MEMORIAS DEL VI FORO DE ESTUDIOS EN LENGUAS INTERNACIONAL (FEL 2010)

ISBN: 978-607-9015-22-0

Useful ideas to improve your listening skills

Sandra Valdez Hernndez
Vilma Portillo Campos
Universidad de Quintana Roo

Abstract
One of the main areas of research in English language teaching is concerned
with listening due to the learning difficulties that this strategy represents to a
considerable percentage of learners. The purpose of this research is to know
the main problems students face regarding listening and the strategies that
might help in certain conditions or situations to improve their listening learning.
The first part of the methodology was to devise a five-entry questionnaire in
order to know the problems students face related to listening. Secondly, the
listening strategies: bottom-up and top-down were adapted to be applied by
means of an experiment conducted to a sample of English intermediate
University students. Information gotten from the development and performance
of the students in class was compiled and analyzed. Even though the
experiment is still being carried out, we have our first findings to be presented.
We are open to comments from other colleagues from whom we might get
ideas to implement new resources in our project.

1. Introduction
Listening is the language skill that is used most frequently. It has been
estimated that adults spend almost half their life communication time listening, and
students receive most of their information through listening to teachers, professors
and to one another. However, the students do not recognize the importance of the
development of this skill; this is one of the reasons we as teachers have to do
activities to better understand listening.
It is necessary to bear in mind that this is not only a process of receiving and
recording aural input, but listeners actively involve themselves in the interpretation
of what they hear, they usually bring their own background knowledge and
linguistic knowledge to bear on the information contained in the information. In
addition, listening process is not the same every time and every person requires

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ISBN: 978-607-9015-22-0

different strategies while listening; for instance, casual greetings require a different
sort of listening capability than do academic lectures or political speeches.
In this paper we present information gotten in our first study on bottom-up
and top down strategies, applied to intermediate students of English. Since
language learning requires intentional listening, we applied some strategies to
identify the ones that were useful for our students. Here we present some ideas
which might help your students to improve their listening learning.

2. Is it important to apply listening strategies?

Since listening is one of the most important skills when learning a language,
its vital to look for strategies to implement in the classroom and with the students.
According to Nunan, 1995. listening is assuming greater importance in many
foreign language contexts, which have until relatively recently focused their efforts
on the development of productive skills. Nunan 1995.
In the same study, Nunan mentions that Rost summarized perfectly the
importance of listening in 1994. Rost says that listening is vital in the language
classroom because:
a. Listening provides input for the learner. Without understanding input at the right
level, any learning simply cannot begin.
b. Spoken language provides a means of interaction for the learner. Because
learners must interact to achieve understanding, access to speakers of the
language is essential.
c. Authentic spoken language presents a challenge for the learner to attempt to
understand language as native speakers actually do.
d. Listening exercises provide teachers with a means of drawing learners attention
to new forms (vocabulary, grammar, new interaction patterns) in the language.

In short and in other words, we could say that listening is essential not only
as a receptive skill, but also to the development of spoken language proficiency
and the development of the students as students as well as professionals.
Listening facilitates understanding of actions, instructions, activities and problems
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ISBN: 978-607-9015-22-0

that people face daily, everywhere, in organizations, in companies, at home, work

and school.

3. Top down and bottom up strategies

The bottom up processing view and the top down interpretation view have
dominated language pedagogy since the early 1980s according to Jack C.
Richards at al. They mention that the bottom up processing model assumes that
listening is a process of decoding the sounds that one hears in a linear fashion,
from the smallest meaningful units (phonemes) to complete texts.
Bottom-up strategies are text based; the listener relies on the language in
the message, that is, the combination of sounds, words, and grammar that creates
meaning. According to this view, phonemic units are decoded and linked together
to form words, words are linked together to form phrases and phrases are linked
together to form clauses and sentences or utterances, finally these utterances are
linked together to form complete, meaningful texts or conversations.
The Top down model of listening by contrast, involves the listener in actively
constructing meaning based on expectations, inferences, intentions, and other
relevant prior knowledge. It means that you use your own knowledge on
determined situations, contexts, texts or conversations.
The language data serve as cues to activate this top down process. In
teaching listening, Nunan suggests that we should design activities that teach both
bottom-up and top-down processing skills and teach students strategies to control
their own listening, some of these strategies are: predicting, selective, different
purposes, inferencing and personalizing.
Other researchers have made foundations on the mental process and
bottom up and top down models, some of them are: Omalley, Chamot and Kupper
who have worked on mental processes second language learners used in listening
comprehension. In the same field Tsui and Fullilove have found that temporal
regions subserve bottom up processing of speech, whereas frontal areas are more
involved in top- down supplementary mechanisms.

