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Teaching ESL Listening

Planning Language Listening Lessons

Jun 18, 2008

Listening is an important component of the language teaching syllabus. Listening exercises that have been properly prepared are integral in the adoption of a language.

Listening to others allows us to engage in social rituals, exchange information, exert control, share feelings, and enjoy ourselves. Listening exercises for second language learners are thus integral in the adoption of a new language.

Teacher´s Role

A teacher´s role in a listening exercise is to create interest, reasons for listening, and the confidence to listen. For each listening exercise the teacher must have in mind:

What kind of listening process is appropriate to the text
How the learner will "tune in" to the context, express attitudes towards the topic, and emphasize schematic knowledge
Pictures that could be used to contextualize the talk
And the forming of the learner´s opinion on the topic (i.e making explicit opinions in a class discussion, then comparing them to the opinions of the listening material)

Sub-Skills of Listening

The sub-skills that can be emphasized in listening exercises include:

Listening for specific information
Following topic shifts
Predicting
Recognising transitions and sequence markers
Recognising word boundaries
Identifying keywords
And taking notes

Uncertainties of Confidence

Learner´s anxiety can be exacerbated by a classroom procedure which does not contextualize the text or prepare the topic by activating prior knowledge. A listening exercise will always test a learner´s listening ability rather than teach it – there is never a total match between the speaker´s intended message and the listene´s perception of meaning in every language.

To make listening exercises less daunting, it is a good idea to introduce while-listening exercises . If an exercise is given to the learner to complete through the listening exercise this will confirm the learner´s expectations, allow them to follow the information, reflect on what was said and write down specific points.

Varieties of Listening

Bottom up listening

This form of listening uses information in the speech itself to comprehend the meaning of the text. A bottom-up listening process means the listener segments speech into identifiable sounds and imposes a structure of these in terms of words, phrases, clauses, sentences, and intonation patterns.

The learner also uses her knowledge of syntactic structure to infer meaning (for example noun phrase-verb phrase-noun phrase). This schematic knowledge is called formal schemata and refers to the knowledge we have of the overall structure of some speech events.

Top down listening

This form of listening infers meaning from contextual clues and from making links between the spoken message and various types of prior knowledge. This schematic knowledge is called content schemata and refers to general word knowledge, sociocultural knowledge, and topic knowledge.

Acquiring listening skills can be very frustrating for the second language learner. Listening exercises can be completed easier if a specific type of listening is asked of the students (be it top-down or bottom-up), targeting a specific sub-skill with a while-listening activity.

The copyright of the article Teaching ESL Listening in ESL Programs/Lessons is owned by Edurne Scott. Permission to republish Teaching ESL Listening in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.