Aims for the 1st series of lessons:
to discuss the essence of listening comprehension;
to discuss the difference between "real life" listening and listening in the classroom;
to consider different kinds of listening;
to discuss and classify listening tasks and texts.
1. Listening comprehension - what is it?
Activity 1
Study the following definitions of listening and single out the characteristic features of this receptive skill.
Listening comprehension - the process of understanding speech in a second or foreign language. It focuses on the role of individual linguistic units (phonemes, words, word combinations, etc.) as well as the role of the listener's expectations (background knowledge) and the knowledge of context.
Listening comprehension - process of acquiring modifications in existing knowledge, skills, habits, or tendencies through experience, practice, or exercise. (Encyclopedia Britannica)
The nature of listening comprehension means that the learner should be encouraged to engage in an active process of listening for meanings, using not only the linguistic cues but also his nonlinguistic knowledge. (Littlewood W. Communicative Language Teaching. - CUP, 2002, p.67)
Listening, understanding, and responding in an appropriate way is an essential part of communication. (Haycraft J. An Introduction to English Language Teaching. - Longman, 1993, p.76)
Аудирование - рецептивный вид речевой деятельности, представляет собой одновременное восприятие и понимание речи на слух. (Kolesnikova I., Dolgina О. A Handbook of English-Russian Terminology. - CUP Блиц Санкт-Петербург, 2001, С.101)
Why teach listening?
to expose students to spoken English;
to let students hear different varieties and accents of English;
to let students acquire language;
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2. Is there any difference between listening as it is taught in the classroom and listening in real life?
Activity 2
Complete A Listening Mind Map noting the differences between listening in the classroom and in real life.
Activity 3
Look at the following checklist and decide which of the features are more characteristic of listening in the classroom and which are more characteristic of "real life" listening.
Characteristic |
Real life |
Classroom |
1. Short turns |
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2.Complete sentences |
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3 .Redundancy |
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4.The whole message is repeated |
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5.Accompanying visual information |
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6.Expecting a response from the listener |
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7.Understanding every single word |
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8.Background noise |
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9.Speaker overlap |
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10.Hesitation pauses |
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11. Attitudinal remarks |
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12.Checking understanding by asking questions |
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3. What kind of listening should we do as students and teach in future?
listening for general understanding / for gist
listening for specific information
intensive listening / for details
extensive listening
Activity 4
Match the kind of listening with its definition.
1) Listening for general understanding/ for gist
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a) This sort of experience can be acquired through listening to lectures, interviews, Radio plays, as well as short easy stories read aloud by the teacher or heard on the tape. The students are asked to listen to a passage with the aim of understanding the author’s message or the speaker’s attitude, usually with one’s own comment on the content of the passage. |
2) Listening for specific information
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b) The listeners want to get the general picture. They want to have an idea of the main points of the text -and overview - without being too concerned with the details.
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3) Intensive listening/ listening for details
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c) This is perhaps the more widely used form of listening practice in modern classroom. The students are asked to listen to a passage with the aim of collecting and organising the information that it contains. The type of the passage contains more concrete information, which may be quite densely packed, and often is not easy for the students to understand on first hearing because they have to be able to access texts for detailed information.
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4) Critical listening
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d) In this case the listeners want to extract bits of information - to find out a fact or two. We may listen to the news, only concentrating when the particular item that interests us comes up disregarding the other information. |
Activity 5