ER I AL TO DEVE L

T
A OP
M LISTENING
SKILLS
By : riky ariansyah
intan
 aspects of designing reading materials that relate to
listening

• the use of brainstorming techniques to activate schemata as a

pre-listening activity

• the need for ‘comprehension’ questions which involve higher-level

thinking skills
 Audio input
Audio input is connected speech, which means that boundaries between
words (or ‘chunks’ functioning as one unit, such as you know and I mean) have to be
identified before meaning processing can commence. There are a number of char-
acteristic phonological features of connected speech which affect word recognition.
These include:
• blurred word boundaries (in common ‘minimal pairs’ such as this guy and the sky)
• contracted forms (he’d gone, he’d go)
• elision (gimme, wanna)
• weak forms (e.g. must realised as /məs/)
• varied intonation patterns
• speaker accent
 rocesss approac
A p h
As with reading, the process approach brings with it a focus on the micro-skills
involved in processing input and the strategies learners can employ for this.
Where coursebooks do take a process approach to listening, one technique is to
tackle the difficulties head on, giving learners controlled practice in word-for-word
decoding and/or raising awareness of features of connected speech. This is done rou-
tinely in the face2face series (Redston and Cunningham) in the ‘help with listening’
sections, as in this example from the Intermediate – Student’s Book:
 rocesss approac
A p h
example from the Intermediate – Student’s Book:
 rocesss approac
A p h
Another aspect of the process approach to developing listening skills is to address
them from the opposite perspective: strategy training. Representative of this, in fact,
is Redston and Cunningham’s above-mentioned technique in face2face: awareness-
raising of features of speech, which is effectively early-stage strategy training.
Cultivating this type of ‘metacognitive knowledge’, which includes awareness of
their own individual listening practices, can help learners develop conscious strate-
gies for dealing with listening.
 process to prod
rom uct
F
The product and process approaches are not mutually exclusive in designing listen-
ing materials,In fact, the classic ‘product’ technique of com-prehension checking can be
used as a sort of ‘way stage’ to a process approach if we refocus it as a diagnostic activity
in which the teacher seeks to establish not whether the ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect’ answers
were arrived at, but how (Field 2008), through raising learners’ awareness of techniquest
they use; thus transitioning towards skill building – rather than skill testing . It is useful,
there-fore, to look at traditional techniques of the product approach, principally compre-
hension work, to see how they can be given a ‘process gloss’, whereby understanding
is checked in more indirect and communicative ways.
THANK YOU ! !