Chapter 1: Introduction to Listening

1

Chapter 1: Introduction to Listening




















1.1 Preamble
1.2 What is listening?
1.3 Listening and other language skills
1.4 Why is listening difficult?
1.5 Two perspectives of listening
1.6 Bottom-up processing
1.7 Top-down processing
1.8 Bottom-up and top-down processing


Upon completion of this chapter, you should be able to:
Define what is listening
Explain why listening is difficult
Discuss the difference between listening as comprehension and
listening as acquisition
Compare bottom-up and top-down processing in listening


C
Chapter 1: Introduction to Listening
Chapter 2: Teaching Listening
Chapter 3: Listening Activities
Chapter 4: Assessing Listening Skills
5 Chapter 5: Introduction to Speaking
Chapter 6: Teaching Speaking
Chapter 7: Speaking Activities
Chapter 8: Assessing Speaking Skills
Chapter 9: Listening-Speaking Connection



Chapter 1: Introduction to Listening

2




This chapter introduces readers to listening and and how listening is related to other language
skills such as reading, writing and speaking. Focus is on bottom-up and top-down processing
and how in reality both processes play a crucial role in listening. Also discussed are the two
perspectives of listening: acquisition and comprehension; and why listening is difficult.






Listening is used far more than any other language skills (Rivers, 1981) and is often regarded
as a passive activity. The importance of teaching listening comprehension has only been
realised very recently.
Rankin (1996) reported that listening
(46%), speaking (30%), reading
(16%), and writing (9%) involve our
daily communication (see Figure 1.1).
Do you agree? If one was to include
watching television and an hour a
day of conversations; then students
would be spending approximately
50% of their waking hours just
listening.
Look at your own activities. How
much of your time do you spend
listening? How much of your time
during tutorials at AeU is spent listening?
If you ask a group of students to give
a one word description of listening,
some would say hearing; however,
hearing is physical. The following are several definitions of listening.
Listening is following and understanding the sound it is hearing with a purpose and
is built on three basic skills: attitude, attention, and adjustment.

Listening is the absorption of the meanings of words and sentences by the brain which
leads to understanding of facts and ideas. But listening takes attention, or sticking to
the task at hand in spite of distractions.

1.2 What is Listening?
Figure 1.1 Students listening in the classroom
1.1 Preamble
Chapter 1: Introduction to Listening

3

Listening as making sense of oral input by attending to the message (Wolvin &
Coakley, 1996).

Listening as a process entails hearing, attending to, understanding, evaluating, and
responding to spoken messages (Floyed. 2001).

Active listening requires concentration, which is the focusing of your thoughts upon one
particular problem. A person who incorporates listening with concentration is actively
listening. IT is responding to another that encourages communication.

Many teachers or tutors tend to talk too much. Do you think the academic facilitator or tutor
for this course talks too much? If he or she does, it defeats the purpose of tutoring, which is to
allow students to learn by discussion. Rather than turning the session into a mini-lecture,
tutors must actively listen and encourage their students to become active learners.




Do you know that are different types of listening? All of us engage in different types of
listening behaviour depending on purpose of listening. How well we listen, however,
depends on a variety of factors that are influenced by our backgrounds and experiences.
Regardless of the type of listening we are engaged in, there are rules of behaviour we must
learn in order to be an effective listener. By way of illustration, how good would a friend be
at therapeutic listening if he provided no feedback or a doctor if she were to look away when
discussing a diagnosis with a patient? Similarly, a college student may contend that he can
listen simultaneously to a teachers lecture and to a football game. Appropriate
comprehension listening, however, suggests that such distractions severely limit
comprehension. Listening skill varies as the context of communication differs. Wolvin and
Carolyn (1996)] propose five different kinds of listening which help to demonstrate that
listening is an active process rather than a passive one.. See Figure 1.1







