MODULE 4

The Receptive Macro Skills – Listening

Prepared by:
BSEd-2, English
Group 1 Yellow
What is Listening?
 Listening is the active intellectual process of decoding,
interpreting, understanding, and evaluating messages.
 It is a mode of communication just as important as the
other modes like speaking, reading, and writing.
 Some educators claim that listening is the most
neglected skill in the classroom because there is a
serious lack of programs and materials on developing
listening skills.
What is Listening?
 Nevertheless, the art of listening is considered as the
ability to understand and recall the spoken word.
 This process is a skill and when treated as such, it had
been discovered that listening can be improved through
training.
 Once people became aware of the importance of good
listening, they are likely to show some improvement
almost automatically.
What is Listening?
 People listen to a great deal of language for two
reasons: interest and usefulness.
 Very often, they listen to something because it
interests them such as listening to favorite radio
program that they consider stimulating. The categories
of interest include listening for enjoyment, pleasure,
and intellectual stimulation.
What is Listening?
 Sometimes, though, it is the usefulness of the text
listened to which causes people to give it full
attention. For instance, one may listen to instructions
given in a manual because that will enable him or her
to operate a machine.
What is Listening?
 Efficient listening carries certain responsibilities for
you as listener. The first one is to develop an
awareness of all carriers of meaning. In adult
communication, words are the most widely used to
convey meaning. There are, however, features like
stress, intonation, rhythm, and body language that
can be used for the same purpose.
What is Listening?
 He always dominates the discussion.
 He always dominates the discussion.
 He always dominates the discussion.

The meaning is affected by where the stress lies

What is Listening?
 Anna bakes the cake. (It is Anna, rather than anyone
else, who Bakes the cake.)
 Anna bakes the cake. (The action is emphasized. Anna
is baking the cake, rather than buying it.)
 Anna bakes the cake. (It is emphasized that Anna is
baking a cake, not a cupcake or brownies.)

The meaning is affected by where the stress lies.

What is Listening?
 Body language does not even have to be explained, but
when you call someone a fool with a scowl and use the
same term with a smile for a friend, meaning changes.
 You have to learn to be sensitive to these features of
language that are useful in your listening
comprehension.
Why Listen?
1. It stimulates better communication between the
parties involved. An attentive listener encourages the
speaker to say more. It builds respect and loyalty and
makes people important.
2. It contributes to and promotes better responses among
the members of the group. It facilitates the meeting of
minds.
3. It makes you appreciate and enjoy what you hear. It
increases and expands the range of one’s enjoyment
of life. It gives pleasure and even comfort.
Why Listen?
4. It assists you in understanding what is being said.
With a listener’s full attention, understanding can be
achieved in no time. Hence, it saves you time as well
as effort.
5. It helps you make better decisions. It provides inputs
as bases for decision-making.
6. It enables you to react what is said. You are able to
agree or disagree, to add something, if not ask
questions about what is being said.
Why Listen?
7. It enlarges one’s experience. Listening broadens and
enriches the mind.
8. It enables you to correct your own problems of
vocalization. Listening to your voice gives you the
opportunity to realize your faults and defects which in
time offers you chances to improve.
9. It decreases the tensions of life.
Purpose of listening
1. To obtain information or knowledge. You listen to
learn and benefit from the experience of others.
Understanding and retention are the primary goals.
2. To appreciate and enjoy what is said. You are pleased
with what you hear.
3. To be clarified and make intellectual judgments, fair
criticisms, and to evaluate ideas.
Purpose of listening
4. To draw inspiration.
5. To improve oneself.
Developing Efficient Listening Habits
1. Concentrate on the task of listening.
2. Guard against prejudices.
3. Don’t criticize the speaker.
4. Avoid emotional reactions.
5. Focus on main ideas.
6. Take down notes.
The Listening Process
1. The Physical or the Attention Stage
2. The Logical or Auditory Discrimination Stage
3. The Semantic or the Comprehension Stage
4. The Retention Stage
The Physical or the Attention Stage
o Listening begins with the ability to hear or catch
sounds with the use of the auditory system.
o Therefore, a person must be in the position or right
mood to listen.
o Likewise, the setting must be conducive to listening.
o Then, can mental concentration be expected.
The Logical or Auditory Discrimination
Stage
o Sounds caught by the hearing mechanisms are
transmitted to the brain to be sorted out, interpreted,
and given meaning.
o It involves the listener’s ability to recognize,
categorize, and discriminate sounds analyzing them on
the basis of the attributes of voice quality, pitch,
volume, and rate. It also includes a listener grasp of
vocabulary.
The Semantic or the Comprehension
Stage
 This is the process of translating and interrelating
sounds into thought symbols. This involves the
listener’s ability to understand and give meaning to
what he hears at the denotative and connotative levels
and to respond to the messages received. This has also
something to do with the affective context of language.
The listener’s feelings and emotions will affect his
reaction and interaction with others.
The Retention Stage

