Teaching Listening Comprehension

Damascus University
Higher Languages Institute
Presentation by: Abd Al-Rahman Al-Midani
Course Professor: Ms. Rana Shabaan
December 23, 2013
Email: thedamascene@hotmail.com
Outline

 Listening Skill

 Characteristics of Spoken Language

 Why Teach Listening

 Listening Activities

 Criteria for Making Listening Activities

 References
Listening skill

 Listening is an internal process that cannot be directly observed.

 Psycholinguistics propose theories on what happens as somebody
listens.
 One theory suggests that as a person listens, he is constructing a
parallel massage based on clues he receives from the interlocutor.
Listening is an active process in which the listener plays a crucial
role in constructing the message.
 Stages of listening process according to Rivers and Temperley

A. Determine if a sound or a stream of sounds is systematic and

organized or random;

B. Impose some structure on the stream of sounds through breaking it

up into sentences and words; and

C. Circulate and process the broken up stream of sounds and decide

the important ones to be recorded and stored.
• Factors that come into play as a person listens:
1. Knowledge of the phonology or sound system of the language in
question;

2. Knowledge of the world shared with the interlocutor; and

3. Familiarity with the subject of discussion.
 Good portion of the massage is conveyed through body language.
 Attitudes between the speakers help in the process of listening
comprehension
Characteristics of Spoken Language

 Redundancy:
 Repetition, restating, back-tracking characterize spoken language;
 Redundancy can be considered an advantage or disadvantage for listeners.
 Untidiness:
 Spontaneous conversations contain sometimes ungrammatical structures,
fragments, pauses etc…
 These errors might be distracting for the learner of a foreign language if he
was not exposed to them during the learning process.
Environmental Interference:
 They are the noise that may confuse the listener as he tries to listen to some
message; the outcome is that he has to guess and fill in what he could not
hear.
Why Teach Listening
 Listening comprehension is a skill that tends to be neglected because of
many reasons:
 Feeling among teachers that learners develop it automatically as he tries to
speak it;
 Easiness to hide incompetence in it;
 Audiolingual courses teach other skills rather than teaching listening.
 Reasons to teach listening:
 It is tested in certain exams;
 Source of enjoyable activities;
 For those whom English is their second language, English is the medium of
instruction without which academic achievement will suffer; and
 Teaching listening results in the learners acquire this skill faster and more
efficiently.
 What language to use in Teaching listening?
 The material used in teaching listening should cover the major
dialects of English: American and British ones.

 The materials should also cover a variety of registers ranging from

highly formal speeches to informal conversations.
Listening Activities
 It is difficult to subdivide listening skills to sub-skills, so listening activities
should require the listener to do global listening hoping that he will acquire
competence through practice and exercises.
 These exercises require the learner to do:
A. Make and confirm predictions in a text;
B. Extract specific information;
C. Grasp the gist;
D. Discover the speakers attitudes and opinions as expressed the text;
E. deduce and infer the meaning of unknown language structures in the text;
F. Recognize discourse markers; and
G. Recognize and distinguish between the different sounds, stress patters and
intonation contours.
 Vowel and consonant discrimination
 When learners have problem distinguishing between two sounds,
minimal pairs serve to train them on the difference between the
sounds;
 Listening to sounds
1) Students are asked to close their eyes and listen to the sounds; some
minutes after that, they are required to speak about what they
listened to;
2) The teacher plays imagination sparking tapes, and he asks students
to speak about what was happening.
 Listening passage
 It is the most activity used in teaching listening and it involves
several steps: choosing the topic, giving background, setting guide
question, playing or reading the text, answering the questions, re-
listening and answering further questions.
 Completion Exercises
 These activities are based on the assumption that good listeners can
expect what the speaker is about t say.
1. Long completion: the teacher reads a texts and pauses and speakers
have to fill in these clozes with word, phrase or clause.
2. Short completion: the texts which the teacher uses are shorter.
 Spot the change
 The teacher reads a text to the students. After that he reads it again
with some changes. Students have to spot these changes.
 Following instructions
 This activity utilizes the Total Physical Response. Teachers issue
oral instructions that the learner who have to demonstrate their
comprehension through carrying out these instruction physically.
 What is it?
 It is a game-like activity in which the teacher describes something or
somebody, and the students have to guess it.
 Anecdotes and jokes
 After being told an anecdote, students can do a variety of tasks like
retelling it, or answering questions that check their comprehension.
 Song
 They can be treated as listening activities and questions maybe
posed to ensure listening comprehension.
 Filling in the clozes is also a useful exercise
 Extensive Listening
 They are purely listening for pleasure; the students are not haunted
by the phantoms of listening comprehension questions.
Criteria for making listening activities:

• The exercises the students are asked to perform must be

realistic & motivating
• Not stripped of redundancy
• Variety of activities
• Suitability in terms of age, level, and interests
• Introduced gradually in small doses
• Variety of registers, voices, genres.
• Clarity and loudness
• Not highly detailed
References

• J. C. Richards and R. Schmidt, Longman

Dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied
Linguistics. Harlow: Longman, 2010.
• C. T. Linse, Practical English Language
Teaching: Young Learners. McGraw-Hill Higher
Education, 2005.
• A. S. Hasan, Methodology id teaching English
to Young Learners.Damascus University Press.
2013.
Thank You Very Much!