Figure 1.1 Types of Listening
1.2 Types of Listening
TYPES OF
LISTENING
Discriminative
Listening
Comprehension
Listening
Critical
Listening
Therapeutic
Listening
Appreciative
Listening
Chapter 1: Introduction to Listening

4

Discriminative listening is where the objective
is to distinguish sound and visual stimuli. This
objective doesn't take into account the meaning;
instead the focus is largely on sounds. In a basic
level class this can be as simple as
distinguishing the gender of the speaker or the
number of the speakers etc. As mentioned
before the focus is not on comprehending; but
on accustoming the his is where L1 listening
begins - the child responds to sound stimulus
and soon can recognise its parents' voices
amidst all other voices. Depending on the level
of the students, the listening can be discriminating sounds to identifying individual
words.
Where the listener is able to identify and distinguish inferences or emotions through
the speakers change in voice tone, their use of pause, etc. Some people are
extremely sensitive in this way, while others are less able to pick up these subtle
cues. This is one reason why a person from one country finds it difficult to speak
another language perfectly, as they are unable distinguish the subtle sounds that
are required in that language. Likewise, a person who cannot hear the subtleties of
emotional variation in another person's voice will be less likely to be able to discern
the emotions the other person is experiencing. This ability may be affected by
hearing impairment.
Comprehension listening where the focus is on 'understanding the message'. To
comprehend the meaning requires the students be able to differentiate between
different sound and sights is to make sense of them. The listener must understand
many words at their fingertips and also all rules of grammar and syntax by so that
they can understand what others are saying.

Therapeutic listening is one kind of listening where the listener's role is to be a
sympathetic listener without much verbal response. In this kind of listening the
listener allows somebody to talk through a problem. This kind of listening is very
important in building good interpersonal relations.

Critical listening is where listeners have to evaluate the message. Listeners have to
critically respond to the message and give their opinion. Where the listener may be
trying to weigh up whether the speaker is credible, whether the message being given
is logical and whether they are being duped or manipulated by the speaker. This is the
type of listening that we may adopt when faced with an offer or sales pitch that
requires a decision from us. Typically we weigh up the pros and cons of an argument,
determining whether it makes sense logically as well as whether it is helpful to us.

Appreciative listening where the focus is on enjoying what one listens. It is possible
for students listen to to English music, even if they don't understand, they still enjoy
Chapter 1: Introduction to Listening

5

thereby challenging the notion that you need to understand to appreciate. For
example, the listener gains pleasure/satisfaction from listening to a certain type of
music for example. Appreciative sources may also include particular charismatic
speakers or entertainers. These are personal preferences and may have been shaped
through our experiences and expectations.
Besides the above, there are two are two types of listening, based on how deeply you are
listening to the message.
o False Listening occurs when a person is pretending to listen but is not
hearing anything that is being said. He or she may nod, smile or grunt
but not actually take in anything that is said. The person is doing it to
make good impression before he or she moves on or never talk to
that person again (practiced especially among politicians).

o Selective or Biased Listening: Selective listening involves listening for
particular things and ignoring others. We thus hear what we want to
hear and pay little attention to 'extraneous' detail.

o Partial listening: Partial listening is what most of us do most of the
time. We listen to the other person with the best of intent and then
become distracted, either by stray thoughts or by something that the
other person has said.










a) What is listening?
b) Explain the different types of learning. Do you agree with these types
of listening?
c) Think of a time when you felt that a person was not listening to you
when you had something important to say. How did you feel?
Chapter 1: Introduction to Listening

6




Research has found that improvement in listening skill has a positive effect on other language
skills: SPEAKING, READING and WRITING. For example:

Morris and Leavey (2002) in a study on preschoolers found that listening skill
instruction improves preschoolers phonological awareness.
Bergman (2003) revealed that listening and reading stories at the same time contribute
to enhance reading comprehension.
Berninger (2004) showed that the writing skills of students in the primary grades
improved through listening instruction their spelling significantly through listening
instruction, whereas there is a high correlation between.

