DEVELOPING LISTENING COMPREHENSION SKILLS

Without being taught to listen, people may be able to express themselves orally.
However, they will never be able to communicate successfully if they are unable to understand
what is said to them. We cannot develop speaking skills unless we develop listening skills.
A recent change of emphasis in the way listening is viewed has come from a realisation
that speaking is not a separate skill in itself; but part of a broader skill - that of participating in
oral/aural interaction - that is, in speaking and listening. Even extended speaking activities like
joke telling, recounting an incident, or giving a lecture, usually require the active participation of
listeners.
Your pupils are likely to need a higher degree of aural (i.e. receptive) ability than of oral
(i.e. productive) ability. In other words, they will need to listen to and understand a much wider
range of language spoken to them (in terms of function, topic, grammar, vocabulary, accent,
style, etc.) than they will need to be able to speak. This means that you must ensure at least as
much listening practice as speaking practice, if not more. The amount of emphasis will depend
ultimately on what level of accuracy and what level of communicative sophistication your pupils
are aiming at.
Moreover, listening to spoken language is also an important way of acquiring the
language – structures and vocabulary.

Unit Objectives
By the end of this unit you should be able to:
 identify the various sub-skills involved in the listening process
 select and apply appropriate classroom activities to develop these sub-skills
 set up, apply and monitor a variety of interactive classroom listening activities
 offer a theoretical justification for each of these activities
 integrate listening activities with the development of one or more of other skills
 assess the learning outcomes of the listening activities.

1. Listening Subskills
What sort of skills do your pupils need to develop, and how can you help them to do
this? We need to look first at what the listening process consists of.
 Sound discrimination and recognition
 Identifying different intonation patterns
 Recognising words and understanding their information content
 Identifying grammatical grouping of words
 Understanding redundancy
 Recognising non-linguistic cues such as gestures
 Using background knowledge to predict and confirm the meaning.

2 Real-Life Listening and Classroom Listening

If you want to prepare your pupils for real-life listening, you need to be aware of the
differences between real-life listening and classroom listening. Classroom listening is usually
controlled and contrived, that is, listening situations are set up in advance, well prepared, and
frequently scripted. Furthermore, the reason for listening is often a linguistic one. The material
listened to may be read aloud from a written text, and as such it is likely to consist of full,
grammmatically accurate sentences, clearly articulated and delivered at a deliberately slow
pace.
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 2.1 Characteristics of Real-Life Listening Situations
Different listening texts have different vocabulary, grammar and even different
phonology. For instance, there will be different phonological features in a chat and a
supermarket staff announcement. A chat will generally go fast, it will make use of more
contractions and there may also be a lot of fall - rise intonation. A supermarket staff
announcement is generally issued in a monotone. The style of texts can vary from very formal,
to formal, casual or intimate, with no hard and fast dividing lines between the styles.
If you wish to make your classroom listening tasks authentic, you need to consider
which of the characteristics of real-life listening you can realistically bring into the classroom. In
real life, the language we listen to is quick, informal and improvised, with the speakers putting it
together as they go along. Speakers and listeners often know one another and can anticipate
what they are likely to talk about. Informal and spontaneous speech has the following features:
 A conversation is usually broken into short chunks as people take short turns to
speak, usually of a few seconds each.
 The pronunciation of words is often slurred, and different from the phonological
representation given in a dictionary.
 The vocabulary is often colloquial (e.g. guy for man, kid for child, etc.)
 Informal speech tends to be ungrammatical: utterances do not usually divide
neatly into sentences; a grammatical structure may change in mid-utterance;
unfinished clauses are common.
 There will be bits of the discourse that are unintelligible to the hearer, perceived
by the latter as being noise. This may be because the words are not said clearly,
or not known to the hearer, or because the hearer is not attending. We usually
comprehend less than 100 per cent of what is said to us, making up for the deficit
by guessing the missing items or simply ignoring them and gathering what we can
from the rest.
 The speaker is normally redundant, that is, says a good deal more than is strictly
necessary for the conveying of the message. Redundancy includes repetition,
paraphrase, glossing with utterances in parenthesis, self-correction, the use of
‘fillers’ such as I mean, well, er.
To some extent redundancy compensates for the gaps created by the ‘noise’. Imagine
someone asking you: “What did you do yesterday?” The question meaning is expressed by the
word what, by the grammar (inversion and the auxiliary verb), and by the phonology (high start
on What, fall - rise intonation on do). There is an abundance of information so that, if we happen
to miss one of the items, we will still have four more chances at interpreting the utterance
correctly.
 The discourse will not be repeated exactly; normally it is heard only once. This
may be compensated for by redundancy, and by the hearer’s possibility of
requesting repetition or explanation.
To these language features we may add a few characteristics of the real-life context:
 Real-life listeners know what to expect. The listener almost always knows in
advance something about what is going to be said, about who is speaking or
about the basic topic. Linked to this is the purpose a listener normally has (e.g. to
find out something). A listener always expects to hear something relevant to this
purpose.
 Looking as well as listening. Only a very small proportion of listening is done
‘blind’ (e.g. listening to the radio or telephone). Normally, a listener has something
to look at that is linked to what is being said; usually the speaker him-/herself, but
often other visual stimuli as well (e.g. a map, scene, or object, or the environment
in general).
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  In real-life, the speaker expects listener feedback. The listener is usually
responding at intervals as the interaction is going on. It is relatively rare for us to
listen to extended speech and respond only at the end. The responses are
normally related to the listening purpose, and are only occasionally a simple
demonstration of comprehension.
The speaker usually directs the speech at the listener, takes the listener’s character and
intentions into account when speaking, and often responds directly to his/her reactions, whether
verbal or non-verbal, by changing or adapting the discourse.

