How to Teach Listening

192 Pages·6.983 MB·English

by  Wilson JJ.

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ISBN 978-1-4058-4775-9
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to the following for permission to reproduce copyright material:
Macmillan Education for an extract from American Inside Out Pre-Intermediate Student's Book by Sue Kay,
Vaughan Jones and Philip Kerr copyright © Sue Kay, Vaughan Jones and Philip Kerr 2002; and Inside Out
Elementary Student's Book by Sue Kay and Vaughan Jones copyright © Sue Kay and Vaughan Jones 2002.
Reproduced with permission; Oxford University Press for pages 56 and 57 from Headway Teacher’s Book
Elementary level by John Soars & Liz Soars, 1993; page 64 from Headway Activity Book Elementary level by Tim
Falla, John Soars & Liz Soars, 1994; 2 figures from Clockwise Classbook Advancedlevel by Amanda Jeffries 2001;
and an extract from Natural English Student's Book Intermediate level by Ruth Gairns & Stuart Redman, 2002
copyright © Oxford University Press; Pearson Education for pages and extracts from the following Advanced
Matters: Student's Bookby Bell 8c Gower, 1999; Cutting Edge: A Practical Approach to Task Based Learning: Advanced
Student Book by Sarah Cunningham & Peter Moor, 2003; Market Leader Upper Intermediate: Coursebook NE
by David Cotton, David Falvey and Simon Kent, 2005; New Cutting Edge Intermediate: Student's Book by Sarah
Cunningham & Peter Moor, 2005; Sky 2 Students Book by Brian Abbs and Ingrid Freebairn, 2005; Intelligent
Business Pre-Intermediate: Course Book by Christine Johnson, 2006; Total English Intermediate: Student's Book
and DVD Pack by Antonia Clare and JJ Wilson, 2006; New Opportunities Pre Intermediately Harris and Mower,
2007 and Total English Advanced: Student's Book and Advanced Workbook by Antonia Clare and JJ Wilson, 2007
copyright © Pearson Education Limited; PFD for the poem ‘Smithereens’ by Roger McGough from In the
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of Roger McGough; Thomson Learning for extracts from Innovations Elementary 1st edition by Dellar and
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Words 8c Music by Eric Patrick Clapton © 1977 EC Music Ltd. All rights administered by Warner/Chappell
Music Ltd, London W6 8BS, Reproduced by permission.
For my parents, David and Elizabeth, with love and thanks.
Contents
Page
Introduction 7
1 Listening in the world and in language learning 9
• The why and how of listening - motivation and mechanics
• The characteristics of spoken English
• Why listening is difficult
• Bottom-up versus top-down approaches to listening
• Why students should listen to English
• The place of listening in language teaching
• Communicative Language Teaching (CLT)
• Hearing English in context
• Listening and language learning - six myths?
2 Listening texts and listening strategies 25
• What makes a good listening text?
• Authentic versus pedagogic
• Strategies good listeners use
• Different types of listening text and different processes required
3 Listening sources, listening tasks 40
• The characteristics of effective listening
• Different sources of listening
o Teacher talk
o Student talk
o Guest speakers
o Textbook recordings
o Television, video, DVD and radio
o Songs
o The Internet
• Types of comprehension exercise
• How to create tasks
4 Pre-listening skills and activities 60
• Listening in the lesson - the sequence
• The role of the teacher
• What a listener needs to know before listening
• Activating schemata/predicting
• Establishing reasons for listening
• Generating questions
• Pre-teaching vocabulary
• Things to avoid during the pre-listening stage
4
5 While-listening skills and activities 81
• Why use while-listening activities?