As the studies reveal, listening comprehension lies at the heart of language learning, but
LISTENING it is the least understood and least researched skill in language learning
especially in second language teaching and learning. Instruction in listening is ignored in
many second language classrooms because teachers are reluctant to teach pronunciation.
However, Hunsaker (1983) found that more than 75% of what children learn in school is
achieved through listening in the classroom. Gilbert (1990) found that K-12 students spend
between 65% and 90% of their school time in learning, which is achieved, in fact, through
listening trajectory.

Receptive Language Expressive Language
Oral Language Listening Speaking
Written Language
Reading
(decoding +
comprehension)
Writing
(handwriting, spelling,
written composition)
Table 1.1 The components of receptive and expressive language
The interrelationship between listening, reading, speaking (oral) and writing is shown in
Table 1.1. Both listening and reading are receptive language, while speaking and
writing are the expressive aspects of language. Receptive language is language that is
heard, processed, and understood by an individual) and Expressive language islanguage
that is generated and produced by an individual.



1.3 Listening and Other Language Skills
Chapter 1: Introduction to Listening

7

a) Listening and Speaking
There has been much debate about the effect
of listening skill on speaking proficiency.
Oral skills (speaking), involves knowing
the sounds of words (phonology), the
structure of sentences (syntactic) and the
meaning of words (semantics). Children
need to to be able to understand words
before they can produce and use them. In
other words, listening precedes speaking and
to a large extent develops speaking.

Rost (1990) proposed the following reasons showing the essential role listening plays to
improve speaking skill.
To understand students must have access to speakers of the language. Only when
they hear what others are talking about do they learn to understand. Failure to
understand the language they hear is an impetus, not an obstacle, to interaction and
learning.
When students hear the language spoken in an authentic situations, they will be more
challenged to attempt to understand the language as other speakers actually use it.
Listening exercises provide teachers with the means for drawing learners attention to
new vocabulary, grammar, and new interaction patterns in the language. This will
build confidence and a willingness to speak in the language,

Listening comprehension precedes speaking, it also develops more speedily than
speaking., I understand everything you say, but I cant repeat it It has been suggested
that that listening must given more attention even before a child learns to speak.

b) Listening and Reading
Listening and reading are components of receptive
language and they share basic cognitive processes.
Listening and reading are linked. Like reading,
listening requires the student to decipher the structure
of sentences and the meaning of words and sentences

Research has shown that reading comprehension is
easier than listening comprehension. Do you agree?
The reason for this is that listeners lack adequate
control over the comprehension of speech, whereas in
reading comprehension, readers can go back and forth
to understand a word or phrase. Why is listening
comprehension neglected in the ESL classroom?

Both listening and reading involve both bottom-up and top-down processing. However,
the words and sentences the listeners hears will have to be stored in memory (so that they do
not forget) and this can be cognitively very demanding. This is unlike, the words and
sentences a person reads, which is not so cognitively demanding because the reader does not
Chapter 1: Introduction to Listening

8

have to store in memory as they are in the book being read. The reader can go back to refer
and extract the meaning when needed. This may explain why listening comprehension is
more difficult than reading comprehension.

To make matters worse, the listener has little control over what is said and because it is
temporary, the listener can retrieve large chunks of the oral information. Also, speaking is
spontaneous, and hesitation, false starts, pauses and corrections are quite common in oral
input and the listener has to deal with this unplanned situation. This situation does not happen
in reading comprehension because the reader always has the book to refer to.


c) Listening and Writing
Writing skill, besides its cognitive process, requires
mechanical attempts to initiate it, so students children need
to be cognitively and physically prepared to embrace this
skill at school age. The development of writing skills rely
heavily on listening skills. Do you agree? Several studies
have shown that the foundations of writing skills is built
upon listening skills. For example, efficient written
language is based on the sounds of a language the listener hears.