2.2 Listening Styles in Real Life

In real life, there are two ways in which we listen: casual and focused listening.
Sometimes we listen with no particular purpose in mind, and often without much
concentration. Examples of casual listening are listening to the radio while doing housework or
chatting to a friend. Usually we do not listen very closely, unless we hear something that
particularly interests us.
At other times we listen for a particular purpose, to find out information we need to
know. Examples of focussed listening are listening to a piece of important news on the radio or
listening to someone explaining how to operate a machine. In these situations, we listen much
more closely; but we do not listen to everything we hear with equal concentration – we listen for
the most important points or for particular information. Usually, we know beforehand what we
are listening for and this helps us to listen.
Moreover, the way we listen changes according to what we are listening to, who we are
listening to, where we are, etc.
a) Interactive and non-interactive listening. Interactive listening is, typically,
listening in conversations, where the listener is also a speaker. Non-interactive
listening is the kind of listening where the listener has no possibility of contributing.
SAQ 1

Arrange the following listening situations along the continuum “interactive - non-
interactive”: instructions, traditional lectures, conversation, sermons, guided tours, loudspeaker
announcements.
interactive

non-interactive

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 b) Transactional and interactional listening. Transactional listening takes place
when we need to know what our interlocutor is talking about because we have to
act upon it somehow. A transactional discourse has a purpose – to solicit goods or
services or a favour. Buying a pair of shoes in a shoe shop, ordering food in a
restaurant, inviting someone to come to a party, are all examples of transactional
discourse. Transactional listening requires attentiveness and selectiveness: we
have to attend carefully in order to carry out (or refuse to carry out) what our
interlocutor requires. For instance, a waiter has to listen and note the food and
drink required, and so on.
Interactional listening has to do with building and maintaining social relations. It
covers all those conversations where we tell each other what we did yesterday
and what we are going to do tomorrow. It also covers those short interchanges
with strangers or distant acquaintances where we swap platitudes about the
weather, comments about sport, etc. Whereas in transactional listening we need to
listen attentively and selectively, in interactional listening we do not need to do so.
However, we may decide to do so when an interactional conversation takes on a
transactional flavour.
c) Submissive and assertive listening. In submissive listening the listener submits
her/himself to the authority of the speaker. The aim of the listener is to find out
what the speaker means, what his/her opinion is, or to apprehend his/her vision of
things. We might listen to a film or play, to a lecture or a sermon in this way.
Assertive listening is to do with listening to a text for what it can give us. We may
not care about the speaker, his/her point of view or style. All we want to do is get
out some facts which are of use to us. We might listen to a loudspeaker
announcement in this way, or to the weather forecast.

