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Understanding listening
Factors that affect listening
Principles and models for teaching listening
Common activities in teaching listening
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Understanding listening
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What do people listen to ?
 Diversified texts
Why do people listen?
 To extract meaning
 To maintain social relations
 To be entertained
How do people listen?
 The active mental process of listening
 Psychological models of listening
 Characteristics of the listening process

The active mental process of listening e.g. 1 a.
John was in the bus on his way to school.
b. He was worried about controlling the math class.
c. The teacher should not have asked him to do it.
d. It was not a proper part of the janitor’s job. e.g. 2 a. The king died.
b. The queen died of grief.
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Therefore, we can conclude that listening is an active mental process involving stages as the following: sampling 选验 predicting 预见 testing 验证 conforming or revising 肯定或修正
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Bottom-up model and top-down model
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Bottom-up model
 listeners construct meaning of what they hear based on the sound they hear. If there are unfamiliar sounds, listeners will find it very hard to keep up with the speaker.
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Top-down model
 Listeners construct meaning using contextual clues and background knowledge. Listeners understand better if they know something about the speaker, the setting, the topic and the purpose of the talk.
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Interactive model
 Interactive model – an integration of the above two models.
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Characteristics of the listening process
 Spontaneity ---- people listen to spontaneous speech without rehearsing
 Context ---- share same background knowledge
 Visual clues ---- help the understanding
 Listener’s response ---- for most listening ( esp. face to face communication)
 Speaker’s adjustment
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Principles for teaching listening
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Some general principles for teaching listening
 Focus on process
 Combine listening with other skills
 Focus on the comprehension of meaning
 Grade difficulty level appropriately
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Principles for selecting and using listening activities (p.141)

Common activities in teaching listening
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Pre-listening tasks should be used to stimulate the appropriate background knowledge, provide learners with a purpose of the listening activity and prepare them with the language needed for understanding the message (e.g. discussing the topic, brainstorming, presenting vocabulary, sharing of related information).
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While-listening tasks must focus on obtaining information, checking comprehension, organizing information, further study of the language in meaningful context.
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Post-listening tasks must provide opportunities for students to integrate what they learned from the text into their existing knowledge and communicate with others using the information obtained from the listening text.

Pre-listening activities 1

Pre-listening activities 2

Pre-listening activities 3

Pre-listening activities 4

While-listening activities 1

While-listening activities 2

While-listening activities 3

Post-listening activities 1

Post-listening activities 2

Post-listening activities 3
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Answering questions
Discussions
Dictogloss
Role plays
Interviews
Debate