Among the four skills, second language learners often complain that listening is the most
difficult to acquire. Both listening and reading are receptive skills, but listening can be more
difficult than reading. WHY?
different speakers produce the same sounds in
different ways, e.g. dialects and accents, stress,
rhythms, intonations & mispronunciations
the listener has little/no control over the speed of
the input of the spoken material
1.3 Why is Listening Difficult?
a) Assess the relationship between listening and the other language skills
such as reading, speaking and writing.
b) Do you agree that listening is a neglected skills in the second language
classroom?
Chapter 1: Introduction to Listening

9

the spoken material is often heard only once (unlike the reading material)
the listener cannot pause to work out the meaning
speech is more likely to be distorted by background noise (e.g. round the classroom)
or the media that transmit sounds
the listener sometimes has to deal simultaneously with another task while listening,
e.g. note-taking

Some researchers attribute poor listening to (a) inadequate attention to the auditory
information, (b) inappropriate listening situations: distractions and noises, (c) difficulty to
distinguish speech sounds, and (d) incompetence in recalling phonemes and manipulating
them explicitly. Instruction of auditory skill contributes to the process of decoding of graphic
images or sounds effectively because it is a sound giving meaning to the letter and graphic
image.



Listening may be examined from two different perspectives:




Listening as:




Listening as Comprehension is the traditional way of
thinking about the nature of listening. This view of listening is
based on the assumption that the main function of listening in
second language learning is to facilitate understanding of
spoken discourse. Let us look at some of the characteristics of
spoken discourse and the special problems they pose for
listeners. Spoken discourse has very different characteristics
from written discourse, and these differences can add a
number of dimensions to our understanding of how we process
speech. For example, spoken discourse is usually
instantaneous. The listener must process it online and there
is often no chance to listen to it again.

Often, spoken discourse strikes the second-language listener as being very fast, although
speech rates vary considerably. Radio monologues may contain 160 words per minute, while
conversation can consist of up to 220 words per minute. The impression of faster or slower
1.4 TWO PERSPECTIVES OF LISTENING
COMPREHENSION
ACQUISITION
Chapter 1: Introduction to Listening

10

speech generally results from the amount of intraclausal pausing that speakers make use of.
Unlike written discourse, spoken discourse is usually unplanned and often reflects the
processes of construction such as hesitations, reduced forms, fillers, and repeats.

Spoken discourse has also been described as having a linear structure, compared to a
hierarchical structure for written discourse. Whereas the unit of organisation of written
discourse is the sentence, spoken language is usually delivered one clause at a time, and
longer utterances in conversation generally consist of several coordinated clauses. Most of
the clauses used are simple conjuncts or adjuncts. Also, spoken texts are often context-
dependent and personal, assuming shared background knowledge. Lastly, spoken texts may
be spoken with many different accents, from standard or non-standard, regional, non-native,
and so on.

Our discussion so far has dealt with one perspective on listening, namely, listening as
comprehension. Everything we have discussed has been based on the assumption that the role
of listening in a language programme is to help develop learners abilities to understand
things they listen to. This approach to teaching of listening is based on the following
assumptions:

Listening serves the goal of extracting meaning from messages.
To do this, learners have to be taught how to use both bottom-up and top-down
processes to understand messages.
The language of utterances the precise words, syntax, and expressions used by
speakers are temporary carriers of meaning.
Once meaning is identified, there is no further need to attend to the form of messages
unless problems in understanding occurred.
Teaching listening strategies can help make learners more effective listeners.
Tasks employed in classroom materials enable listeners to recognize and act on the
general, specific, or implied meaning of utterances.
These tasks include sequencing, true-false comprehension, picture identification,
summarizing, and as well as activities designed to develop effective listening
strategies.

Listening as Acquisition considers listening as inputs that triggers the further development
of second-language proficiency. Schmidt (1990) emphasised the role of consciousness or
noticing in language learning. What is noticing?. We wont learn anything from what we
hear and understand unless we notice something about the input or what we hear. Being
consciousness of the features of the input (or what we hear) can trigger the first stage in the
process language competence. However, for language development to take place, more is
required than simply noticing features of the input (or what we hear). The learner has to try to
incorporate new linguistic items into his or her language repertoire, that is, to use them in oral
production or speaking.



