7 Types of Activities for Listening with a Purpose

1. Listening for the Main Idea

The purpose of this type of listening is to train students to grasp the main points or
general information presented in the audio. Students often get stuck on a detail, a word or
phrase they don’t understand and fail to see the bigger picture. So, this is a great exercise
for this type of student.

Listening Exercise: Choose a short audio track that presents information that may be
easily summarized, like a news report. Breaking News English offers some excellent
audio tracks for different levels, like this one for example on the war that has been taken
place between the Ethiopia army force and TPLF. Have students summarize the main
points in one or two sentences. It is important to clarify that students aren’t expected to
deliver details, like numbers, names or statistics but rather express the main point in a
concise manner.

2. Listening for Detail

Here, the purpose is to train students to grasp specific information, details that are
relevant, important or necessary. The goal is to help students obtain the detailed
information they may need like hours, dates, names, etc…

Listening Exercise: Biographies tend to have lots of great details. Choose an interesting
one – many things for example economically, socially aspects and organization have
been in several in People page, as well as cool Places to learn about. Prepare a short list
of questions they must read before listening, of the what, when, where, how type.
Students listen for these details, then report their answers after the listening.

3. Listening for a Sequence

Quite often, students receive instructions in English, information they will need to act on
or orders they will need to follow. It is vital that they get the order right, that they
understand the sequence correctly and what each step entails.

Listening Exercise:making coffee has a great how boil it,which materials are
necessary to use it.Have students listen the text as they write the series of steps,or
give them the steps and have them put them in the right order.
 4. Listening for Specific Vocabulary

Listening activities offer great opportunities to teach new words or review vocabulary
previously taught. Here, the purpose is to identify and remember a series of words, which
are usually easily categorized, like types of food, sports, animals, etc…

Listening Exercise: Choose an audio track or song that lists words that may be included
in a category, like wild amimals or domastic animals (great song for young learners and
teens!) You can ask students to listen and write down all of the animals they hear
mentioned, as well as the sounds they make. Or create a matching exercise.

5 .Listening for Cultural Interest

With a carefully selected listening activity, you also have the opportunity to teach
students about a special holiday or tradition that is popular with another culture. The
purpose is to expose the class to this cultural aspect through a listening activity.

Listening Exercise: Choose an audio track that speaks about a popular, Ethiopia holiday
like newyear. Have students listen and answer some comprehension questions. Then ask:
Is this holiday celebrated in their country of origin? If not, is there a festivity that is
similar in their country?

6. Listening for Attitude and Opinions

Sometimes students have to listen for what someone is really saying, not what they’re
literally saying, but what they actually mean. Attitudes, opinions and feelings can all be
conveyed in varying degrees from strong disagreement to mild criticism. Advanced
students should be able to discern different attitudes and positions, as well as identify
how the speaker feels.

Listening Exercise: Listen to this conversation regarding a man’s personal problem.

Apart from the actual loss of hair, what else concerns him? (maybe not being accepted as
he his, being made fun of, etc…actually it is not supportive idea ,it is feeling) How does
his friend react to this problem? (She’s not concerned, doesn’t think it’s a big like him).

7. Listening for Functional Language

Very often, we teach functional language in the ESL classroom, expressions students
can use to accept/decline invitations, give suggestions, give advice, etc… The purpose is
to show students how these expressions are used in a conversation.
 Listening Exercise:In their group students , listen to their conversation among
themselves or between a friend about different listening part or text. What
words/expressions do they use in their conversation. After the listening, students can
practice these expressions in similar conversations.

Characteristics of the listening process

Warming-up

Look back at the list of listening situations in Tasks 3. Judge the situations according to the
following criteria:

● Formal or informal?

●Rehearsed or non-rehearsed?

● Can the listener interact with the speaker or not?

Presentation

Generally speaking, listening in real life has the following characteristics (adapted from Ur,
1996:106-7)

Spontaneity

While some of the things that we listen to are rehearsed, e.g. radio news, television news
and shows, movies, theatre, and some formal lectures, most of the time during an average day
we listen to people speaking spontaneously and informally without rehearsing what they are
going to say ahead of time.

Context
 The context of listening is usually known in real life. In other words, we know the
relationship between the listener and the speaker. Therefore, the situation helps us to predict
what we are going to hear.