3 Classroom Listening Activities

The traditional aims for listening lessons were the presentation or practice of
grammatical structures and vocabulary. Even now the principal rationale behind the selection of
listening material in textbooks seems to be either a grammatical or a lexical one. However, it is
often necessary to create lessons or lesson sequences that specifically address the listening
comprehension problems your pupils have. The following could be aims for listening activities:
 to increase the pupils’ awareness of how listening with a purpose can make
listening more effective
 to increase the pupils’ awareness of different styles
 to present various aspects of culture enabling the pupils to make useful
predictions
 to present strategies for dealing with individual unfamiliar words
or, more specifically:
 to increase the pupils’ awareness of the extent and frequency of contractions/short
forms in normal, rapid speech.
 to introduce and provide practice in common collocations
 to provide practice in various grammar structures, focussing attention on their
meaning
 to provide exposure to a variety of dialects, etc.
Some of these aims may still remind you of the traditional use of listening activities to
present or practise language items. The big difference is that the texts used now are mostly
authentic.

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 Think first!

How authentic does the following conversation seem to be? What features of
authenticity does it show?
“A: Where are you going?”
“B: I’m going home.”
“A: Are you walking or going by bus?”
“B: I’m walking. I’m not going by bus.”
“A: What are your plans for the weekend?”
“B: I’m going to give a party”.
“A: See you tomorrow.”
“B: See you.”

 incomplete sentences
 repetition of certain structures
 contractions
 hesitations and fillers
 changes of topic
 redundancy
 ungrammatical utterances

3.1 Spontaneous Speech in the Classroom

Most listening texts you use in the classroom should be based on either genuinely
improvised, spontaneous speech, or on a fair imitation of it. These texts have the advantages of
speaker visibility (your pupils will see you talking to them) and of being a kind of direct
interaction, which the pupils may interrupt. A written text that is read aloud as a basis for
classroom listening activity is unlikely to incorporate the characteristics of informal speech and
will provide your pupils with no practice in understanding spoken discourse. You should
improvise at least some of the listening texts yourself in the classroom. Video also makes a
positive contribution to the effectiveness of listening practice, as it supplies the aspect of
speaker visibility and the general visual environment of the text.
When using spontaneous speech, encourage your pupils to develop the ability to
extract the information they need from a single hearing. Help them by using texts that are
redundant enough to provide this information more than once. Whenever possible, they should
be able to stop you to request a repeat or an explanation.
However, even if the pupils can do the task after one listening, you may wish to let them
hear the text again, for the sake of further exposure and practice and better chances of
successful performance.
SAQ 2

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 Can you think of any advantages of teacher spontaneous speech over recorded
speech?
Do you feel confident when using spontaneous speech?

3.2 Choosing Listening Materials for the Classroom

Your choice of listening materials can be affected by considerations which have to do
with presenting and practising grammar or vocabulary items. Apart from that, it is also possible
to select texts and listening material on skills development basis. In this situation, you will
consider the skills that the pupils will use outside the classroom and not the areas of phonology,
grammar or vocabulary that are creating difficulties. Apart from these, several other factors need
to be taken into account, like text type, style and register and listening style.