Chapter 1: Introduction to Listening

11













Bottom-up processing refers to using the incoming input as the basis for understanding the
message. Comprehension begins with the received data that is analyzed as successive levels
of organization sounds, words, clauses, sentences, texts until meaning is derived.
Comprehension is viewed as a process of decoding.


We can illustrate this with an example. You listened to the following from a friend:

The guy I met on the bus this morning on the way to work was
telling me he runs an Indian restaurant in Petaling Jaya.
Apparently, its very popular at the moment.










Figure 1.1 Bottom-up processing


The listeners lexical and grammatical competence in a language provides the basis for
bottom-up processing. You take in the raw speech and scan for familiar words and store it in
working memory. Then you use your grammatical knowledge to construct underlying
propositions (or sentences) and work out the relationship between elements of the
propositions or sentences. Then you forget the exact wordings of the propositions or
sentences and retain the meaning (i.e. comprehension) (Clark and Clark, 1977)

To illustrate, you understand your friends utterances using bottom-up processing by mentally
1.5 Listening as Bottom-Up Processing
INFORMATION
Sounds Words
Phrases &
Clauses
Sentences Text Grammar
a) Why is listening difficult for second language learners?
b) Explain the difference between listening as comprehension and
listening as acquisition.
Chapter 1: Introduction to Listening

12

break it down into its components. This is referred to as chunking. Here are the chunks that
guided you to the underlying core meaning of the utterances:

Your friend was on the bus.
There was a guy next to him.
They talked.
The guy said he runs an Indian
restaurant.
Its in Petaling Jaya.
Its very popular now.

The chunks help you to identify the underlying propositions of the utterances expressed by
your friend. It is these units of meaning that you remember, and not the form in which you
initially heard them. You knowledge of grammar helped you to find the appropriate chunks,
and your friend also assisted you in by his intonation and pausing.






Top-down processing, on the other hand, refers to the use of background knowledge in
understanding the meaning of a message. Whereas bottom-up processing goes from language
to meaning, top-down processing goes from meaning to language. The background
knowledge required for top-down processing may be previous knowledge about the topic of
discourse, situational or contextual knowledge, or knowledge in the form of schemata or
scripts plans about the overall structure of events and the relationships between them.















Figure 1.2 Top-down processing




1.6 Listening as Top-Down Processing
INFORMATION
Context
Prior
Knowledge

Prediction
Experience

Chapter 1: Introduction to Listening

13

For example, consider how we might respond to the following utterance:

I heard on the news there was a big earthquake in China last night.

On recognising the word earthquake, we generate a set of questions for which we want
answers:

Where exactly was the earthquake?
How big was it?
Did it cause a lot of damage?
Were many people killed or injured?
What rescue efforts are under way?

These questions guide us through the understanding of any subsequent discourse that we
hear, and they focus our listening on what is said in response to the questions.

Consider this example Imagine I say the following to a colleague at my office one morning:

I am going to the dentist this afternoon.

This utterance activates a schema for going to the dentist. This schema can be thought of as
organized around the following dimensions:

A setting (e.g., the dentists office)
Participants (e.g., the dentist, the patient, the dentists assistant)
Goals (e.g., to have a check up or to replace a filling)
Procedures (e.g., injections, drilling, rinsing)
Outcomes (e.g., fixing the problem, pain, discomfort)

When I return to my office, the following exchange takes place with my colleague:

So how was it?
Fine. I didnt feel a thing.

Because speaker and hearer share understanding of the going to the dentist schema, the
details of the visit need not be spelled out. Minimal information is sufficient to enable the
participants to understand what happened. This is another example of the use of top-down
processing.