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MEMORIAS DEL VI FORO DE ESTUDIOS EN LENGUAS INTERNACIONAL (FEL 2010)

ISBN: 978-607-9015-22-0

Tsui & Fullilove have investigated the processing skill used by skilled and
less-skilled readers & listeners in their studies they could prove that skilled
listeners are those who are better able to engage in bottom-up processing.
Current approaches to teaching listening have tended to emphasize
listening for gist, top down processing, listening strategies. What they usually teach
students is how to deal with authentic language and real-life situations as part of
the communicative approach.
In addition, Tsui & Fullilove stress that language learning depends on
listening. Listening provides the aural input that serves as the basis for language
acquisition and enables learners to interact in spoken communication. Listening
strategies, in words of Fullilove, are techniques or activities that contribute directly
to the comprehension and recall of listening input. Listening strategies can be
classified by how the listener processes the input.

4. Ideas to improve listening

According to Baker &Westrup 2000, we as teachers need to do some
activities to improve listening, they give us some ideas: We need to do some
activities to prepare students before, during and after the listening. Meanwhile we
should use the subskills of listening predicting, listening for the main idea and
listening for specific information. They argue that the must important is to focus
student attention on the item they will listen.
They also point out that to develop listening for general information we
should ask students to find out information about the number of people involved in
the conversation, their relationship, the topic of the story, the place and the time
the story or dialogue happens. Thats to say listening for specific information
means students must learn to ignore the details. To practice this, you can ask the
students to listen carefully for the answers to specific questions.

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MEMORIAS DEL VI FORO DE ESTUDIOS EN LENGUAS INTERNACIONAL (FEL 2010)

ISBN: 978-607-9015-22-0

5. How to assess listening

In1994, Cohen proposed several ways to assess listening skill. He mentions
that we can assess the discrimination of sounds, grammatical distinctions, the
vocabulary and the auditory comprehension. The discrimination of sounds and
grammatical distinctions might help to develop the bottom up strategies, whereas
the auditory comprehension and vocabulary the top down. For the discrimination of
the sounds students are required to listen for and identify sound distinctions that do
not exist in their native language.
In the grammatical distinction the students can listen and identify inflectional
markers, for instance the respondents must determine whether the subject and
verb are in singular or plural. In terms of vocabulary the students perform an
action in response to a command for example: get up, walk to the window, and
draw a picture according to oral instructions. Finally in the auditory comprehension
the students indicate whether a response to a question is appropriate, indicate the
appropriate paraphrase for a statement and respond to conversations giving
appropriate responses.
Research has indicated that we can expect better performance on aural
comprehension of more orally oriented texts (Inbar, 1988 cited in Cohen: 259). The
same work has also shown that higher-level students are more likely to use top
down process, while lower level studies tend to use bottom up or data driven
process.
Dictation can serve as a measure of auditory comprehension if it is given at
a fast enough pace so that it is not simply a spelling test (Oller, 1979; Stansfield,
1985). Nonnative students must segment the sounds into words, phrases and
sentences. It has been found that they usually make these types of errors (Oller,
1972; Cohen,1994 ) Inversion, incorrect word choice, insertion of extra words and
omission of words.

6. Dealing with problems

Tauroza S. in Nunan 1995 mentioned that listening is rarely taught but
frequently tested. We completely agree with him because both tasks are important
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MEMORIAS DEL VI FORO DE ESTUDIOS EN LENGUAS INTERNACIONAL (FEL 2010)

ISBN: 978-607-9015-22-0

and sometimes we forget it, thats why we should balance teaching and testing. He
also mentions that some people like to listen to a passage entirely before they go
back and focus on phrases that they have not understood. Other people prefer to
stop the audio as soon as they come across something they are not sure about; his
advice is to do what you or your students prefer depending on the passage you are
listening to, but focus on problems that relate to the answers required by the
exercises.

