LISTENING

• Types of LC activities

  1. Listening for perception

  2. Listening for comprehension
• Types of listening and making responses

  • Listening and making no response
  • Listening and making short responses
  • Listening and making longer responses
  • Listening as a basis for study and discussion
• Guidelines for listening tasks

  • Material for listening (input) should be closer to informal discourse rather than simplified/edited
  • Visual information provides additional support
  • Students should be encouraged to comprehend as much as possible after 1 single hearing
  • Tasks should be contextualized and introduced by the teacher as meaningful, relatable situations so students can activate relevant schemata
  • Specific instructions/purpose are much better than vague/general instructions
• Schema (plural: schemata)


  A conventional knowledge structure in our memory for specific things
• Using songs in the classroom

  • Advantages: highly memorable, motivating, good starting point for a culture-oriented lesson, helpful in memorizing target structures and vocabulary, incidental vocabulary learning
  • Keeping it secret: don't give away the song choice, take into account students' age, time of day, language proficiency level, musical interests, prepare various activities that illustrate the teaching focus
  • Introduction: pre-listening questions that set the scene, provide visuals
  • What's the story + vocabulary/grammar practice: teacher chooses words from the song to make up a story, use illustrations to clarify vocabulary, choose only one grammar structure/tense/phrase to practise
  • Reveal not all: students use vocabulary, grammar structure, have a feel for the story, fill in the lyrics with the target language
  • Surprise! Surprise!: students listen to the song, check the lyrics (gap filling, misused words, mixed up words, paraphrasing), teacher provides additional information on the song, performer, historical facts
• Possible issues with using songs: some students may not be interested in/familiar with a given popular culture text, activities based on songs require careful and meticulous preparation, the lyrics of some songs contain grammatical mistakes, slang or bad language
• Note completion task


  1. The barber in Penny Lane likes showing pictures of (1)

  2. The banker on the corner owns (2)

  3. Kids think the banker is (3)

  4. When it's wet, the banker doesn't (4)

  5. The fireman in Penny Lane has (5) in his pocket

  6. When he's not working, the fireman (6)

  7. You can buy flowers from (7) in Penny Lane

  8. At the moment someone enters the barber's, he has (8) customers
• Differences between spoken and written discourse: "one is essentially transitory and the other one is designed to be permanent" (Brown and Yule, 1983: 14)
• Transitory


  Spoken discourse
• Permanent


  Written discourse
• Listening comprehension is 'tricky', challenging and stressful to learners because, due to the time constraint, it demands some automatic processing of what we hear (= spoken discourse) and at initial/intermediate stages of learning, such operations are performed more slowly + with more control
• Auditory input -> echoic memory (a kind of memory that stores information on pronunciation, intonation, rhythm and stress + auditory models of linking words into clauses) -> this is crucial especially in languages like English, where there is no 1:1 relationship between the graphemic form and the phonemic form and it takes effort to match the two, and which is a stress-timed language
• Best solution: learners need to be exposed to both graphemic and phonemic forms as they complement and mutually define each other and the learner needs to be able to reconstruct the language system, their contact with matching both forms will be definitely be helpful in creating a mental representation of the system in their own minds