Visual clues

we can see their facial expressions, gestures and other body language as well as the
surrounding environment, which is relevant when, for example, people point at objects or in
certain directions. These visual clues help us understand and predict what we hear.

Listener’s response

Most of the listening in daily life allows the listener to respond to the speaker, such as in a
conversation. This means we can interrupt the speakers and ask for repetition or clarification.

Speaker’s adjustment

In most cases, the speaker is talking directly to the listener, so he or she can adjust the way
of speaking according to the listener's reactions. For example, if the listener indicates that he or
she does not understand what is being said, the speaker may rephrase or elaborate.

Principles for teaching listening

There are two major purposes in listening. The first is for social reasons. The second is to
exchange information. The second kind is more difficult and needs more emphasis in the
language classroom.

Focus on process

People must do many things to process information that they are receiving. First they have
to hear what is being said, and then they have to pay attention, and construct a meaningful
message in their mind by relating what they hear to what they already know. It is very
important to design tasks the performance of which show how well the students have
comprehended the listening material.

Combine listening with other skills

 It is important to develop speaking and listening skills together, because most often time
in real life these two skills are needed at the same time.

Focus on comprehending meaning

It is important to design tasks that do not ask learners to remember details that they
wouldn't even remember in their native language. In fact, psycholinguistic studies have shown
that people do not remember the exact form of the message they hear; that is, they don't
remember what they hear word for word, rather, they remember the meaning. The original
message is transferred in the brain to a form where the meaning is preserved, but the original
surface detail is forgotten.

Grade difficult level appropriately

When designing listening tasks, it is very important to grade the difficulty level of the tasks.
There are a large number of factors that affect the difficulty level of listening tasks, but they fall
into three main categories according to Anderson and Lynch (1988:46): l) type of language
used; 2) task or purpose in listening; 3) context in which the listening occurs.

 The bottom-up process

Two models have been set up in the psychological studies of nature of the listening
process: the bottom-up processing model and the up-down processing model. In the bottom-up
model, listening comprehension is believed to start with sound and meaning recognitions.
The top-down process

The alternative top-down view suggests that the listener actively constructs (or, more
accurately, reconstructs) the original meaning of the speaker using incoming sounds as clues. In
this reconstruction process, the listener uses prior knowledge of the context and situation
within which the listening takes place to make sense of what he or she hears. Context of
situation includes such things as knowledge of the topic at hand, the speaker or speakers, and
their relationship to the situation as well as to each other and prior events.
 There are three stages in listening activities for language learners: pre-listening, while
listening, and post-listening, which we will discuss in detail in the next sections

Pr e-listening activities
Predicting

Research in listening has shown that good listeners are good predictors. By helping our
students become better predictors, we are helping them become better listeners. There are
many different activities that can be used to encourage students to predict the content of what
they are about to hear.

If there is a picture with the listening passage, the students can be asked to predict what
the passage will contain before they listen. If there is no picture, perhaps the teacher can find
or draw a picture that fits the text. Visual aids are immensely helpful in aiding students'
comprehension. "They attract students' attention and help and encourage them to focus on the
subject in hand" (Ur, 1984:30).

Setting the scene

Another type of pre-reading activity is to set the scene for the students. As we have said
before, listening to passages in the classroom can be more difficult than listening in real life,
because of the lack of context. So the teacher can help provide the background information to
activate learners' schema, so they will be better prepared to understand what they hear.

Listening for the gist

The third type of pre-listening activity is listening for the gist. It is very important to give
students practice in this area, because in real-life, they will not be able to listen to something
several times. Therefore, it will be impossible for them to catch all the details, so they need to
be comfortable with some ambiguity in listening and realize that they can still learn even when
they do not understand every single word. Listening for the gist is similar to the concept of
skimming a passage in reading. The key is to ask students one or two questions that focus on
the main idea or the tone or mood of the whole passage. Notice that students can answer the
gist questions even though they do not understand every word or phrase in the passage. If the
passage is recorded well, students will be able to guess the answer simply from the tone of
voices of the speakers.

Listening for specific information

There are situations in real life where we listen only for some specific details and ignore
the rest of the entire message. For example, when we listen to the weather report on TV, we
are only interested in the temperature in the city where we live or where we plan to go on the
weekend, or when we are sitting in a train station or an airport, we do not listen to the details
of all the announcements. It is important to expose our students to a variety of types of
listening texts for a variety of purposes so that they will develop a variety of listening strategies
to use for different situations.

