Listening Skills
Now that you have an idea of how to establish your course outcomes and create a curriculum around them, we are finally ready to get into the specifics of listening! To help you tackle teaching all of the areas within English Listening, I will break it down in a couple of different ways. First, the difference between bottom-up and top-down listening!
Bottom-up listening: Using this approach, students recognize and distinguish individual sounds and segments of words. With these phonemes, they build words, and then sentences. Part by part, they build literally from the “bottom-up” to determine the meaning of a passage.
Top-down listening: Instead of focusing on the smallest unit of meaning, this approach begins with the main idea of the context of a passage. Drawing from previous knowledge, they infer what is being said from what they predict would be said. With this context, they are able to deduce the meaning of sentences and even of individual words.
Both approaches to understanding what they hear are essential for your students to learn. Though they may seem like opposites, they work together to make meaning. For instance, if a student watching a video uses the bottom-up approach to follow along and understand the following words, “My stomach hurts. I am so___”, they may come across a word they are unfamiliar with. Rather than ignoring the word, they may switch to a top-down approach, remembering how the speakers were discussing food, the student may infer that the missing word is “hungry”. Even if they did not pick out every word in the sentence, the student can fill in the gaps with a top-down inference.
To build the ability to use a bottom-up approach, one of the most common exercises you can use is a “cloze activity”. Students are given a transcript with blank spaces throughout. While you play an audio recording or a video, the students fill in the blanks with what they hear. Even just the act of following along with the given words while they listen will build speech recognition. They will match what they see with what they hear and register it in their memories. Preparing for the blanks, students will also listen for the phrase or word before a blank, practicing selective listening. After the video is over, you could either go over the answers as a class, or ask students to find a buddy and compare answers
Focusing on the top-down approach, however, may be harder for students with a firm background in memorization. Rather than rooted in memorizable details, the top-down approach focuses on what is left unsaid. An exercise to help develop this skill is to ask your students questions before and after the listening passage. Before, you might give the students some background, and then ask the students to predict what will happen in the scene. As they watch, the students will determine if the passage followed their prediction or not. This will help the students focus shift away from the details and towards the main idea. Questions in post-listening can even expand the students’ understanding and application of the passage by asking questions like, “Why did Julie not like the soup?” or “Why would you be upset if you were Daniel?”
This activity leads nicely into the next break-down of English Listening skills—one-way and two-way listening:
One-way listening: This type of listening is when a student listens to an input and is not expected to respond. Their job is simply to understand and learn from the input. Videos, audio recordings, and lectures are all examples where students would use one-way listening. It is often easy for teachers to lean into one-way listening activities because they mean that the entire class is focused on a screen or a recording and are thus pretty easy to manage. In the real world, movies, plays, and the news are times we engage in one-way listening.
Two-way listening: This type of listening requires the listener to not only engage, but respond to what is being said like in your average day-to-day conversations. Sometimes, that response may only be a nod, or an “uh-huh”. Often though, it means answering or asking questions to build the conversation. Whether at the grocery store, in an interview, at the doctor’s office, or on a bus, two-way listening is required almost everywhere we go. While much can be gleaned from one-way listening, teaching your students to employ two-way listening is absolutely essential. In some cultures, classrooms are centered on the idea that students passively listen and learn while the teacher, an authority-figure, lectures. It may take some creativity to help your students break this mold and be comfortable with speaking in a classroom setting. One of the easiest ways to build student comfort with responding to listening prompts is to do a “think-pair-share.” You provide a question or prompt, and then assign each student a buddy. Allow the students to reflect on their own response, and then share with their assigned buddy. You can then come back together as a class and call on individual students to share what they discussed in partners. As the students become comfortable with sharing, they will build the skill to, not only listen and understand, but form emotional and verbal responses to what is being shared. This activity will also help your students to learn social skills in the language like turn-taking, and will hopefully help unify your class.
Before wrapping up this post, I wanted to discuss one more break down of listening—listening for comprehension and listening for acquisition:
Listening for comprehension: This approach to listening focuses on understanding what is being said. It does not focus on individual words or grammatical structures, but on the main idea. A way to check for comprehension is to give your students multiple choice or true/false questions about events in a listening passage. Even if students are in the absolute beginning stages of learning English, they can show they understood a passage by ordering pictures representing the story they listened to.
Listening for acquisition: For decades, listening was considered a passive activity. The only purpose in listening was to understand what was said. While the ability to glean meaning while listening is essential in language learning, it is does not monopolize on all that listening has to offer. While listening, students can expand their vocabulary and recognize and replicate grammatical structures used in a listening passage. Cloze exercises and dictation exercises are a great way to help students gain vocabulary and focus, not just on what was said, but how it was said. Role plays are a great way to cement what they learned by practicing it! If your students watched a video on ordering a hotdog, you may draw attention to the grammar used to ask for specific items on the menu, then play the video again. After, have your students practice using the grammar to order their own hotdogs! Two-way listening anyone?
