of cognitive
strategies;
 Assessing the situation: taking stock of conditions surrounding a
language task by assessing one’s own knowledge, one’s available internal
and external resources and the constraints of the situation before
engaging in a task;
 Monitoring: determining the effectiveness of one’s own or another’s
performance while engaged in a task;
 Self-evaluating: determining the effectiveness of one’s own or another’s
performance after engaging in the activity;
 Self-testing: testing oneself to determine the effectiveness of one’s own
language use or the lack thereof.
INDONESIA

Goh (1997,1998) shows how the metacognitive activities of
planning, monitoring, and evaluating can be applied to the
teaching of listening.
INDONESIA
Planning This is a strategy for determining learning objectives and deciding the
means by which the objectives can be achieved.
General
listening
development
Identify learning objectives for listening development
Determine ways to achieve these objectives
Set realistic short-term and long-term goals
Seek opportunities for listening practice
Specific
listening task
Preview main ideas before listening
Rehearse language (e.g. pronunciation) necessary for the task
Decide in advance which aspects of the text to concentrate on
Monitoring This is a strategy for checking on the progress in the course of learning or
carrying out a learning task
General
listening
Consider progress against a set of pre-determined criteria
Determine how close it is to achieving short-term or long-term goals
Check and see if the same mistakes are still being made
Specific
listening task
Check understanding during listening
Check the appropriateness and the accuracy of what is understood and
compare it with new information
Identify the source of difficulty

INDONESIA
Evaluating This is a strategy for determining the
success of the outcome of an attempt to
learn or complete a learning task
General
listening
development
Assess listening progress against a set of
pre-determined criteria
Assess the effectiveness of learning and
practice strategies
Assess the appropriateness of learning goals
and objectives set
Specific
listening task
Check the appropriateness and the
accuracy of what has been understood
Determine the effectiveness of strategies
used the task
Assess overall comprehension of the text

9. Listening Strategies
INDONESIA

Reference
Brown, H.D.2007. Teaching by Principles An Interactive Approach to Language Pedagogy.
New York: Pearson.
Brown, H.D.1994. Principle of Language Learning and Teaching (3rd Eds.). Englewood Cliffs,
NJ: Prentice Hall.
Flowerdew, John& Lindsay Miller.2005.Second Language Listening: Theory and Practice.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Harmer, Jeremy.2007. The Practice of English Language Teaching. 4th eds. Essex:
Longman Pearson
________.2007. How to Teach English. New Eds. Essex: Longman Pearson.
Nation, I.S.P & Jonathan Newton.2008. Teaching ESL/EFL Listening and Speaking. New
York: Routledge
Nunan, D. 2003. Practical English Language Teaching. New York: McGraw-Hill
Richards, C Jack. 2006. Teaching Listening and Speaking From Theory to Practice. New
York: Cambridge University Press.
INDONESIA

Day 8 teaching listening

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Day 8 teaching listening