3.3 Intensive and Extensive Listening

According to focus, listening activities can be classified as intensive or extensive.
Intensive listening is done either for detailed comprehension of the meaning of a text or
for language. During the activities which focus on the detailed comprehension of meaning the
pupils are reinforcing a structure or practising a grammar point that is linked to the rest of the
lesson. This can be done through:
 Comprehension questions:
(i) factual, where the answer is clearly stated somewhere in the passage.
(ii) inferential, where the pupils have to make some sort of connection themselves,
such as a connection between two parts of the passage or between something in
the passage and the pupils’ knowledge of the outside world.
(iii) personal, where the question is related to the pupils’ own experience or opinion.
 Summary questions. The pupils listen to a passage and then summarise what
they have heard. They may take notes as they listen. The summary can be written
up in the form of a letter or a newspaper report.
 Logical problems can be used to encourage very careful intensive listening.
Intensive listening for language provides detailed work on language once the pupils can
understand what they are listening to. This work is effective if the linguistic exercises are related
to each other and to the listening passage.
In extensive listening the pupils are primarily concerned with following a story or finding
something out from the passage they are listening to. You should prepare the pupils for the
listening by telling them something about the topic of the listening text or by giving them key
words.
To a large extent, however, the division between intensive and extensive listening is
somewhat artificial. It is easy to use the same listening text for both extensive listening and
more detailed work.

3.4 Listening Comprehension Activities Classified According to

Learner Response
Listening activities can be classified according to how the pupils respond to the listening
material. Responses give the pupils an immediate motivation, structure the listening and make it
meaningful.

Think first!
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 How can you know whether your pupils are following or not, when they are not
supposed to give any response?

No overt responses
The pupils may not have to do anything in response to the listening text, when they are
engaged in such activities as:
 Stories. You tell a joke or real-life anecdote, retell a well-known story, read a story
from a book; or play a recording of a story. If the story is well chosen, your pupils
are likely to be motivated to attend and understand in order to enjoy it.
 Songs. You sing a song yourself, or play a recording of one. If no response is
required the pupils may simply enjoy the music without understanding the words.
 Entertainment: films, theatre, and video. As with stories, if the content is really
entertaining (interesting, stimulating, humorous, dramatic) your pupils will be
motivated to make the effort to understand without the need for any further task.
Even if the pupils are not asked to give a response during such listening activities, you
can still watch their facial expression and body language to see if they are following or not.

Short responses
The class may be expected to give short responses when they are engaged in activities
like the following:
 Obeying instructions. The pupils perform actions, or draw shapes or pictures, in
response to your instructions.
 Ticking off items. You provide a list, a text or a picture; the pupils mark or tick off
words as they hear them within a spoken description, story or simple list of items.
 True / false. The listening passage consists of a number of statements, some of
which are true and some false. The pupils write ticks or crosses to indicate
whether the statements are right or wrong; or make brief responses (‘True!’ or
‘False!’); or they may stay silent if the statements are right and say ‘No!’ if they are
wrong.
 Detecting mistakes. You tell a story or describe something the class knows, but
with a number of deliberate mistakes or inconsistencies. The pupils raise their
hands or call out when they hear something wrong.
 Cloze. The listening text has occasional, widely spaced brief gaps, represented by
silence or some kind of buzz. The pupils write down what they think might be the
missing word. If you speak the text yourself, then you can more easily adapt the
pace of your speech to the speed of your pupils’ responses.
 Guessing definitions. You provide brief oral definitions of a person, place, thing,
action, etc. and the pupils write down what they think it is.
 Skim and scan listening. A listening text is given, in which the pupils are asked to
identify some general topic or information (skimming), or certain limited information
(scanning) and note the answer(s). Written questions inviting brief answers may
be provided in advance or a grid with certain entries missing or a picture or
diagram to be altered or completed.
Longer responses
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 When you organise such activities as the following, you will expect longer
responses:
 Answering questions. One or more questions demanding fairly full responses
are given in advance, to which the listening text provides the answer(s). Because
of the relative length of the answers demanded, they are most conveniently given
in writing.
 Note-taking. The pupils take brief notes from a short lecture or talk.
 Paraphrasing and translating. The pupils rewrite the listening text in different
words, either in English (paraphrase) or in Romanian (translation).
 Summarising. The pupils write a brief summary of the content of the listening
passage.
 Long gap-filling. A long gap is left, at the beginning, middle or end of a text; the
pupils guess and write down, or say, what they think might be missing.

