MINISTERIO DE EDUCACIÓN

DIRECCIÓN GENERAL DE SECUNDARIA

DIRECCIÓN DE SECUNDARIA REGULAR Y A DISTANCIA
DIRECCION DE PROGRAMACION EDUCATIVA

MÓDULO AUTOFORMATIVO DE LA ASIGNATURA

DE INGLÉS

English as a Second Language

UNIT I
“ELT-Receptive Skills, listening”
 INTRODUCTION.
2
The General Direction of Secondary Education Office of the Ministry of Education of
Nicaragua, continues strengthening the methodological, didactic and linguistic skills of EFL/ESL
teachers that are in charge of teaching English subject at the secondary level. To do so, interactive
English Language Teaching Modules will be conducted in order to empower teachers with new trends
in ELT. This training will take place in each municipality during the EPI meetings.

The present training has been designed to strengthen teaching competencies of secondary school
English teachers which will have a great impact in the learning of English as a foreign and second
language by enhancing future classroom practices.

At the end of this module, Teacher will:

❒ Reflect and modify their practices when teaching listening as a receptive skill.
❒ Use cognitive and metacognitive strategies in their listening lessons.
❒ Plan a listening lesson based on appropriate frameworks.
❒ Integrate top-down and bottom-up process when selecting learning activities.
❒ Interact with other teachers to support learning.
❒ Design didactic meaningful teaching material to facilitate the learning of English as a second
language.
❒ Teach specific listening strategies that facilitates comprehension.
❒ Use a communicative approach in the teaching of listening as a receptive skill.

Plan Temático

Total de horas Horas de trabajo Total

N° Temas y subtemas a desarrollar presenciales independiente de
Teóricas Prácticas horas
Receptive Skills (Listening) 3 3
1 ❒ Listening as comprehension.
❒ Listening as acquisition.
 ❒ Listening processes (top down/bottom
up)
❒ Cognitive/metacognitive strategies 3
❒ Planning a listening lesson. (PDP)

2 Receptive Skills (Reading)

❒ Reading comprehension
❒ Reading processes (top down/bottom
3 3
up).
❒ Reading skills (scanning/skimming)
❒ Planning a Reading lesson. (PDP)
3 Productive skills (Writing)
❒ Writing as a process (pre-writing,
drafting, revising, editing, publishing)
3 3
❒ Writing conventions
❒ Writing prompts
❒ Planning a writing lesson.
4 Productive skills (Speaking)
❒ Core speaking skills
❒ Speaking Process: Before, during, after
3 3
❒ Speaking framework (ECRIF)
❒ Speaking activities
❒ Planning a speaking lesson.
5 Estrategias de Evaluación /
Assessment
“Fair of the recetive and productive 3 3
skills strategies”

Total 15 15

Diagnostic Activity.

Dear EFL/ESL teacher, read the situation below and critically justify your response to the following
questions based on your expertise and teaching experience.

Imagine you are teaching a low intermediate group of students (A2 level). The main theme of the unit is
about “Descriptions of people”. To develop this unit, you are preparing the teaching material and you found
a video that is related to the topic. You want to use the video as a listening practice in class. (adapted from
Ramirez, 2021)

Please explain:

1. Would you have the listening activity with a video format (mp4) or an audio format (mp3)? Why?
______________________________________________________________________________
2. At what stage of the Lesson would you use the video or the audio?
______________________________________________________________________________ 4

3. What activities would you do before playing the listening?

______________________________________________________________________________

Discuss:
1- What happen in your mind when you listen? To what extent are you aware of the processes?
2- Think of different types of things you have listened to. What things have you listened to today?
3- What is your teaching philosophy regarding Listening? How should listening be taught?
4- Why is listening more difficult than reading?

1.1 What is listening?

Listening is, certainly, part of a daily routine. This skill may be presented in numerous ways and
requires from a person both to receive and understand incoming information. For instance, through
a conversation at work, when watching TV, or in a CD music we listen to. There is much
information received and understood due to the existence of prior knowledge. Understanding what
we listen is the result of active construction occurring at all levels of language (sounds, grammar,
and lexis and discourse structure) and context (the topic, the participants, the communication
purpose and the place or setting for interaction).

Listening starts when the first speech signal is recognized and it may go on long after the input or
spoken information has finished (Ramirez, 2021). Based on what it is stated above, it is concluded
that listening may follow the stages:

Perception: Decoding or Recognition

01 Matching the sound to words already known.

Parsing: Analyzing decoding information into larger units

02 (grammar structures or lexicon)

Utilization: Relationship between phonological, lexical and

grammatical information and the listener’s prior knowledge.
03
 Anderson (1995)- Cognitive model 5

1.2 WHAT DOES LISTENING INVOLVE?

Working Memory:

The working memory plays a crucial role in language comprehension (Miki, 2012). The Working
Memory can be defined as a limited capacity store for retaining information for a brief period while
performing mental operations on that information. For Graesser and Britton (1996, as cited in
Ramirez 2021), the listening cognitive process is inhibited by the restrictions of memory. They
highlight that “text understanding is the dynamic process of constructing coherent representations and
inferences at multiple levels of text and context within the bottleneck of a limited capacity working
memory.”