While-listening activities
The while-listening stage is the most difficult for the teacher to control, because this is
where the student needs to pay attention and process the information actively. There are many
different kinds of tasks for students to do while they are listening to a passage. Below are just a
few examples.

Nonspecific responses

Recent research has shown that by not giving students any task the first time they listen to
a passage, it can take the anxiety out of listening. This can work well with stories or with any
kind of material that is interesting, humourous, or dramatic, because learners are likely to pay
attention and try to understand in order to enjoy it.

Listen and tick

A large part of what makes a listening task easy or difficult is what the teacher asks the
students to do with the material. If all the students need to do is tick items as they hear them,
the task will be much easier. Below is an example.

Listen and fill

 The students can read along while they listen to something and fill in the blanks with the
words that they hear. It is easy to design this type of tasks. All you need to do is to decide which
words to take out and replace with blanks. You can decide to focus on different types of words,
for example, only nouns, or only function words (prepositions and articles like "an, the, of, for,
on, in") depending on how difficult the passage is and what you you’re your students to practice
listening to.

Listen and guess

The teacher (or a student) can provide oral descriptions of a person, place, thing, action,
etc. Learners write down what they think it is. One game that can be played is to ask the
students to write down descriptions of them after they have learned vocabulary for height,
appearance, and personalities. The teacher can collect the descriptions and then choose 10 or
so to read out loud to the whole class, so that the students can write down silently who they
think is being described. Then, the answers can be confirmed and anyone who guessed all of
them correctly is the "winner".

Post-listening activities

The post-listening stage is where the teacher can determine how well the students have
understood what they listened to, but it is important to design the tasks well.

Multiple-choice questions

The most typical type of post-listening task is the multiple-choice comprehension

question. While this type of task may prepare students to take traditional multiple-choice tests,
it does little to help them develop good listening habits and strategies. The teacher needs to
decide what balance is best for the students, preparing them for traditional multiple-choice
tests or preparing them to function in English in the real world. The following example from
Anderson and Lynch (1988:69) illustrates two types of tasks: one provides test-taking practice
and the other helps the students listen with understanding.

Answering questions
 Instead of multiple-choice questions, open-ended questions can be asked. Some types
might lend themselves nicely to discussion in small groups. The answers to some questions can
be found in the passage, but other types of questions might be asking about the attitude of the
speaker. Was the person angry, upset, happy, excited? Another type of question is an inference
question, where the answer is not stated explicitly, but can only be inferred from the text.

Note-taking and gap-filling

This is a good example of how while-listening and post-listening is combined. First the
students listen to a fairly long text (depending on the level). The students takes notes while
they are listening. When the listening is finished, the students are given two or three minutes to
tidy up the notes. Then the teacher gives the students an incomplete summary of the text that
the students have listened to. The students complete the summary based on their notes. They
do not have to use the original words from the text. This is a good activity where students
reconstruct meaning from what they hear.

s Dictogloss

Dictogloss is a recently discovered listening activity which requires the use of

comprehensive listening skills. It has four stages:

1) Preparation. The teacher prepares the students by briefly talking about the topic
and key words or asking general questions about the text they are going to hear .The teacher
should also make sure students know what to do exactly.

2) Dictation. The teacher dictates the text twice. For the first time, students just listen
and focus on the meaning. For the second time, the students take extensive notes. The
teacher should make sure that the dictation speed is almost at the speed of normal speech.

3) Reconstruction. Based on their notes, the students work in pairs or groups and
reconstruct the text they have heard.

4) Analysis and correction. The students compare their version of the text with the
original, sentence by sentence.
 n traditional classroom settings, listening texts are read aloud by teachers and students
listen to their teachers

What is a syllable?
A syllable is a single, unbroken sound of a spoken (or written) word. Syllables usually contain a
vowel and accompanying consonants. Sometimes syllables are referred to as the ‘beats’ of
spoken language.