• Listening for gist
• Listening for detail
• Inferring
• Participating actively
• Note-taking
• Dictation
• Listen and do
6 Post-listening skills and activities 96
• Reflecting
• Checking and summarising
• Discussion
• Creative responses
• Critical responses
• Information exchange
• Problem-solving
• Deconstructing the listening text
• Reconstructing the listening text
7 Preparation and planning 111
• The teacher as planner
• Listening in the syllabus
• Choosing and adapting published materials
• Authentic materials: radio, film/TV, songs
• Anticipating problems
• Young learners
• ESP (English for specific purposes)
• Six essentials for planning listening lessons
8 Listening in the wider context 134
• Integrated listening
• How to assess listening
• Encouraging students to listen outside the classroom
• Self-access and listening in the language lab
• Teacher autonomy; becoming a better teacher of listening
Task File 146
Task File Key 165
Chapter notes and further reading 178
Glossary 184
Index 190
5
Acknowledgements
How to Teach Listening benefited enormously from the input of a wonderful team of
colleagues, friends and family. I am extremely grateful to the following people, who read
early drafts of the manuscript: my father, David Henry Wilson, who has read pretty much
everything I’ve written of consequence since I was three, and always found brilliant ways
to improve it; my sister, Jenny Wilson, a superb editor with an eagle eye; Nick Dawson, my
friend and colleague, for his ideas, injections of humour and dedication (while sitting up
in a hospital bed in the summer of 2007, he insisted on reading a chapter of the unfinished
manuscript); and my wife and best friend, Alexandra Neves, for her perceptive comments
and her support. Thanks also to the anonymous readers for their excellent suggestions,
many of which found their way into the final draft of the book.
I’d like to thank the Pearson team, particularly Jeremy Harmer and Katy Wright for
their invaluable help in shaping the book, and also my outstanding editor, Helena Gomm,
whose expertise, patience and good humour were much appreciated. Thanks are also due to
Kate Goldrick for keeping the whole project on track, and for the behind-the-scenes work
of Sharon Buss, Jane Reeve, David Briscoe and Eddi Edwards. I would finally like to thank
my long-time collaborator on other projects, Antonia Clare, for her encouragement.
/. /. Wilson
New Mexico, USA
6
Introduction
Listening should be impossible. Fluent speech is a motorway pile-up. One word crashes
into the next, and the individual sounds - just like the rear and front ends of cars - are
‘concertinaed’ out of shape. This is why children love saying, ‘I scream for ice cream’,
and why one learner once misheard ‘the stuffy nose can lead to problems’ as ‘the stuff he
knows can lead to problems’. Indeed, when individual words are extracted digitally from
recording tape, thereby taken out of their context of connected speech, they are mainly
unrecognisable, even to native speakers.
Furthermore, the things listeners do - pick up acoustic signals, re-imagine them into
words, turn the words into meaningful sentences, organise the sentences into propositions
using linguistic and non-linguistic contexts - are bewilderingly complex cognitive
processes. When the acoustic signal is in a foreign language, the processes become more
complex still. And yet many language students manage to listen successfully, to maintain
conversations, chat with strangers, follow directions to Harrods and listen to radio soap
operas and lectures on astrophysics.
How to Teach Listening will answer several questions about the skill: Why do we do it?
How do we do it? And the core of the book: How can we (teachers) help others (students)
to get better at it?
The book opens with a general discussion of listening, and the main principles behind
listening in the ELT classroom. This first chapter, ‘Listening in the world and in language
learning’, also gives the reader the background to some of the debates (bottom-up versus
top-down theories, for example) and the research findings that have influenced the way we
conceptualise and speak about listening.
In Chapter 2, ‘Listening texts and listening strategies’, we look at what makes good
listening texts and how students can deal with them. There is also a discussion of the merits
of authentic versus inauthentic listening texts - a topic much in debate in recent years. In
Chapter 3, ‘Listening sources, listening tasks’, we discuss where to find listening material and
what our students might do with it. This chapter also assesses different types of listening
text (from television, coursebooks, the Internet, etc).
We then move on to the very practical core of the book. Chapters 4, 5 and 6 provide
a number of pre-, while- and post-listening skills and activities, plus discussion of the
principles behind them. These chapters should give any teacher, of however limited
experience, the tools to teach a listening lesson competently. Here we deal with a number
of activities and skills, ranging from the long-established - activating schema and listening
for gist - to more innovative ideas stemming from recent developments in ELT.
Chapter 7 covers a number of areas that will concern teachers, such as adapting
materials, anticipating problems and planning the listening component of specialised
courses like business English or English for young learners.
Finally, Chapter 8, ‘Listening in the wider context’, discusses long-term development
for both the teacher and the student. In many ways this is the most important chapter in
the book as it looks at how students can continue to improve their listening outside the
classroom and beyond the duration of any formal course. It also deals with professional
7
development for teachers. The chapter considers issues such as assessing listening, using
the language laboratory and action research.
