Listening sub-skills

Listening Skill Phonological recognition

Difficulties/Why

Possible solutions and practice activities

The students have difficulty with recognizing the After listening to a live or recorded listening, ask the students to sounds in the language, especially supra- choose which word was said, e.g. bad/pad. Asking the students to segmental phonology (sentence level phonology). count the number of words in a sentence and identify the weak forms, These difficulties can be caused by the lack of a e.g. for /fir/. similar sound in their native language or there Teaching the students the phonemic chart, activities, as above, from being two or more phonemes that sound similar ship or sheep, dictations where the students have to count/identify making it impossible for the students to individual words or activities from course books on distinguish between them. The difficulty at pronunciation/stress/intonation, e.g. Upper Intermediate Matters sentence level can be caused by difficulty in de- Students Book(students mark the stress, choose the correct meaning coding the individual words in connected speech. Once words have been integrated into sentences within colloquial, spontaneous speech, recognizing them becomes much more difficult. (Ur 1984 Page 41) (dependent on the speakers intonation, Part A Page 6)

Prediction

The students have difficulty in predicting the The teacher can elicit information about the topic as a class before the general content and also have problems with students listen individually; this will enable the students to tackle predicting the next word. They may not have the prediction more confidently. cultural or topic knowledge to allow them to The students can brainstorm (work together in groups each student predict the content of a listening, or it may be that giving their opinion.) in order to predict the content of the listening the students do not have enough grammatical thus talking each others ideas through logically. Teachers can stop 22

knowledge to predict the next word, e.g. Abu mid-sentence when dictating and the students have to decide what the Dhabi is a ___________ country. The students next word will be, this activity I have found to be particularly may not realize that an adjective often precedes a successful when the students are put in teams and the team that noun. guesses correctly gets one point. Similarly, this can be done with recorded material. Most importantly the teacher must create a purpose for the students to listen Listening for specific information. The listener may have difficulty in identifying the At lower levels the teacher can provide practice in listening for specific information required if they try to listen specific information by following a cloze procedure: giving the to all the words, including the redundant words in students a copy of an incomplete text that the students have to the text. For the listener there is sometimes no complete as the teacher reads. If the teacher wants the students to redundancy in the text and the learner overloads deduce the meaning, he/she can give the learners time to complete as and cannot cope with the task. The students may much as possible before the listening takes place. Charts can be used not recognize the discourse markers leading up to for the students to complete with as much or as little information as the required information and therefore do not find necessary. At higher levels, the students can complete bar graphs, pie the information required. charts or flow charts where the students have to complete the missing information. Global comprehension. Students may have difficulty in identifying what the speakers are talking about. This could be due to the frantic need to understand every word or simply that the opportunity to listen to materials in a more relaxed way has not been provided in the classroom by the teacher. (More detail on student problems in this area on Pages 7 &8) 23 The students must be provided with the opportunity to listen to a variety of listening materials in a relaxed way and given simple questions to answer. It must be stressed that they students do not have to remember every word that is uttered and that even native speakers would not be expected to remember/understand every word of a dialogue, for example. Activities that would help the students develop this sub-skill would be activities such as: answering simple questions, e.g., Where are the speakers? Do they know each other? What are they

taking about? Inference. This skill enables the listener to develop the process of arriving at a hypothesis of a listening text by deducing the meaning from the context of the listening material. Inferring can be a difficult sub-skill for students to master. This can be due to their lack of knowledge in the second language, which can result in the student resorting to more child-like processing skills of only remembering what is stated in a text. However, it is important not to over-simplify material or it may be seen as condescending to the students. However, care needs to be taken that the provision of explicit information is not perceived by the adult L2 learner as a simplification of intellectual content rather than of linguistic form (Anderson1988 Page52) Inferring attitude This would involve the student making assumptions about the speakers attitude: whether the speaker is happy/sad/angry/upset etc. Difficulties that would prevent a listener from becoming proficient in this sub-skill would be an inability to understand the speakers body 24 When using listening material it is important to look at the level of an inferential task given to match it with the students language level. The elementary students in the group I will be teaching for the next few months could not yet cope with a difficult task that would involve them in inferring a great amount of information, so the listening material that I use with them at the moment is fairly explicit, or the task set fairly simple. However I hope to make the material less explicit in some listening exercises as their knowledge of the English language becomes more extensive. Some listening activities that could improve the learners sub-skill of inferring are: asking about the situation the speakers are taking about, how old the people are, how many people are in the situation, where they are, what they look like etc. Questions that cannot be answered simply by the information in the text. At elementary level I would only give the students a few questions of this type, e.g. What do the people look like? This would make the task manageable for the students. In the past, I have sensitized the students to body language by basing lessons on body language and comparing the students own body language to others. This has proved to be both enlightening to the students and to myself, e.g. I discovered that I was being very rude if I blew my nose in front of a Japanese student. In a multi lingual class, this type of lesson can produce a better understanding of each other

language, lack of knowledge in the topic area. A situation with which the student is unfamiliar, inability to read the meaning of word/sentence stress when listening to the speaker.

and can promote the gelling of the class. In a monolingual class, such as the class I am presently teaching, it encourages the students to focus on the visual clues that would normally be used in their own language. Work on pronunciation and stress would also be beneficial. (See page 8 for activities on pronunciation /stress)

Detailed comprehension

When the learner is expected to extract the majority of information from a stream of discourse, their must be a realistic purpose in doing so, e.g. If listening to a radio programme, I would not expect the listener to remember the majority of the words. However, if the listener wanted to know how to cook a particular dish, he/she would have to remember each step of the task. You cant make pavlova without whipping the listening may be too fast, (this is often the case for L1 listeners, so it is much worse for L2 Listeners) the task may be too difficult, the not comprehend the situation as he/she does not come across the same situation in his/her country.

With this group, I have done some dictation work, getting the students to record all of the information given to them by a peer. This I have done in the form of shouting dictations, where student A stands at one side of the room shouting the information to student B who writes down the information This helps the students to cope with other noises when listening. We have also tried some running dictations, where one student has the information stuck on a wall and follows this procedure: read/ retain/ run/ tell partner/ go back to text to get more information, meanwhile student B is writing down the information of the original text or by getting the student to carry out a task, e.g. making some food for a class party. The students can also be given building tasks, using cuisenaire rods, be given directions and pre-listening activities can be designed by the teacher to enable the student to cope with a situation that is foreign to them.

egg whites. The problems for the listener may be given to him/her by student. Accuracy can be checked, using a model

language may be too advanced or the listener may following them, or taking important telephone messages. Relevant

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