Note 7 Developing Listening Skills

(Last updated: 10/03/2024)

1. What is involved in listening

  1. Listening is a receptive skill, which involves aural comprehension.
  2. Hearing/perceiving aural input
    • Suprasegmental features
      • Tone
      • Intonation
      • Focus
    • Segmental phonology
      • Phonetic inventory (of a particular language): Each natural language uses a limited set of all the possible sounds that human beings can articulate.
      • Phonemes: Different speech sounds may have the same functional value: i.e., distinguishing meaning
  3. Attending to aural input/stimuli,
    • What is taken in, i.e., filter out what is irrelevant
  4. Associate aural input with meaning
    • Word or literal level
    • Meaning in context
    • Inferences

c.f. http://www.auburn.edu/~nunnath/engl6240/tlisten.html (local)

2. Listening activities

  • Collaborative, e.g, conversation, interview, etc.
  • Noncollaborative, e.g., news
  • Aural vs. visual: Other communication channels: Aural/visual (e.g., body language and other non-verbal messages, context)

Refer to http://www.auburn.edu/~nunnath/engl6240/tlisten.html for ideas about typical foreign/second language listening activities.

3. Listening in the second language classroom

  1. How much attention should we devote to listening?
    It depends on your curriculum objectives.
  2. Listening materials
    • Sources of listening materials
    • Authentic materials vs. simplified/edited materials
    • Speech rate
  3. Assessment, c.f. http://www.onestopenglish.com/skills/listening/teaching-tips/how-to-teach-listening/listening-skills-guide/146218.article

Listening for the main idea — students listen to identify the overall ideas expressed in the whole recording.

Listening for details — students listen for groups of words and phrases at sentence level.

Listening for specific information — students listen for particular information at word level.

Predicting — students try to guess key information contained in the recording before they listen.

Inferring meaning — students listen to identify the difference between what the speaker says and what they actually mean.

Identifying emotion — students listen to identify the mood of certain speakers.

Listening for opinions — students listen to identify the attitude of certain speakers.

Inferring relationships — students listen to identify who the people are in the recording and what the relationship is between them.

Recognizing context — students listen to aural and contextual clues to identify where the conversation takes place, who is speaking, etc.

4. A sample listening activity

5. Other reference