 This refers to the listener’s ability to retain/remember

the ideas conveyed and later to use these ideas in
reacting with others in a definite speech setting.
Types of Listening

1. Active listening as contrasted to passive listening.

2. Serious listening requires concentration of thought
Active listening as contrasted to passive
listening
 The former which is a skill requires effort on the part
of the listener while the other which is a natural
process does not.
Serious listening requires concentration
of thought
Critical or Discriminative Listening. It has four levels,
to wit:
a.1. attentive listening – is characterized with
concentration of thought
a.2. retentive listening - retains knowledge
a.3. reflective listening - reflects on ideas heard
a.4. reactive listening - with a readiness to react
Social Listening. This may be also classified into the
following:
b.1. appreciative listening - listening for pleasure
b.2. conversational listening - listening to maintain
good relationships
b.3. courteous listening - means more than just
being silent
Levels of Listening

1. Ignoring.
2. Pretending.
3. Selective Listening.
4. Attentive Listening.
5. Sympathetic Listening
6. Emphatic Listening
TEACHING LISTENING
 Before Listening
 During Listening
 After Listening
Before Listening
 Prepare your learners by introducing the topic and
finding out what they already know about it. A good
way to do this is to have a brainstorming session and
some discussion questions related to the topic. Then
provide any necessary background information and
new vocabulary they will need for the listening
activity.
During Listening
 Be specific about what students need to listen for. They
can listen for selective details or general content, or for
an emotional tone such as happy, surprised, or angry. If
they are not marking answers or otherwise responding
while listening, tell them ahead of time what will be
required afterward.
After Listening
 Finish with an activity to extend the topic and help
students remember new vocabulary. This could be a
discussion group, craft project, writing task, game, etc.
The following ideas will help make your listening
activities successful.
Ideas to make your listening activities
successful.
 Noise. Reduce distractions and noise during the
listening segment.
 Equipment. If you are using a cassette player, make
sure it produces acceptable sound quality.
 Repetition. Read or play the text a total of 2-3 times.
Tell students in advance you will repeat it.
 Content. Unless your text is merely a list of items, talk
about the content as well as specific language used.
Ideas to make your listening activities
successful.
 Recording Your Own Tape. Write appropriate text (or
use something from your textbook) and have another
English speaker read it onto tape.
 Video. You can play a video clip with the sound off and
ask students to make predictions about what dialog is
taking place.
 Homework. Give students a listening task to do
between classes.
DIAGNOSTIC APPROACH
Teaching listening
 Typically, teachers do some prelistening and then have
students listen to the text and perform a variety of
tasks.
 Teachers evaluate students’ comprehension based on
the correctness of their responses and proceed to the
next activity. Implicit here is the focus on the result,
the product of listening in the form of correct answers.
 This approach tests students’ listening comprehension,
informing them that they failed at certain points, but
does little to teach how to listen, that is, to help them
understand what went wrong with their listening and
how it could be repaired.
DIAGNOSTIC APPROACH
 Field (2008) calls for a diagnostic approach to
listening, which allows teachers and students to attend
to listening difficulties and practice strategies to
diminish them.
 Characteristics of the approach are described in the
following sections
Using Incorrect Answers to Detect
Weaknesses, and Designing Activities to
Help
 How often do teachers rush to supply a “correct”
answer when a student fails to respond to a listening
task?
 Teachers may play a recording several times and ask
for other students’ input to make things right, missing
an opportunity to determine the reason for the listening
error.
Using Incorrect Answers to Detect
Weaknesses, and Designing Activities to
Help
 To revise this approach, a teacher could identify
problems by making a note of students’ lapses in
comprehension as she checks their answers.
 She would then discuss with students how they arrived
at a certain answer, what prevented them from
understanding parts of the text, and what could be done
to improve their listening facilities.
Using Incorrect Answers to Detect
Weaknesses, and Designing Activities to
Help
 Finally, she would follow up with activities that target
specific listening problems that emerged during the
discussion.
 The aim is to increase students’ awareness of their
listening processes and reinforce effective listening
behaviors they can use when they face these problems
again.
Avoiding Listening Tasks That Require
Memorization
 Understanding a message does not mean remembering
every single detail, so students’ inability to recall
information does not always signal a lack of
comprehension.
 Yet some exercises—namely, multiple-choice and very
specific questions—test listeners’ memory skills rather
than focusing on the listening process.
Avoiding Listening Tasks That Require
Memorization
 Instructors should try to include various types of
comprehension questions that discuss the content of
the text as well as invite students to examine their
listening performance
Helping Students Develop a Wider
Range of Listening Strategies
 Ineffective listeners rely on a single strategy (e.g.,
focusing on individual sentences, missing the
relationship between ideas) without changing or
adapting it.
 To cope with difficult texts more effectively, students
should be exposed to a variety of strategies.
Explaining, modelling, and regularly practicing with
students how to set goals, plan tasks, self-monitor, and
evaluate helps them control their listening.
Helping Students Develop a Wider
Range of Listening Strategies
 Anticipating content, inferring, guessing, and
recognizing redundancies improves specific listening
problems.
 Encouraging interaction with classmates and native
speakers through listening expands communicative
contexts and enhances self-confidence.
Helping Students Develop a Wider
Range of Listening Strategies
 Effective strategy use does not happen by itself.
Although the very idea of strategies may seem to be
too abstract to students, teachers can help them
appreciate the importance of strategies by including
activities with a focus on their listening process.
 For example, students could discuss (in small groups
or with the class) what they did to prepare for listening,
follow the text, identify key points, and so forth.
Helping Students Develop a Wider
Range of Listening Strategies
 Or the class could share personal experiences with
various listening tasks and develop a master list of
effective strategies for different types of texts, adding
to it as their strategic competence grows.
 To introduce a strategy, the teacher needs to get
students to realize that there is a problem and a way
of dealing with it.
Helping Students Develop a Wider
Range of Listening Strategies
 He or she could model the strategy by explaining what
she does and why it is helpful in this particular case,
and provide multiple opportunities to practice in
different listening situations.
 Depending on the task, he or she also could remind
students to be flexible in their choice of strategies and
to employ strategic listening outside of the class.
Differentiating Between Listening Skills