There are some activities they recommend we should do, we can:

replay, since repeated listening to a phrase will help make that phrase a part of
your listening vocabulary.
If there are words that are completely unfamiliar, replay the phrase if your
students cannot understand the phrase use the transcript to find out what is being
said, if they do not know the meaning of the words, look them up in the dictionary.
After this, listen to the phrase again. In this way the students might experience how
the sounds represent words. This technique helps to build listening vocabulary.
As follows and to summarize, we present some strategies included in Top
down and Bottom up and some activities to enhance those views. Chart 1
Top down

Activities

Bottom up

Activities

Listening for the

main idea
Predicting

Anecdote

Listening for specific

details
Recognizing cognates

Giving directions

Drawing inferences
Summarizing

Listening
for
meaning
Listening for gist

Folk story
Situations in different places, e.g.
the hospital or school.
A chat (taking to your friend in a
casual environment, talking to
your friend in the disco)
A political speech, conversations
about technology, business
Years and time/ weather report

Recognizing
order patterns

word-

Giving instructions (about a

manual, or a bus)
Pair words, group words,
phrasal verbs, expressions

7. Our experiment
We are conducting a project based on the listening strategies: bottom-up
and top-down; these strategies were adapted to be applied by means of an
experiment conducted to a sample of English intermediate University students in
the University of Quintana Roo. Information gotten from the development and
performance of the students in class is being compiled, compared and analyzed,
but in this paper we present our first findings.
Universidad de Quintana Roo Departamento de Lengua y Educacin
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MEMORIAS DEL VI FORO DE ESTUDIOS EN LENGUAS INTERNACIONAL (FEL 2010)

ISBN: 978-607-9015-22-0

7. 1 Materials & Method

First of all we applied a five entry questionnaire based on Wilson, to know
the main problems students face while listening. We selected and applied different
materials from books and the internet to help them overcome their weakness and
have stronger listening skills. Our main sources were the CD English for business
and the site es-lab.com. The main purpose of our activities was to make students
aware of the importance of using strategies to deal with common problems when
listening, and provide them with strategies which might help them to effectively
understand English.
The participants were 10 Mexican students, 6 females and 4 males, most of
them from Commercial systems 8, and 2 from English language major; all of them
enrolled in the English for business course with the same objective in common
passing the course.
7.2 Data Analysis
The data collection collected until now has been analyzed, on the bases of
research questions and here we have our first conclusions and foundation. Our
hypothesis hidden is to determine whether students manifest better results, in our
context, by using top down and bottom up strategies and may apply them in their
future life.
7.3 Results and discussion
Chart 27 entry questionnaire
6

Ican'tunderstand
anything

5
4

Ican'tseparate
words

3
2
1
0
always almostusually hardly never
always
ever

Icanunderstand
mostofthe
information

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MEMORIAS DEL VI FORO DE ESTUDIOS EN LENGUAS INTERNACIONAL (FEL 2010)

ISBN: 978-607-9015-22-0

We applied a five entry questionnaire based on Wilson 2003 to determine

the main problems students had while listening. Students reported in the
questionnaire that the principal problem, as we can see in chart 2, was that they
couldnt understand the main idea, given that only 10% mentioned that they could
always understand it. 40% of the students surveyed mentioned that they could
hear and understand words but not the meaning which was another problem.
Chart 3 Evolution in terms of listening comprehension
S10
S9
S8
S7
S6

Now

S5

Atthebeginning

S4
S3
S2
S1
0

10

After being applied strategies top down and bottom up in the classroom,
using some exercises related to the topics in the curricula, credit card, money,
expenses, inflation, franchise and others; students were surveyed as a
retrospection to know their opinions on their evolution in terms of listening
comprehension. We presented the results in chart 3. As you can see there are a
few changes among the students, specially in the most who consider themselves
to have higher results when listening, but some did not present any changes at all
and stayed the same position at the beginning and at the end of this study; this
was mainly for those who had good comprehension. With this data we could
deduce that lower students tried to study more, and practice harder to improve
their listening comprehension, while those who had good listening comprehension
decided not to do anything to improve a little more.

