Teaching Listening

Creating pre- while- post- listening

Differences?

• You have just one go at it
• The presence of stress, rhythm, intonation etc
• Characteristics of fast, natural speech (e.g. weak forms)
• Often the need to process and respond immediately
• Often visual clues but also other noise
• Information is often less densely packed and more repetitive than in reading
• Natural redundancy
• Less complex in grammatical and discourse structure

Principles of teaching listening

• Focus on process
• Combine listening with other skills
• Focus on the comprehension of meaning
• Grade difficulty level appropriately

Principles of teaching listening

• Pre-listening activities
• While listening activities
• Post-listening activities

Pre listening activities

• RATIONALE:
• Motivating students by making the topic relevant and interesting
• Activating existing knowledge for new knowledge to be built upon
• Introducing key vocabulary and key structures, that students need in order to understand the text

Pre-listening activities

• Predicting (eg. “What are these people doing? What are they saying to each other?”)
• Setting the scene - introduce people/ places (activating schemata)
• Gist listening
• Listening for specific information

While listening activities

• No response
• Tick boxes eg.
• Sequencing
• Act
• Draw
• Gap fill
• Take notes

Final thoughts

• Don’t expect learners to remember more than a native speaker would!
• Testing understanding rather than memory
• Think more about the process than the product (wrong answers more interesting...)

Post-listening activities

• Multiple-choice questions (eg.)
• Answering questions
• Note-taking and gap-filling
• Dictogloss (preparation, dictation, reconstruction, correcting)
• Role play
• Debate
• Discussion

Thank you for your attention