The Attention span: Listening is a receptive, but active skill that entails
paying attention to information that is being heard. Poor listeners may face
concentration issues (EnglishClub, 2022). Based on the processing model,
Attention plays an important role to decode the meaning of an oral text by
analyzing phonological, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic inputs
(Wolfgramm, Suter, & Goksel, 2016)

Phonological Awareness:

When listening to a spoken text, phonological features such as stress,

intonation, pronunciation of words or sentences and units of sounds may
be needed in order to have a full understanding. Therefore, building
phonological knowledge is paramount to develop listening
comprehension. Phonological awareness can be defined as the ability to
recognize units of sounds and reflect or manipulate those units of sound (Li, Cheng, & Kirby,
2012). According to Swartz (2019) “phonemic awareness is the ability to notice, think about, and
work with the individual sounds in spoken words”
 6
2. LISTENING PROCESSES

Discuss:

1- What types of background information help you make sense of what you listen?

2- When you listen to an oral text, do you use top-down or bottom-up processing?

3- In your teaching practices of listening, what process do you teach/use the most?

TOP-DOWN PROCESS BOTTOM-UP PROCESS

Prior knowledge Decoding Vocabulary

schemata
Experience Sounds Grammar

Imagine you listen to a conversation about health issues. To understand the main ideas or details
of it, you may use Top-down and Bottom-up processing. While using Top-down, you might remember
your personal experience related to health issues or prior knowledge (words you know about health
issues). On the other hand, in a Bottom-up processing, you might start by decoding (understanding the
sounds, words, structures of language) by classifying the information (adjective, nouns, verbs) until you
achieve comprehension.

Top-down: involves the use of background knowledge in understanding the meaning of a message. It
may integrate previous knowledge about the topic, and the situational or contextual knowledge in the
form of “schemata”. 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 7
information used in a given situation. Bottom-up: involves using the incoming information to
understand the message. We begin with the received data that is analyzed as successive levels of
organization – sounds, words, clauses, sentences, texts–until meaning is derived. Comprehension is
viewed as a process of decoding. According to Nunan (2003) with bottom-up processing, students start
with the component parts: words, grammar, and the like. Having an interactive processing, which means
the integration of both process Top-down and Bottom-up, provides a setting for interpretation and
activates the background knowledge.

3. LISTENING AS COMPREHENSION.

Typically, EFL/ESL teachers use listening tasks to help learners understand main
ideas and details of the spoken text. It is thought that the main function of listening
in a second or foreign language is to facilitate understanding (Richards J. C., 2008).
For Listening as comprehension Top Down Strategies play a fundamental role. It
goes from global to more specific information. For instance, students can predict
content of the listening and use various material such as pictures, or key words, discussing about the
topic, using prior knowledge and experience to understand and set a context. Listeners constructs
meaning through using cues from context. Top-down Strategies to develop Listening as Comprehension
may involve: identifying the topic, identifying the speaker, making prediction, reviewing vocabulary,
brainstorming information and from existing knowledge, among others.

4. LISTENING AS ACQUISITION.
Another crucial role of Listening, beyond comprehension, is acquisition
of language, facilitating the learning of small units of language such as
lexicon or structures. It emphasizes that we can learn the language from
the input (oral text) by noticing the

language elements that are presented in the input (Ramirez, 2021). For
instance, we sometimes listen to conversations and first identify how the
speakers use or pronounce specific words. Then, we start using them
because we acquired the meaning, form and use. In this type of Listening,
Bottom-up Strategies are fundamental. There are two important activities here: Noticing activities and
Restructuring activities. Noticing refers to returning to the listening texts for language awareness. For
example, students can listen again to an audio, recording or video in order to: identify pronunciation
patterns, complete scripts with missing words, phrases or structures in study. On the other hand,
 Restructuring refers to producing oral or written language that involves items from the listening text. It
can include reading aloud scripts and changing information, or dialogue writing with items from listening 8
text.