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MEMORIAS DEL VI FORO DE ESTUDIOS EN LENGUAS INTERNACIONAL (FEL 2010)

ISBN: 978-607-9015-22-0
8

Chart 4 Grading strategies

7
6
1Excellent

2Veryuseful

3Useful
3

4Somehowuseful

5Notveryuseful

1
0
TN

RF

IP

MI

TT

IIK

RR

SD SCT WO

Finally we have the opinions of the students related to the exercises based
on the listening strategies top down and bottom up. The results show positive
opinions expressing most of them, that the strategies are useful.
In chart 4 you can see their opinions, the word order raked in the first place
with 7 from 10. Followed by remembering things, facts, real situations in life related
to the topic before listening, and using the information I know about the topic. As
we have mentioned before; Nunan remarks, and we have seen until now that both
top down and bottom up are important and useful, since the students can rely on
their previous knowledge and apply standarized rules on the language in the
message to create meaning.
8. Conclusions
What we have found until now is an effective progress with students,
specially positive attitude towards the exercises, and we as many teachers have
used bottom up and top down in the classroom, probably empirically but we have
used facts and things in life to help students, listening to folk stories, stories, and
the transcripts when listening which according to Nunan, Tauroza, Buck, Brown,
Cohen, and others who have made studies are effective to improve listening
comprehension.

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ISBN: 978-607-9015-22-0

Its important to train students so they are able to solve the problems they
face when they are in class or when they interact with native speakers outside the
classroom and in real life.
Top down and bottom up strategies help students to overcome problems
when listening, even we could say that this helps students to overcome problems
with listening, self-confidence and shyness, because once they master the listening
strategies they feel more confident when listen and interact with others in English.

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MEMORIAS DEL VI FORO DE ESTUDIOS EN LENGUAS INTERNACIONAL (FEL 2010)

ISBN: 978-607-9015-22-0
References
Baker, J. & Westrup, H. 2000. The English language teachers handbook. How to teach large
classes with few resources. London: British Library Cataloguing-in-publication data
Bowen, T. & Marks, J. 1994. Inside teaching. Great Britain: Heinemann
Cohen, A. 1994. Assessing language ability in the classroom. Boston, USA: Heinle&Heinle
publishers.
Stansfield, C. 1985. A history of dictation in foreign language teaching and testing. The modern
language Journal, 69(2), 121-128
Nunan, D. & Miller, L. 1995. New ways in teaching listening. Teachers of English to speakers of
other languages (TESOL). Virginia USA
Mendez, M & Marin, A. 2007. Effects of Strategy Training on the development of language skills.
Universidad de Quintana Roo. Mxico: Ediciones Pomares.
Richards, J. 2008. Methodology in Language Teaching: An anthology of current practice. US:
Cambridge University Press
http://goupbook.com/pdf/Teaching%20Listening.pdf bajado el 19 de marzo de 2010

Biodata
M.C. Sandra Valdez Hernndez is a profesor at the Universidad de Quintana Roo
(UQROO), campus Chetumal and M.T.I. Vilma Portillo Campos is professors at the
Universidad de Quintana Roo, campus Cozumel. They both studied English
language at the UQROO and have a master degree, the first person in science of
education, the second in translation and interpretation. They belong to the group of
research in Translation and teaching languages (GITEL) and are interested in
finding out better ways of teaching and learning.
Contacto: svaldez@uqroo.mx
Mtra. Vilma Portillo Campos es Profesora Investigadora de la Universidad de
Quintana Roo, campus Cozumel. Realiz su preparacin acadmica en Lengua
Inglesa en la Universidad de Quintana Roo y es Maestra en Traduccin e
Interpretacin Ingls-Espaol (M.T.I) por la Universidad Autnoma de Guadalajara.
Pertenece al Grupo de Investigacin en Traduccin y Enseanza de Lenguas
(GITEL)
Contacto: vportillo@uqroo.mx

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