Syllables differ from phonemes in that a phoneme is the smallest unit of sound; the number of
syllables in a word is unrelated to the number of phonemes it contains. For example: /b/, /k/,
/t/, /ch/, /sh/, /ee/, /ai/, /igh/, /ear/ are all phonemes. The word ‘chat’ is made up of three
phonemes (/ch/ /a/ /t/). The word ‘light’ is made up of three phonemes (/l/ /igh/ /t/).  However,
both theJump to navigationJump to searchSyllable (disambiguation)

.
 Introduction

Llistening becomes an increasingly vital skill in L2 learning, which explains the

professions’ interest in authentic video materials. However, video-based language
teaching lacks a significant data base (Bacon, 1992; Herron et al., 2006;
Thompson & Rubin, 1996) and few research data are available concerning which
tasks and activities make “video viewing experience more profitable for students”
(Herron, 1994, p.196). How do students develop listening skills by using video
materials? Do they learn best by mere “exposure” to “comprehensible input”
advocated by Krashen (1985)? In contrast, cognitive models advocate L2 learning
in which students are consciously involved (Harrington, 2002); a more recent,
sociocultural approach, places L2 acquisition in a context of social practices
(Warschauer, 1997; Savingnon & Sysoyev, 2002). While there is a recent
improvement from passive, non-interrupted watching of long videotexts to brief,
electronically delivered user- controlled video segments, the focus on pre- and
spost- listening activities still prevails.
 Conclusion

This opening chapter has described the background to the study with
description of applied linguistics, L2 teaching approaches, communicative
competence and the inception of pragmatic competence, along with
Interlanguage pragmatics and pragmatics. It has also discussed the main aim and
the rationale for the study. Finally, definitions have been presented. The next
chapter will review the literature including pragmatic and SLA theories, research
in pragmatics and the main model of instruction.

Conclusions

L2 listening competence is a complex skill that needs to be developed

consciously. It can best be developed with practice when students reflect on the
process of listening without the threat of evaluation. Using listening activities to
only test comprehension leads to anxiety which debilitates the development of
metacognitve strategies. Strategy use positively impacts self-concept, attitudes,
about learning and attributional beliefs about personal control (Borkowski et. al.,
1990). Guiding students through the process of listening not only provides them
with the knowledge by which they can successfully complete a listening task; it
also motivates them and puts them in control of their learning (Vandergrift, 2002).
 INTRODUCTION

With globalization and rapid economic development, there has been a

world wide increasing demand for effective communication in the English
language. Being multilingual is becoming a strategic investment that people from
all walks of life have been expending their time, their effort and their riches to
realize. To communicate with People of other nationalities, cultures and linguistic
backgrounds is a remarkable feat. It involves acquiring a second/ foreign language
(L2), comprehending and being understood in communication and interaction.
Adopting a communicative approach to achieve this undertaking has placed
more emphasis on achieving the functional Component of the L2 along with
its linguistic component. Kasper and Roever (2005) along with Deda (2013)
argue language learners do not only have to develop their Linguistic
competence, but also their pragmatic competence which refers to the function And
the use of the language

Introduction

the syllabus is apart of curriculum. It is aplan of learning experience of a particular subject to

be provided to the learners to meet their need of aparticular standard in ayear of semester.it refers
to the content of what is to be taught and the knowledge skills and attituds which are to be
delibratly grown together with stage specific objects.

The syllabus determines the basic content of instracion in agiven subject and the range of
knowledge and skill which the pupils must acquire and establish in deatail.

Asyllabus is considered as aguid to the in change as well as to the students.it helps the
students to know about the subject in detail why it is apart of their course of study what are the
expectations from students consequences of failure etc.it contains general rules policies
instruction topics covered assignments projects test dates and so on

. 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 stories.

Story

Tell a joke or real-life anecdote, retell a well-known story, read a story from a book; or play a
recording of a story. IFthe 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 one. Note, however, that if no response is required
learners may simply enjoy the music without understanding the words.

Entertainment

Films, s theater, video. As with stories, if the content is really entertaining (interesting,
stimulating, humorous, dramatic) 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 simple list of items.

True/False

The listening passage consists of a number of statements, some of which are true and some
false (possibly based on material the class has just learnt). Learners write ticks or crosses to
indicate whether the statements are right or wrong; or make brief responses (‘True!’ or ‘False!’
for example

Types of listing text

Definition of listening text

 Listening texts can be classified according to the contents, complexity, authenticity, sphere,
theme, quantity, etc. The linguistic and thematic level of listening input and its adequacy to
general teaching purposes or concrete goals of each lesson are defined by a sort of criteria.e); or
they may stay silent if the statements are right, say ‘No!’ if they are wrong. In traditional
classroom settings, listening texts are read aloud by teachers and students listen to their
teachers