(1) PDP Framework
P = Pre-listening
D = During-listening
P= Post-listening
Pre-listening
(1) Pre-listening
Purpose
Help students prepare for what they are going to hear (which will
give them a greater chance of success in any task)
Activities
 Activate schemata (to help predict content)
 Generate interest in the topic
 Teach lexical items
 Set up a reason to listen
(1) During-listening
Purpose
Students interact with the text to improve their listening skills
Activities (step-by-step – carefully sequenced and scaffolded)
 Main idea/Gist (general)
 Details (specific)
 Inferences (what is not explicitly stated)
 Summarize (comprehensive)
*Need to do a different task for each repeated listening (x3).
(1) Post-listening
Purpose
Build and expand on what students have learned in the lesson (which
includes integrating other language skills and personalizing content)
Activities
 Comprehension questions
 Vocabulary review
 Response to content (orally and/or in writing)
 Extension work or project(s)
(2) Role of the teacher
Tailor (text must fit class – appropriate topic, level, genre, etc.)
Stand-up comedian (best source of input; hold an audience)
Sleuth (analyze lesson language before class for comprehension)
Engineer (working knowledge of equipment)
Spy (observe students while listening)
Doctor (expert at diagnosis – things that went wrong)
Firefighter (get out of trouble – lesson/listening text is too difficult)
Tour guide (point out what’s interesting and ignore what isn’t)
(3) Cole and Jakimek (1980)
“In mud eels are, in clay none are”
Listeners had to report back what they had heard, but proved totally
incapable of understanding the sentence.
Relevance: Shows that, without a clear context, connected speech
often becomes inaccessible.
(4-5) Context and Pre-listening
 Who is speaking and who is listening? Why?
 What is their relationship?
 Where are they and what are they trying to achieve?
 What language are they using (verbal and body) and how are they
using it (tone, pitch, accent, volume, speaking style, etc.)?
 What information will be heard in the listening text (to include
length, function – persuading, and structure – monologue)?
 What is the topic? Familiar or requires special knowledge?
(6) Activating schemata
 Brainstorming (generate ideas > narrow down)
 Visuals (immediate and evocative)
 Realia (link classroom to outside world; memories/associations)
 Texts and words (vital information, motivates us to investigate)
 Situations (typical/routine – familiarity helps predict/anticipate)
 Opinions, ideas and facts (broadens and involves)
(7) Establishing reasons for listening
1. Make the purpose realistic (task must reflect type of listening text)
2. Make the goal achievable
3. Get the students involved (time, effort, and thought)
(8-9) Most motivating task
Listen for answers to our own (generated) questions
1. Higher-order questions: Analyze something or personalize the
issue (open-ended, produce deep/critical thinking)
2. Lower-order questions: Require basic factual information
(usually have just one correct answer)
3. Display questions: Teacher asks for a correct form (rather than
for any thought)
*Higher-order and lower-order questions help activate schemata.
(10) Pre-teaching vocabulary (factors)
 Time it takes to teach each word
 Whether the word is worth the effort (key: efficiency –
familiar context, pronunciation, do something with it –
sentence, personalize)
 Number of words to be pre-taught (fewer the better)
(11) Chang and Read
160 Taiwanese students – Pre-teaching vocabulary isn’t very effective
 Newly-learned vocabulary is usually not accessible to students during the midlistening phase (can’t process spoken form of the word and meaning simultaneously
> needs to be automatized – several opportunities to process over time)
 Pre-teaching vocabulary tends to encourage students to focus on the target
vocabulary rather than the meaning of the passage as a whole
 Guessing unknown words is a valuable skill (one that students should practice
regularly)
*Teachers need to think carefully about which words to pre-teach, how to pre-teach
them and whether the meaning of unknown words can be inferred and checked in the
post-listening phase).
