Topic: Listening Comprehension

General

objectives:
Students will be able to teach listening
comprehension with communicative
approach.
Students will be able to integrate listening
with speaking, reading and writing.

Lesson One
Communicative Approaches to Listening
Comprehension

Pre-task activities
Step One: elicit Kinds of real-life listening
Step Two: elicit characteristics of Real-life listening
Step Three: introduce two approaches to listening--- Bottom-up
and top-down
Step Four: identifying different types of listening texts.
Step Five: elicit difficulties in listening to English
as a foreign language.
Step Six: tips in design a listen task
While-task activities
Step Seven: students giving a lesson of listening comprehension.
Post-task activities
Step Eight: students evaluate the lessons.

1. Real-life listening
1.1 Kinds of real-life listening
1.2 Characteristics of Real-life listening
1.3 Two approaches to listening--- Bottom-up and top-down
2. Listening to English as a
foreign language.
2.1 Identifying different types of listening
2.2 Difficulties in listening to English
as a foreign language.
3. How to design a listening tasks?

1.1 Kinds of real life listening

Telephone

conversations

Lectures
Instructions
Movies
Songs
Radio
Television

1.2 Characteristics of Real-life listening

Spontaneity
Purpose and expectation
Response
Speakers adjustment
Context
Visual clues
Shortness
Informal speech
Redundancy
Noise
Colloquial language
Auditory character

1.3 Two approaches to listening--Bottom-up and top-down

Listeners segment the stream of speech into
its constituent sounds, link these together to form
words, chain the words together to form clauses
and sentences and so on . The view is known as
the bottom-up approach to listening,

The use of inside the head knowledge, that is

knowledge which is not directly encoded in words
is known as the top-down view of listening.

2. Listening to English as a foreign language

2.1 A classification of aural texts

Aural texts

Monologue

Dialogue

Planned

Unplanned

interpersonal

Transactional

Recorded video-taped live

Planned

Unplanned

Planned

Unplanned

Unfamiliar

Familiar

V L

R V L

R V L R V L R V L

2.2 Difficulties in listening to English as a foreign language

Hearing the sounds

Understanding intonation and stress
Coping with redundancy and backgroundnoise
Speed
Heard only once
No pause
Predicting
Understanding colloquial vocabulary
Fatigue
Understanding different accents
Simultaneously tasks

3.How to design a listening tasks?

A pre-set purpose
Motivation
Success
Simplicity
Feedback
Visual materials
Combining listening and speaking

Suggestions for classroom activities

Listening

for perception
Listening for comprehension

Listening for perception

At word-level
Oral activities
Reading and writing activities
Meaning-based activities
At sentence-level
Oral activities
Reading and writing activities
Meaning-based activities

At word-level
Oral

activities
(1) repetition
(2) which category (man men ) ? pen cat rap

1
2
(3) same or different ?
pin pin bin pin
Reading and wring activities
(1)Reading the right words
A. bat
B. bet C.but
(2) writing the right words

At sentence-level
Oral

activities
(1) repetition
(2)
identifying word-divisions (how many
words)
Reading and wring activities
(1) identifying stress and unstress eg
Im terribly tired. Ithink Ill go and have a rest.
(2) identifying intonation

..
(3) dictation

Listening for comprehension

Listening

and making no response

Listening and making short response
Listening and making longer response
Listening as a basis for study and discussion

Listening and making no response

Following

a written text
Listening to a familiar text
Listening aided by visuals
Informal teacher-talk
Entertainment

Listening and making short response

(1)

obeying instructions
a, physical movement
b, constructing models
c, picture dictation
(2) ticking off items
(3) true/false exercises
(4) detecting mistakes
(5) aural cloze
(6) guessing definitions
(7) noting specific information

Listening and making short response

(8)

pictures
a, identifying and ordering
b, altering and marking
(9) maps
a, naming features
b, alterations
(10)ground-plan
(11)grids
(12)family tree
(13)graphs

Grid

graph

ground-plan

Listening and making longer responses

Repetition

and dictation
Paraphrase
Translation
Answering questions
Answering comprehension questions on texts
Predictions
Filling gaps
Note taking
Summarizing

Listening as a basis for study and discussion

Problem-solving
Jigsaw

listening
Interpretative listening
Evaluative and stylistic analysis

Lesson Two
The Dictogloss Approach
Pre-task

activities
Step One: preparation
While-task activities
Step Two: dictation
Step Three: reconstruction .
Post-task activities
Step Four: Analysis and correction.

The dictogloss approach

1.

Preparation
2. Dictation
3. Reconstruction
4. Analysis and correction.

1. Preparation.

At this stage. teachers prepare students

for the text they will be hearing by asking
questions and discussing a stimulus picture.
by discussing vocabulary ,by ensuring that
students know what they are supposed to do
and by ensuring that the students are in the
appropriate groups.

2. Dictation

Learners hear the dictation twice. The

first time. they listen only and get a general
feeling for the text. The second time they
take down notes. Being encouraged to listen
for content words which will assist them in
reconstructing the text. For reasons of
consistency, it is preferable that students
listen lo a cassette recording rather than
teacher-read text

3. Reconstruction
At the conclusion of the dictation,
learners pool notes and produce their
version of the text . During this stage it is
important that the teacher does not provide
any language input.

4. Analysis and correction

There arc various ways of dealing with

this stage. The small group versions can be
reproduced on the board or overhead
projector. The texts can be photocopied and
distributed or the students can compare their
version with the original sentence by
sentence .

Advantages of dictogloss

The dictogloss technique provides a useful bridge between bottom-up

and top-down listening. In the first instance, learners are primarily
concerned with identifying individual elements in the text - a bottomup strategy. However, during the small group discussions, some or all
of the following top-down strategies might be employed. In all of
these the listener will integrate background. `inside the head'
knowledge with the clues picked up during the dictation .
1 . Listeners will make predictions.
2. Listeners will make inferences about things not directly stated in the
text
3. Listeners will identify the topic of the text.
4. Listeners will identify the text type (whether it is a narrative.
description. anecdote etc. ).
5. Listeners will identify various sorts of semantic relationships in the
text