Extended responses
In such activities, the listening is only a ‘jump-off point’ for extended reading, writing or
speaking (these are ‘combined skills’ activities).
 Problem solving. A problem is described orally; the pupils discuss how to deal
with it, and/or write down a suggested solution.
 Interpretation. An extract from a piece of dialogue or monologue is provided with
no previous information; the pupils try to guess from the words, kinds of voices,
tone and other evidence what is going on. At a more sophisticated level, a piece of
literature that is suitable for reading aloud (some poetry, for example) can be
discussed and analysed.
A number of procedures can be used for encouraging response to a listening piece:
1. Ask pupils to interrupt/stop the tape and ask for clarification where necessary.
Teach them appropriate language for doing so.
2. Give pupils a set of comments (What rubbish! That's interesting. I didn’t know that.
etc.) Ask them to stop the tape and make the comments in appropriate places.
3. With dialogue material, stop the tape after each line and ask pupils to say what
they think the other person is going to say.
4. Ask pupils to fill in charts, forms, etc. where appropriate.
5. Ask pupils to take notes, especially from lectures, news, current affairs, etc.
6. Provide pupils with the 'task' that would be carried out if they were listening
outside the classroom. For example, after listening to recorded messages on an answering
machine, pupils note down the relevant information to pass on to their classmates.
SAQ 3

Which of the six procedures above can be adapted for reading, too?

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 3.5 Guidelines for Designing Effective Listening Tasks
Keep in mind that nothing works all the time, for everybody, in every situation. If an
activity is useful, add it to your repertoire. If it is not, abandon or adjust it. Here are a few basic
points to remember:
 Warm up before each activity, by introducing the topic and relating it where
possible to your pupils’ own lives and interests.
 Give clear instructions and then check that the pupils have understood them. It is
not sufficient to ask if they understand. Those who do not may remain silent for
fear of exposing their ignorance. Ask one of the weaker pupils to tell you what they
are going to do.
 When using a text, give the title and ask the pupils to predict the kind of language
they are going to hear. Write any key vocabulary that they suggest on the board.
 Give them something to listen for, so that they have a purpose in listening. Tell
them you want to know when the incident occurred, where, or what person, animal
or object was mentioned.
Give your pupils in advance some idea about the kind of text that they are going to hear.
The mere instruction ‘Listen to the passage…’ is less useful than something like: ‘You are going
to hear a husband and wife discussing their plans for the summer….’ The latter instruction
activates their previous knowledge and enables them to use it to build anticipations that will help
them understand the text.
Provide a listening purpose by setting a task. Thus, rather than say simply: ‘Listen and
understand….’ give a specific instruction such as: ‘Listen and find out where the family are
going for their summer holidays. Mark the places on your map.’ The definition of a purpose
enables the pupils to listen selectively for significant information.
SAQ 4

Look at the following descriptions and tick the examples of purposeful listening:

 Pupils listen to someone giving directions and trace the route on a map.
 Pupils listen to a weather forecast and decide where they will spend the weekend
if they want to have good weather.
 Pupils look at photographs of the teacher’s family and, while the teacher talks
about the people, they have to identify them by name.
 Before listening to a description of the town in which they are studying, pupils
make a list of points they would expect to be made. As they listen to the description they tick the
points which are, in fact, mentioned.
 Pupils listen to a story and subsequently answer questions about the events.
(after Parrott, M., 1993, Tasks for Language Teachers, CUP)
The task you set for your pupils will usually involve intermittent responses during the
listening. You should encourage the pupils to respond to the information they are looking for as
they hear it, not to wait to the end. The fact that the pupils are active during the listening rather
than waiting to the end keeps them busy and helps to prevent boredom.
Although they are the most naturally occurring responses, verbal responses are
impractical in the listening classroom. Here the answers will have to be in the form of physical
Anca Cehan 9
movements or written responses which can be checked later.
Providing the pupils with some idea of what they are going to hear and what they are
asked to do with it helps them to succeed in the task, and it raises their motivation and interest.
This is often provided by a visual focus: marking a picture, diagram, or map or even a written
text.
If there is no pre-set task, you must make sure that the text itself is stimulating enough,
and of an appropriate level. Occasionally, for the sake of the fun and challenge, or to encourage
your pupils to use real-world knowledge to help interpretation, you may wish to ask them to find
out what the passage is about without any previous hint. There are also listening activities, such
as listening to stories or watching exciting films, which need no clear task beyond the
comprehension itself.
One real problem may be that materials writers often overload the task: too many
responses are demanded of the pupils, information is coming too fast, there is not enough
redundancy and there is not enough time to respond during the listening. The result is pupil
frustration and irritation, even if the listening text is repeated.
SAQ 5

Look at the following list of personal factors and indicate which is characteristic of
effective and which of ineffective listening. Write either E (for effective) or I (for ineffective) in the
space provided.
The pupil
 tries to understand everything
 tries to listen word by word
 tries to activate general knowledge of the topic to hel him understand the
discourse
 guesses in order to help him understand when he misses information
 ‘thinks ahead’ generally while listening (guesses how the discourse will
develop/what is going to be talked about)
 uses his knowledge of the language to narrow down the range of possibilities with
regards to what the next key word or phrase may be
 varies his attention during the listening process, concentrating on particular words
which are stressed, and on stretches of speech which are pitched relatively high in the voice
range.
after Parrott, M. 1993, Tasks for Language Teachers, CUP

3.6 Procedures for the Systematic Development of Listening

Comprehension
If you follow a systematic approach to teaching listening skills, then you might want to
include phonology teaching procedures in your listening lessons. You could go beyond the
phonological level and provide lexis and discourse recognition tasks, too.
 Developing recognition and discrimination of phonological features
1. Model, drill, show on board phonemes, consonant clusters at word boundaries,
weak forms, main stress, intonation
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 2. Pupils show recognition (by raising: a left/right hand; a red/blue rod; a card with ‘1’
or a card with ‘2’ written on it; etc. ) of:
 word boundary phenomena (Did you hear /p/ or /b/?)
 minimal pairs
 stress recognition (Which word was stressed ‘flower’ or ‘red’?)
 intonation recognition (Did the intonation on the stressed syllable go  or
?)
3. Pupils listen and mark stress on a transcript.
4. Pupils listen and mark pause, change in pitch, etc. by drawing a line.
 Skim listening
Skim listening (or gist listening) is listening to get an overall idea of what is going on.
This is not to be confused with a ‘first listening’ procedure, where you allows pupils to
listen to a tape once through to get a general idea, before going on to more detailed
comprehension questions. The point of this is simply to help learners over the difficulties
of alienation from the tape recorder.
The most obvious way of doing this is to expose pupils to different non-interactive
listening pieces and to point out, by comparison, what sort of overall message is going
on.
 Building confidence with listening pieces and texts
1. If you are planning to make extensive use of a tape recorder or video recorder for
listening, then you can help them to feel confident by using the equipment in the
first instance to play music or to show film with no dialogue.
2. Use a short extract at first, building up to longer pieces.
3. Confidence can be built up by providing very easy tasks initially, moving on to
more difficult ones.
4. Pupils can increase their confidence in reading by underlining everything they
understand (this encourages a positive attitude, focuses attention on meaning
rather than on difficulties, and provides a vocabulary avoidance strategy).
 Authentic listening in the classroom
There are many thoroughly authentic instances of listening in the classroom which
present themselves in the normal run of things. The following procedures provide, in
themselves, authentic listening: giving instructions, checking registers, answering
questions, instructions, encouraging students, correcting, explaining, checking,
answering questions, solving students’ problems.
Authentic listening activities in class which do not necessarily occur normally, but which
can easily be made to occur are, among others, student presentations and pre-lesson
chit-chat.