(12) Pre-listening: Things to avoid
1. Don’t let the pre-listening stage drag on (keep short, fast-paced)
2. Don’t give away too much information to the students
(introduce the topic; don’t give all the answers)
3. Don’t do a listening before the listening (no teacher monologues;
let students do as much speaking as possible)
4. Don’t just talk about the general topic (focus on content of the
passage; relevant to what students will hear)
While-listening
(1) While-listening: Why and help
1. Help students understand the listening passage
 Provide a focus
 Allow them to perceive the text’s structure
 Help them chunk the listening into sections or units of information
 Provide clues as to how they might respond
 Keep them concentrating throughout the passage
 Contribute towards the entertainment factor
2. Have students show evidence of understanding or non-understanding
(2) Production vs. Recognition
1. Productive responses
 Note-taking
 Writing answers to questions
 Correcting errors
 Completing tables, charts, diagrams, sentences
2. Recognition responses
 Answering multiple-choice and true/false questions
 Ticking words and phrases that are heard
 Matching and choosing pictures
Wise to remember: Listening is comprehension – not production
While-listening tasks
1. Listening for gist
2. Listening for detail
3. Inferring
4. Participating actively
5. Note-taking
6. Dictation
7. Listen and do
(3) Listening for gist
On their first encounter with a passage in the classroom, students
usually listen for gist – the main idea.
Before we can develop any discussion of themes, analyze language
used, examine features of pronunciation, etc., the students need to
have grasped the overall communicative intention of the speaker.
This forms the basis and context of all other work that we do on the
text.
(4) Listening for detail
After listening for gist, students usually listen in detail or for specific
information
(5) Inferring
A thinking skill in which we make deductions by going beyond what
is actually (explicitly) stated
When we infer at a higher level, the situation must demand an
inference (i.e. either something latent remains unsaid or there is a
hidden truth below the surface of the situation – a gap the listener
fills in)
(6) Participating actively: How to
By listening and responding either verbally or by categorizing
aspects of what they hear
(7) Note-taking
Note-taking promotes a higher level of attention
(8) Dictation: Benefits
 Forces students to be active during and after the task
 Works well for mixed-ability and large classes
 Provides access to interesting texts
 Is a multiskilled activity
 Is a great way to focus the attention of over-animated students
or daydreamers at the back of the class
 Is very flexible (with numerous variations)
(9) Dictation: Common approach
(10) Dictation: Built-in danger
Students could slip into robot mode – writing down what they hear
without actually thinking about the content (i.e. become speech
transcription devices)
(11) Listen and do: Useful
Good for mixed-ability classes as most activities don’t require an
oral response – plus the (TPR) commands tend to be very short
(requiring the listener to pay attention to just a few words)
Post-listening
(1) Pre-listening and While-listening
Pre-listening prepares students for listening by getting them
interested in the topic, activating schemata and working with topdown ideas
While-listening is when students are on-task and engaged in realtime processing of the input (easy to difficult, general to specific –
e.g. gist > details > Inferences)
(2) Post-listening
Pre-listening involves:
 Checking answers
 Going into detail by looking at both top-down features (e.g.
setting of the passage or information about the speakers) and
bottom-up features (e.g. individual words or phrases)
 Looking at what students found problematic (i.e. do
troubleshooting)
(3) Troubleshooting
Where was there a breakdown in communication? Why?
 Was it caused by pronunciation?
 Was it an unknown or unrecognized vocabulary that caused the
problem?
 Was it the speed at which the speaker talked?
 Was it a problem related to syntax/grammar/structure/order of
words?
 Was it world knowledge?
(4) Diagnostic
Like good doctors, we offer remedies – strategies, techniques,
exposure to grammar, vocabulary and discourse markers, and
further listening practice
We also find out what the students didn’t struggle with and how
they came to their answers (i.e. does their success represent
improvement with a particular skill/set of skills or was it a lucky
guess?)
(5) Long-term goal
Ensure a successful process (i.e. intelligent use of top-down and
bottom-up information, as well as good strategy use) as much as a
successful product (i.e. the correct answer)
(6) Post-listening activities
Checking and summarizing (assess student understanding of the text)
Discussion (opportunities for comments and personalization)
Creative responses (involve both writing and speaking)
Critical responses (awareness of the speaker’s viewpoint, biases, prejudices)
Information exchange (share information – e.g. jigsaw)
Problem-solving (listing, sorting, ranking, ordering, solving, etc.)
Deconstructing the listening text (play short segments of the text > focus on
salient features – e.g. grammar or vocabulary + using transcripts)
Reconstructing the listening text (provide fragments of the text > have
students put back together – e.g. dictogloss or gap-fill)