Much of our knowledge of the world consists of knowledge about specific situations, the
people one might expect to encounter in such situations, what their goals and purposes are,
and how they typically accomplish them. Likewise, we have knowledge of thousands of
topics and concepts, their associated meanings, and links to other topics and concepts. In
applying this prior knowledge about things, concepts, people, and events to a particular
utterance, comprehension can often proceed from the top down. The actual discourse heard is
used to confirm expectations and to fill out details.

Chapter 1: Introduction to Listening

14





In the real-world listening, both bottom-up and top-down processing generally occur
together. The extent to which one or the other dominates depends on the listeners familiarity
with the topic and content of a text, the density of information in a text, the text type, and the
listeners purpose in listening.



















Figure 1.3 Bottom-up and Top-down processing


For example, an experienced cook might listen to a radio chef describing a recipe for cooking
chicken to compare the chefs recipe with her own. She has a precise schema to apply to the
task and listens to register similarities and differences. She makes more use of top-down
processing. However, a novice cook listening to the same program might listen with much
greater attention trying to identify each step in order to write down the recipe. Here, far more
bottom-up processing is needed.

Conclusion
There are two distinct processes involved in listening comprehension. Listeners use 'top-
down' processes when they use prior knowledge to understand the meaning of a message.
Prior knowledge can be knowledge of the topic, the listening context, the text-type, the
culture or other information stored in long-term memory as schemata (typical sequences or
common situations around which world knowledge is organized). Listeners use content words
and contextual clues to form hypotheses in an exploratory fashion.

On the other hand, listeners also use 'bottom-up' processes when they use linguistic
knowledge to understand the meaning of a message. They build meaning from lower level
1.7 Listening as a Combination of the Two Processes
INFORMATION
Context
Prior
Knowledge

Prediction
Experience

Sounds Words
Phrases &
Clauses
Sentences Text Grammar
Chapter 1: Introduction to Listening

15

sounds to words to grammatical relationships to lexical meanings in order to arrive at the
final message. Listening comprehension is not either top-down or bottom-up processing, but
an interactive, interpretive process where listeners use both prior knowledge and linguistic
knowledge in understanding messages. The degree to which listeners use the one process or
the other will depend on their knowledge of the language, familiarity with the topic or the
purpose for listening. For example, listening for gist involves primarily top-down processing,
whereas listening for specific information, as in a weather broadcast, involves primarily
bottom-up processing to comprehend all the desired details.













Listening in another language is a hard job, but we can make it easier by applying
what we know about activating prior knowledge, helping students organise their learning by
thinking about their purposes for listening, and if speaking is also a goal of the classroom,
using well-structured speaking tasks informed by research (Brown, 2006). Besides that,
motivation is equally important. Because listening is so challenging, teachers need to think
carefully about making learning activities successful and interesting.

a) Activating Prior Knowledge to Improve Listening Comprehension

One very important idea for teaching listening is that listening courses must make use of
students prior knowledge in order to improve listening comprehension. We have known at
least since the 1930s that
peoples prior knowl edge has an
effect on their cognition. Prior
knowledge is organised in
schemata (the plural form of
schema): abstract, generalized
mental representations of our experience that are available to help us understand new
experiences. Another way to look at this phenomenon is the idea of scripts. For example, you
will have different script on the sequence of ordering a meal in an American fast food
restaurant compared to the script at a Nasi Kandar restaurant.

You are in Spain (you do not speak Spanish) and want to buy a train ticket. Suddenly, the
station master approaches you and says huelga and you remember that it means strike. You
a) What is bottom-up processing in listening?
b) What is top-down processing in listening?
c) Explain the combination of the two processes in listening.


1.7 Helping Listeners in Understand What They Hear
Chapter 1: Introduction to Listening

16

conclude that he is trying to tell you that there will no train services because workers are on
strike. Here you are using your prior knowledge to understand what the station master was
trying to tell you.