3.7 A Basic Methodological Model for the Teaching of Listening

Comprehension
The model has five basic stages:
1. Lead-in. Prepare the class or have the pupils to prepare themselves for the task
and get familiar with the topic of the listening activity. One of the major reason for
this is to create expectations and arouse their interest in the subject matter of the
text.
2. Directing comprehension task: Make sure that your pupils know what they are
going to do (to answer questions, fill in a chart, complete a message or try and re-
tell what they heard). Explain and direct the pupils’ purpose for listening.
3. Pupils listening for the task. Speak or play the record while the pupils listen to
the text to perform the task you have set.
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 4. Directing feedback. When the pupils have performed the task, help them to see if
they have completed the task successfully and find out how well they have done.
This may follow a stage in which pupils check their answers with each other first.
5. Directing text-related task. Organise follow-up tasks related to the text. For
instance, ask them to do more analytical work. Thus if the first task involved
getting the general picture, return to the text for such a task as inferring attitude or
deducing meaning. However, if the pupils perform unsuccessfully in their first
comprehension task, redirect them to the same task to try again.

3.8 Problems with Classroom Listening

Think First!

Can you name some of the reasons why your pupils may not understand a spoken text?
What aspects of listening to English are particularly difficult for your pupils to cope with?

Listening to a voice coming from a machine is neither easy nor common. Most pupils
listen to the radio mainly for music. The only parallels with life outside the classroom are
listening to announcements in airports, stations or supermarkets, or listening to commentaries in
museums and on tourist buses.
Trying to understand the spoken word through a similar medium presents particular
difficulties. Besides the obvious difficulty presented by divorcing the spoken word from its
normal visual circumstances, pupils may be alienated by the quality of the recording and their
inability to have any control over what they are listening to and, in particular, over the rate at
which it.
The topic can be strange or unknown, and the pupils may feel it is offensive on their
normal capacities.
Their ability to listen extensively is determined, to a great extent, by their awareness or
knowledge of the topic. If they know what they are going to listen to, they have expectations
that they expect to be fulfilled, and they make predictions about what the speaker(s) will say.
These expectations and predictions channel their attention to specific parts of the utterance. By
knowing what to expect, and what they are listening for, they can more easily ‘home in’ on what
needs most attention or concentration.
The pupils may not have enough background information. They need a network of
general background information to help them comprehend the things they hear. Even extremely
competent language users can have difficulty in listening when they are unable to use or to
perceive the background information.
Background information is an important factor in the expecting, predicting, recognising
and inferring chain of skills. This information ca be in the shape of the general situation (e.g.
where the listening takes place), or the way speakers look (e.g. how they are dressed, or the
expressions on their faces), or the scenario that is called up as the monologue or conversation
gets under way. We refer to our experience to get ready and interpret what we hear correctly.
The classroom may have a strange effect on some pupils’ normal capacities.
Under normal circumstances, we always listen or read for a reason: enjoyment,

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curiosity, interest; or the need for a train time, an address, etc. There is always a purpose to our
listening. This reason helps us to set up expectations about the content of the message and
helps us to interpret it or to decode it. Similarly, under normal circumstances, we tend to ‘get our
bearings’ before listening. We do this in a number of ways: we may hear the title of a
programme on the radio; at the beginning of a conversation we may ask a couple of questions
to our interlocutor to check that we are both talking about the same thing; we may summon our
existing knowledge (schemata) about the subject to the fore of our minds; we may look at the
object our companion is pointing to, and so on. Finally, under normal circumstances, we may
choose to listen in different ways: we may decide, for instance, not to listen to a loudspeaker
announcement which is intended for someone else.
The pupils in the classroom, however, have these normal mechanisms suspended. To
most pupils, the purpose of listening in the classroom is an instructional one. This is one reason
why pupils can normally listen to your instructions with less difficulty than when they are given a
listening activity.
Additionally, the classroom provides distractions which may hinder normal attention and
also creates tensions, like being asked questions in front of others.
Lack of linguistic knowledge will hinder the pupils’ attempts at understanding what they
listen to. They may have difficulty understanding non-standard variants or they may be
unfamiliar with many of the words in what they are listening to. In such situations they will give
up trying to understand the text. If their grasp of grammar is shaky then they will misinterpret the
message of the text.
SAQ 6