How to Teach Listening has been written for teachers, teacher trainers, directors of
studies and materials writers involved in teaching English as a foreign language. While the
book caters for teachers with little or no experience in the EFL classroom, more experienced
teachers will find fresh ideas and perspectives on the teaching of listening. In general, How
to Teach Listening assumes that the classroom has some form of equipment to expedite the
use of recorded material, but the book also provides ideas for the many teaching situations
in which power cuts are common, technology is unavailable or untrustworthy, and the
teacher’s voice is the only reliable form of listening input.
Suggested classroom activities are signalled by this icon.
J. J. Wilson
New Mexico, USA
Listening in the
world and in
language learning
We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak. (Epictetus)
■ The why and how of listening ■ The place of listening in
- motivation and mechanics language teaching
■ The characteristics of spoken ■ Communicative Language
English Teaching (CLT)
■ Why listening is difficult ■ Hearing English in context
■ Bottom-up versus top-down ■ Listening and language
approaches to listening learning - six myths?
■ Why students should listen to
English
The why and how of listening - motivation and mechanics
Animals listen either to stay safe or to get food. Frogs can hear predators and other frogs
but nothing else. Kangaroos can hear the scales of a rattlesnake scraping on sand. Bats find
their dinner by squeaking and listening to the echoes bouncing off nearby insects. Humans,
on the other hand, listen not only for the sound of lions growling in the night and babies
crying for food, but also to lectures, grand speeches of all lengths (Fidel Castro’s used to
go on for hours, apparently), idle chit-chat, radio broadcasts, instructions and, of course,
foreign languages. From the small child listening out for the melodious bell of the ice cream
van to the adult tuning in to airport announcements, we listen primarily because there are
things we need to know. We learn to listen and we listen to learn. But humans also listen to
Beethoven and The Beatles, bedtime stories and bad jokes. Why? Because, unlike animals,
humans have another reason to listen: sounds can stimulate the imagination and enrich
our lives.
The primary purposes of human listening, then, are information-gathering and
pleasure, though there are other reasons, such as empathy, assessment and criticism. The
types of listening we engage in on a day-to-day basis can be categorised as follows:
9
Chapter 1
Listening for gist This refers to the occasions when we want to know
the general idea of what is being said, as well as who
is speaking to whom and why, and how successful
they are in communicating their point.
Listening for specific information This refers to the occasions when we don’t need to
understand everything, but only a very specific part.
For example, while listening to a list of delayed trains,
we are only interested in hearing news about one
particular train - the one we want to catch - and so
we listen selectively for this specific information. We
ignore everything else.
Listening in detail This refers to the type of listening we do when,
for example, we need to find errors or determine
differences between one passage and another. We
cannot afford to ignore anything because, unlike
listening to a list of delayed trains, we don’t know
exactly what information will help us to achieve our
task.
Inferential listening This refers to the type of listening we do when we
wish to know how the speaker feels. It may involve
inferring, which is dealt with in more detail in
Chapter 5.
As for the ‘how’ of listening, nothing can happen without sound waves. These are caused
by movement - the whirr of a bat’s wings, the tremor of a violin string, the vibrations of
the vocal chords, all of which move the air around them. Sound waves need conductors
through which to travel, such as air or water (the tagline from the film Alien - ‘In space no
one can hear you scream’ - is literally true because there is no air, water or other conductor
of sound in space). The sound waves are then ‘received’. Unlike spiders, which detect sound
through the hair on their bodies, or grasshoppers, which ‘hear’ with their legs, we have
ears, specially formed for receiving sound waves. The outer ear catches these vibrations,
which then pass through the middle ear, consisting of the ear drum, bones and membranes,
and then through the cochlea (named after the Latin for a shell, because of its snail-like
shape), which is part of the inner ear. Finally, the sound waves are interpreted by the brain,
and if we are really listening (that is, concentrating on the message) as opposed to merely
hearing (when the same process takes place but without a sustained focus on the part of the
recipient), we may then laugh, cry or slouch off to do our homework.
The characteristics of spoken English
In recent years, with the advent of text-messaging and chat rooms, writing has begun to
assume some of the features of speaking: informality, lack of attention to punctuation,
transience, real-time interaction. As leremy Harmer writes, ‘on the Internet, live sessions
are not called chats by accident’. Indeed, the word ‘chat’, for many teenagers and children, is
associated more now with reading and writing than speaking and listening.
10