 By identifying a set of distinctive behaviors that work

together toward comprehension, teachers allow
learners yet another glimpse into the listening process.
 Listeners may be used to employing microskills in
their native language, but specific activities need to be
designed to help them transfer those skills into a new
language.
Differentiating Between Listening Skills

 Although each skill could be practiced separately, the

key to skills instruction is not to treat them as a laundry
list of discrete practice points that students get or do
not get.
 Rather, skill training should become a part of a larger
listening proficiency picture, inviting students to try
new behaviors in a variety of contexts and tasks.
Providing Top-Down and Bottom-Up
Listening Practice
Bottom-up processing helps students recognize lexical
and pronunciation features to understand the text.
Because of their direct focus on language forms at the
word and sentence levels, bottom-up exercises are
particularly beneficial for lower level students who need
to expand their language repertoire
To develop bottom-up processing,
students ccould be asked to:
 distinguish individual sounds, word boundaries, and
stressed syllables
 identify thought groups listen for intonation patterns in
utterances
 identify grammatical forms and functions
 recognize contractions and connected speech
 recognize linking words
Providing Top-Down and Bottom-Up
Listening Practice
Top-down processing relies on prior knowledge and
experience to build the meaning of a listening text using
the information provided by sounds and words. To arrive
at a meaning of a text, the listener draws on her
knowledge of the context, topic, speakers, situation, and
the world, matching it to the aural input.
Top-down listening skills include:

 listening for gist, main ideas, topic, and setting of the

text
 listening for specific information
 sequencing the information
 prediction
 guessing
 inferencing
Providing Top-Down and Bottom-Up
Listening Practice
 Skilled listeners simultaneously engage in top-down
and bottom-up processing, using both types of skills to
construct meaning. Although pedagogically people
often practice them separately because of their
distinctly different focus, they can be addressed within
the context of a single listening text.
THANK YOU FOR
LISTENING!