Why does the presence of individual unfamiliar words hinder the understanding of a
spoken text?

Anything we listen to is overflowing with information, and competent listeners are given
a large number of chances to decode the message of a text. Competent language users are
familiar with the patterns of sounds, stress, intonation, spelling, lexis, grammar, discourse and
style are able to eliminate unlikely alternatives spontaneously and unconsciously at every tiny
step of the unfolding of the discourse. Exploiting redundancy means that when we are listening
and we miss a word or a grammar marker, such as past-tense morpheme, we can usually
guess what that word or marker was by hearing to the rest of the utterance. In other words, it is
knowledge of patterns that makes the task of listening easier. The expectations of which
sounds follow which, which words commonly go together, how words combine syntactically,
along with background knowledge, reduce the amount of sounds, sound-groups, letters and
words they actually need to hear.

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 SAQ 7

Can you understand what this speaker, with a slight speech defect, is saying: “Top
talking, tand till and tay there until I tell you to move.” Why (not)?

A good knowledge of how English discourse works helps the pupils to predict what they
are about to listen to and to make correct inferences about what they have just heard - to make
backwards and forwards connections to other parts of the discourse they are engaged in. This
enables them to build a picture of the meaning of the discourse and of the relationships within it.
The pupils’ lack of familiarity with the linguistic patterns of English reduces both their
predictive and their guessing ability. Also, if your pupils’ level of language is not good enough,
they cannot understand fast, natural speech. They will often ask you to slow down and speak
clearly (by which they mean pronounce each word the way it would sound in isolation). If you do
so, you will help them to learn to cope with everyday informal speech. Your pupils should be
exposed to as much spontaneous informal talk as they can successfully understand.
Your pupils may find it difficult to keep up with the listening task. They may feel
overloaded with incoming information. The solution is not so much to slow down the discourse
but rather to encourage them to stop trying to understand everything, learn to pick out what is
essential and allow themselves to ignore the rest.
Your pupils may often need to hear things more than once. There may also be good
pedagogical reasons for exposing them to texts more than once. In real life, however, they will
have to cope with ‘one-off’ listening. You can try to use texts that include ‘redundant’ passages
and within which the essential information is presented more than once and not too intensively.
You can also give them the opportunity to request clarification or repetition during the listening.
Your pupils will get tired. This is one reason why listening passages should not be very
long, and why you should break them into short ‘chunks’ through pause, listener response or
change of speaker.

Summary
Listening is seen as a complementary skill to speaking in communication. Pupils may
find listening difficult because some teachers consider it a passive skill, which does not need
teaching. However, as listening is a medium over which the pupils have no control, it should be
taught along with speaking. The pupils should be exposed to as many different types of listening
as possible, as the objective of listening comprehension practice in the classroom is that pupils
should learn to function successfully in real-life listening situations.

Key Concepts
 oral and aural skills
 listening styles
 redundancy
 intensive and extensive listening in the classroom
 pupil response to listening
 methodological model for listening activities
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  background information
 alienation

Further Reading

1. Harmer, Jeremy, 1991, The Practice of English Language Teaching, Longman

2. Hubbard Peter et al., 1983, A Training Course for TEFL, OUP
3. Ur, Penny, 1996, A Course in Language Teaching. Practice and Theory, CUP

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