8.6.3.2. Communicative exercises: Teaching listening as a skill

Exercises of this group are aimed at developing the skill of immediate understanding and interpreting the text. There can be logically distinguished 2 sides in speech comprehension: objective and subjective. The objective side reflects the structure of the speech listened to. The subjective side is modelling the structure of this speech in the listener’s mind.

Understanding a text involves four levels:

1. telling the meaning of words;

2. apprehension the general meaning of a text;

3. further differentiation and specification of the meaning of words on the basis of apprehension;

4. deducing the meaning of a text as a single whole.

While listening, a recipient performs a number of analytical-synthetical operations. These operations provide active involvement of the process of thinking on the part of the listener. Thinking, in its turn, involves interpretation. This process of active synthesis through analysis provides the dynamics of listening skills perfection. Performing activities in listening to texts, students master the skill of anticipating the context as a single whole, estimating the main thing, finding out minor details, estimating causative relationships and consequential connections (cause and effect relations). Thus, the type of skill to be developed is the basis of classification of this group of exercises.

To be able to comprehend a listening text, the listener has to be concerned about actions and characteristics of heroes, logical sequence of events and to be able to observe it while transmitting the received information. Another important characteristic is the ability to distinguish logical parts in the text: exposition, culmination, and denouement.

1) Exercises in anticipating the content of a listening text and in developing imagination. This kind of exercises is especially useful for telling stories to the class. By asking students to guess what is going to happen next, we help them develop their listening skill. It is also a good way to keep the class actively involved in listening. While you are telling the class an imaginary story about yourself (or, even better, a real one), stop frequently. Ask them to guess what you are going to say next. Try to get as many suggestions as possible each time, e.g.: ‘A few nights ago I was asleep at home as usual. At about 3 o’clock in the morning… (What happened?) I was suddenly awakened by the noise… (What noise?) of rushing water. (What was it?) It came from the bathroom, so I got up and went to investigate… (What was the matter?) I found to my dismay that the cold water pipe had burst and water was pouring all over the floor… (So what did I do?) So I got a bucket and put it underneath… (What should I have done?) Then I realised what I should have done. I went out into the hall and turned off the mains tap’.

It goes without saying that asking questions keeps the class involved, and is also a way of checking that the students are following the story. The same technique can be used with any kind of story – a story about yourself, a historical story, a folk tale or a fable. Stories are one of the easiest ways for teachers to give listening practice if there are not enough listening activities in the textbook.

Other possible tasks may be: Listen to the beginning of the text and suggest your version of ending it up/ Try to guess what happened next.

The Elephant Who Forgot

One day a boy went out to play in the park. On his way to the park, he saw an elephant trying to get on a bus. The doors of the bus were too narrow and the elephant was too wide. So he didn’t fit. The elephant stepped aside, let the bus go and decided to wait for a bigger bus. The boy was amazed and came up to the elephant and asked, ‘What are you doing here?’ ‘I’m waiting for a bus’, answered the elephant. ‘You can’t do it’, said the boy. ‘Elephants don’t ride in a bus’. ‘I’m not an elephant’, said the elephant. ‘You are’, said the boy. ‘No’, said the elephant, ‘I’m a people’. ‘You-are-an-elephant!’ repeated the boy. ‘Prove it’, said the elephant and glared down at the boy. The boy glared back up and…

The students suggest their versions of ending the story. After that, the original version is given to the students to compare. The best and closest to the original is chosen together, explained why and praised.

2) Exercises in telling logical cohesion between separate parts of the listening text. Listen to the story and put up your hand when you hear a sentence that does not correspond to the meaning of the story:

The Crowd

One day Mr Brown was walking with his wife and his very large family. In the street, a policeman stopped him. Mr Brown left the car and began to protest. ‘Hold on! What have I done?’ cried Mr Brown. ‘I certainly don’t know what you have done’, answered the policeman, ‘but I do want to know why the crowd is following you’.

The ability to single out the main sense connection pays its contribution to the development of the skill to grasp the main thing in the text.

3) Exercises in telling logical sequence of actions:

• Listen to the story and retell it in 4-5 sentences.

• Listen to the story and retell it in logical sequence of what John has done.

When John went home yesterday afternoon, he played a game, got into bed, took off his play clothes and ate his supper.

- Listen to the story and distribute the pictures according to the sequence of the events in the story.

4) Exercises in getting the main idea of the text:

• Listen to the story and choose a title for it.

• Listen to the story and draw the picture of the place and the character of the story.

• Tell which of the two stories you are going to listen corresponds to the picture in front of you.

• Tell which of the titles of the story corresponds to the picture/ description/ story/ extract, etc.

5. Exercises in comprehending the text without conjecture:

• Listen to the story and say if there was the following sentence: ‘…’. Retell the text.

• Listen to 2 stories and tell what they differ in.

• Look at the picture and listen to the story. Tell what details do not correspond to the story.

• Listen to the story and then read the text. Tell which sentences were absent in the teacher’s story.

Thus, communicative exercises in listening help develop the skill of getting the general picture first, then – the skill of extracting detailed information. In other words, the training sequence follows the progression of increasing the degree of difficulty in listening material.