Teaching Listening
Strategies
for Developing Listening Skills
Language
learning depends on listening. Listening provides the aural input that serves
as the basis for language acquisition and enables learners to interact in
spoken communication.
Effective
language instructors show students how they can adjust their listening behavior
to deal with a variety of situations, types of input, and listening purposes.
They help students develop a set of listening strategies and match appropriate
strategies to each listening situation.
Listening Strategies
Listening
strategies are techniques or activities that contribute directly to the
comprehension and recall of listening input. Listening strategies can be
classified by how the listener processes the input.
Top-down
strategies are listener
based; the listener taps into background knowledge of the topic, the situation
or context, the type of text, and the language. This background knowledge
activates a set of expectations that help the listener to interpret what is
heard and anticipate what will come next. Top-down strategies include
- listening for the main idea
- predicting
- drawing inferences
- summarizing
Bottom-up
strategies are text
based; the listener relies on the language in the message, that is, the
combination of sounds, words, and grammar that creates meaning. Bottom-up
strategies include
- listening for specific details
- recognizing cognates
- recognizing word-order patterns
Strategic
listeners also use metacognitive strategies to plan, monitor, and
evaluate their listening.
- They plan by deciding which listening strategies will serve best in a particular situation.
- They monitor their comprehension and the effectiveness of the selected strategies.
- They evaluate by determining whether they have achieved their listening comprehension goals and whether the combination of listening strategies selected was an effective one.
Listening for Meaning
To extract
meaning from a listening text, students need to follow four basic steps:
- Figure out the purpose for listening. Activate background knowledge of the topic in order to predict or anticipate content and identify appropriate listening strategies.
- Attend to the parts of the listening input that are relevant to the identified purpose and ignore the rest. This selectivity enables students to focus on specific items in the input and reduces the amount of information they have to hold in short-term memory in order to recognize it.
- Select top-down and bottom-up strategies that are appropriate to the listening task and use them flexibly and interactively. Students' comprehension improves and their confidence increases when they use top-down and bottom-up strategies simultaneously to construct meaning.
- Check comprehension while listening and when the listening task is over. Monitoring comprehension helps students detect inconsistencies and comprehension failures, directing them to use alternate strategies.
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