Teaching Listening

By
Dr. Mohammed Ghawi
 Basic Concepts
• Listening: The ability to understand words received through the ears.
• Top-down Listening: Listening for general information.
• Bottom-up Listening: Listening for specific information.
• Intensive Listening: Listening in a classroom under the close guidance of the
teacher.
• Extensive Listening: Listening outside the classroom for pleasure.
• Redundancy: Redundant utterances may take the form of repetitions, false
starts, rephrasing, self-corrections, elaborations, and meaningless additions
such as "I mean; you know“
• Noise: Outside disturbance, temporary lack of attention, mispronounced
words, lack of knowledge.
 Importance of Teaching
Listening
• Frequency of listening in language use and EFL textbooks.
• Exposing students to varieties of native English.
• Acquainting students with various moods, accents, intonation
patterns.
• Saving teacher's time and energy in the EFL class.
 Needed Listening Skills
• Distinguishing English sounds (p/b, e/i, f/v, s/z, etc.)
• Identifying intonation and stress patterns (rising/falling; stressed/unstressed
words).
• Recognizing some grammatical signals:
Plural nouns: books, churches
Third person singular of verbs: sleeps, watches
Regular past tense of verbs: walked, lived, invited
• Recognizing collocation (car: driver, license, garage)
• Distinguishing between spoken and written language (redundancy, noise,
colloquialism, contractions, reductions in vowel quality)
• Predicting what people are going to talk about.
• Guessing the meaning of unknown words from context.
• Identifying relevant points and discarding irrelevant information.
• Retaining relevant information by note-taking and summarizing.
• Inferring meaning.
 Types of Listening Activities
1. Listening for Perception:
At the sentence level
• Repetition: choral, group and
individual repetition
• Identifying stress (I am terribly
tired)
• Identifying intonation
(rising/falling)
At the word level
• Repetition: choral, group and
individual repetition
• Which category: man (1); men (2)
[Teacher: pen, cat, rap, net]
• Minimal pairs: same or different
(pin/ pin; pin/bin)
• The right word: but (bat, bet, but)
2. Listening for Comprehension:

• Listening and making no response (identifying the described pictures

among a set of pictures)
• Listening and making short responses (T/F exercises)
• Listening and making longer responses (comprehension questions,
summarizing, translation, prediction, etc.)
 Stages of a Listening Activity

Pre- Post-
listening While- listening
listening
 :Pre-listening .1

• Brainstorming: A discussion of the listening topic based on titles,

photographs, etc.
• Discussion: Exchange of ideas and opinions about the topic.
• Games: Games that involve key words in the listening activity.
• Guiding Questions: Questions that help the learners exploit the
listening passage or dialog.
 2. While-listening
• Comparing
• Following instructions
• Filling in gaps
• Prediction:
• Repetition
• Ticking off items
• Information gap
• Paraphrase
• Sequencing
• Information search
• Matching
• Jigsaw listening
 3. Post-listening
• Answering comprehension questions
• Problem-solving
• Summarizing
• Writing follow-up activities
• Speaking follow-up activities
The Role of a Teacher in a Listening Activity
 1. Be prepared and organized
• Try out the audio equipment.
• Check audio quality.
• Use authentic recordings whenever possible.
• Make sure the topic is related to students interests.
• Use different types of audio materials.
• Make sure students understand what they are supposed to do.
• Let students compare answers in pairs or groups before whole class
discussions.
• Pause the recording to give students time to answer.
• Specify adequate time for listening
 2. Alleviate tension
• Tell students they don’t have understand everything.
• Tell students to focus on what they are asked to do only.
• Make sure the task is appropriate for students’ level.
• Play the recording the first time without assigning any task.
• Play the recoding in sections.
• Use activities that encourage students to share information.
Thank You