5. STRATEGIES IN LISTENING.

When teaching receptive skills such as Listening, the use of varied strategies is fundamental for a
successful and meaningful understanding of a listening task (Richards, 2016). These strategies may be
devided into Cognitives, metacognitive and social affective strategies. In one hand, Cognitive strategies
focuses on activities used by learners in order to understand a specific linguistic input and get the knowledge
(Serri, Boroujeni, & Hesabi, 2012). On the other hand, Metacognitive strategies refers to the conciousness
of performing an activity or task. They deal with knowing about learning. That is, “Learners learn how to
learn”. Finally, social affective strategies refers to the engagement of the listener to interact with the
speaker or the listening task (Larry Vandergrift, 2018). These strategies may include asking for clarification,
cooperating or anxiety reduction. (Based on Goh, 2002; Vandergrift, 2003; and Kondo and Yang, 2004)

6. LISTENING SKILLS
Listening is an important component of communication. It requires much attention and effort to
achieve understanding. Therefore, the development of important skills becomes paramount for its
success. According to Ahmed (2015), some essentials skills teachers should develop in students are
predicting content, listening for gist, detecting signposts, listening for details, and Inferring
meaning.

Predicting, in one hand, is a skill that integrates the

prior knowledge, the expected information from an oral text and
the context. On the other hand, detecting signposts help
learners to follow the structures of an oral text by identifying
connector words such as: first of all, later, another thing is,
among others (Ahmed, 2015). While listening for the gist
refers to paying attention to the main idea of the whole message,
listening for details focuses on specific information based on
the oral text. Finally, inferring meaning refers to deducing the
meaning of a word taking into account the context.

7. PLANNING A LISTENING LESSON.

 Three important stages are typically followed when planning a listening lesson: Pre-Listening,
During-Listening and Post-Listening. The Pre-Listening stage prepare learners through a set of 9
activities that activates schema, or prior knowledge. In the During Listening stage, learners are
required to show their understanding by focusing on exercises to identify the gist, specific details,
sequence, attitude, etc. Finally, in the Post listening, learners produce a response (oral or written).
Learners are provided with opportunities to internalize what they have heard (Algeria Tesol, 2022).

HOMEWORK

1- Look at the listening activities from the link below, are they Listening as comprehension or
listening as acquisition activities? Why? Justify your response.
https://www.cambridgeenglish.org/learning-english/activities-for-learners/b1l080-tastes

What are they talking about? ____________________________________

Where to go for dinner. ______________________________________

What to eat for breakfast. ______________________________________

2- In group of 3, design and plan a listening lesson taking into account the important processes,
strategies and skills. You must also include activities for both, listening as comprehension and
listening as acquisition.

o Design Learning and teaching material

o Present it to the class as a Demo.

Reference
Algeria Tesol. (2022). Retrieved from PDP Framework:
https://sites.google.com/a/algeriatesol.org/algeriatesol/frameworks/pdp-pre-duringpost/pdp-
framework/pdp-framework

EnglishClub. (2022). EnglishClub. Retrieved from https://www.englishclub.com/listening/

Larry Vandergrift, J. C. (2018). Wiley Online Library. Retrieved from Listening to Learn
versus Learning to Listen: https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118784235.eelt0567
Li, M., Cheng, L., & Kirby, J. R. (2012). Retrieved from
https://www.oise.utoronto.ca/gevalab/UserFiles/File/20142015_Publications/2012_Li_C
heng_Kirby.pdf 10

Miki, S. (2012). Working Memory as a Factor Affecting L2 Listening Comprehension Sub

Skills. Retrieved from https://www.google.com/url?
sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&ua
ct=8&ved=2ahUKEwj1qryS5K32AhUzQjABHQoKCsgQFnoECAMQAQ&url=https%3A
%2F %2Fkumadai.repo.nii.ac.jp%2F%3Faction%3Drepository_action_common_download
%2 6item_id%3D26303%26item_no%3D1%26attrib

Nunan, D. (2003). PRACTICAL ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHING. Singapore: McGraw-

Hill.

Richards, J. (2016, January 15). World of Better Learning. Retrieved from

https://www.cambridge.org/elt/blog/2016/01/15/teaching-listening-5-listeningstrategies/

Richards, J. C. (2008). Teaching Listening and Speaking From theory to Practice.

Serri, F., Boroujeni, A. J., & Hesabi, A. (2012). ACADEMY PUBLISHER. Retrieved from
Cognitive, Metacognitive, and Social/Affective Strategies in Listening Comprehension and
Their Relationships with Individual Differences:
https://www.academypublication.com/issues/past/tpls/vol02/04/28.pdf

Swartz, R. (2019). Early Learning Project. Retrieved from Learn by Listening to Language:
Build Phonemic Awareness Skills:
https://illinoisearlylearning.org/blogs/growing/learnbylistening/

Wolfgramm, C., Suter, N., & Goksel, E. (2016). ReasearchGate.

doi:10.1080/10904018.2015.1065746