Unlike reading, listening must be done in real time; there is no second chance, unless, of
course, the listener specifically asks for repetition. Listening involves understanding all sorts
of sounds and blending of words. There are false starts, pauses and hesitations to be dealt
with. Generally, studies have shown that readers recalled more details than listeners, and that
listeners, while understanding a lot of the main ideas, had to fill in the blanks in their
understanding by guessing at context. This explains why listeners have to use their prior
knowledge in understanding what is being said by the speaker.

Some people are inherently better listeners than others. But even the best listeners, as anyone
who has taught a language knows, can have a difficult time. Listening in a second language is
subject to individual differences depending on their ability to process and store information.
The task of the teacher is to first understand that all humans are limited in their ability to
process information. Hence, they must find a way to help students to activate their prior
knowledge to take away some of the difficulties they face. It is important to give students the
opportunity to use what they already know their prior knowledge to help them do the task.
Activating prior knowledge, in addition to helping comprehension, motivates students by
bringing their lives into the lesson.

b) Establishing the Purpose for Listening
We always have a purpose for listening. We may listen to the radio in the morning to decide
whether to wear a coat or take an umbrella. We may listen to a song for pleasure. We listen in
different ways based on our purpose. Having a purpose helps us listen more effectively. For
example, when listening to the weather report,
fishermen listen and decide whether to go out to
sea.

We can help students listen more effectively if
we spend some time teaching them about
purposes for listening. If students know why they
are listening, they are more focused.

Listening for main ideas means that the listener wants to get a general idea of what is
being said. The details are less important.
Listening for details is something we do every day. For example, we need the details
when we are getting directions to someplace like a friends home. Just understanding
the topic in this case does us no good.
Listeners have to listen between the lines to figure out what really is meant.
Speakers do not always say exactly what they mean. That is, important aspects of
meaning are sometimes implied rather than stated.

In conclusion, systematically presenting (1) listening for main ideas, (2) listening for details,
and (3) listening and making inferences helps students develop a sense of why they listen and
which skill to use to listen better. Teachers can build skills by asking students to focus on
Chapter 1: Introduction to Listening

17

their reason for listening each time they listen. This is a form of strategy training. Strategies
are clearly a way to ease the burden of listening and should be taught.








KEY WORDS










SUMMARY

Listening is used far more than any other language skills and is often regarded as a
passive activity.

Listening in another language is a hard job, but we can make it easier by applying
what we know about activating prior knowledge and helping students organise their
learning by thinking about their purposes for listening.

Listening may be examined from two different perspectives: acquisition and
comprehension.

Children need to to be able to understand words before they can produce and use
them. In other words, listening precedes speaking and to a large extent develops
speaking.

Research has shown that reading comprehension is easier than listening
comprehension.
Discuss the ways in which a teacher can support listeners so that they can become
more effective listeners in the second language classroom.
Listening skills
Listening comprehension
Bottom-up processing
Top-down processing
Discriminative listening

Therapeutic listening
Appreciative listening
False listening
Activating prior knowledge
Listening as acquisition

Chapter 1: Introduction to Listening

18


The development of writing skills rely heavily on listening skills.

Among the four skills, second language learners often complain that listening is the
most difficult to acquire.

Bottom-up processing refers to using the incoming input as the basis for
understanding the message.

Top-down processing, on the other hand, refers to the use of background knowledge
in understanding the meaning of a message.

In the real-world listening, both bottom-up and top-down processing generally occur
together.

REFERENCES

Brown, S. (2006). Teaching Listening. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Wolvin, A. and Coakley, C. (1996). Listening. Madison, WI: Brown/Benchmark, 1996

Hossein Bozorgian (2012) Listening Skill Requires a Further Look into Second/Foreign
Language Learning, ISRN Education. Article ID 810129, 10 pages

Hunsaker, R. (1983). Speaking and Listening. Boston: Morton Publishing.

Rickards, J. (2008). Teaching Listening and Speaking. Cambridge University Press.