Transcript Document

Unit 9 Teaching Listening
Teaching objectives
 1. know characteristics of the listening
process
 2. grasp principles for teaching listening
 3. know about Pre-listening activities
 4. know about While-listening activities
 5. know about Post-listening activities
Teaching contents

Why does listening
seem so difficult?
 What do we listening to
in everyday life?
 Characteristics of the
listening process
 Principles for teaching
listening
 Pre-listening activities
 While-listening
activities
 Post-listening activities
1. Why does listening seem so
difficult?
 1.1 Lead-in activities
 Ask students to discuss the following
questions:
 1) In your English learning
experiences, did you find listening
more difficult than the other throe skills?
 2) Can you think of any reasons why
listening is often considered to be
more difficult?
1. Why does listening seem so
difficult?
 1.2 Reasons for students' poor listening skill
 1) Lack of teaching materials (audio and video
tapes);
 2) Lack of equipment (tape players, VCRs, VCDs,
computers);
 3) Lack of training in how to use the equipment;
 4) Listening is not included on many important
tests;
 5) Lack of real-life situations where language
learners need to understand spoken English;
 6) Lessons tend to test rather than to train
students' listening skills.
1. Why does listening seem so
difficult?
 1.3 Reasons why listening can be more
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difficult than reading
Different speakers produce the same sounds in
different ways;
The listener has little or no control over the speed
of the input of spoken material;
Spoken material is often heard only once.
The listener cannot pause to work out the
meaning of the heard material ;
Speech is more likely to be distorted by
background noise or the media that transmit
sounds.
The listener sometimes has to deal
simultaneously with another task while listening.
2. What do we listen to in
everyday life?
 2.1 Task 2
 2.1.1 Lead-in activities
 Ask students to discuss how many situations they
can think of where they listen to other people in
their native language? And then work with a
partner and think about all the different situations
where they need to listen in a routine day.
 2.1.2 One reason for students' unsatisfactory
listening abilities
 One reason for students' unsatisfactory listening
abilities is that there is not enough variety in the
materials that they listen to.
2.2 Task 3
 Ask students to choose eight situations that
they think are the most frequent.
 [ ] telephone conversations about business
 [ ] radio news in English
 [ ] lessons or lectures given in English
 [ ] conversations with foreigners
 [ ] instructions in English
 [ ] watching television in English
 [ ] watching movies in English
 [ ] shop assistants who sell goods to
 [ ] deal with tourists
 [ ] interviews with foreign-enterprises
 [ ] international trade fairs
 [ ] socialize with foreigners
3. Characteristics of the listening
process
 Spontaneity
 Context
 Visual clues
 Listener’s response
 Speaker’s adjustment
back
4. Principles for teaching listening
 Focus on process
 Combine listening with other skills
 Focus on comprehending meaning
 Grade difficult level appropriately
 The bottom-up process
 The top-down process
back
Focus on process
 People must do many things to process
information that they are receiving. First they
have to hear what is being said, and then they
have to pay attention, and construct a
meaningful message in their mind by relating
what they hear to what they already know.
back
Focus on comprehending
meaning
It is important to design tasks that do not ask
learners to remember details that they wouldn't
even remember in their native language. In fact,
psycholinguistic studies have shown that people
do not remember the exact form of the message
they hear; that is, they don't remember what they
hear word for word, rather, they remember the
meaning.
back
Grade difficult level appropriately
There are a large number of factors that affect the
difficulty level of listening tasks, but they fall into
three main categories according to Anderson and
Lynch (1988:46): l) type of language used; 2) task
or purpose in listening; 3) context in which the
listening occurs.
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The bottom-up process
Two models have been set up in the psychological
studies of nature of the listening process: the
bottom-up processing model and the up-down
processing model. In the bottom-up model,
listening comprehension is believed to start with
sound and meaning recognitions.
The top-down process
The alternative top-down view suggests that the
listener actively constructs the original meaning
of the speaker using incoming sounds as clues.
In this reconstruction process, the listener uses
prior knowledge of the context and situation
within which the listening takes place to make
sense of what he or she hears.
back
5. Pre-listening activities
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Predicting
 Setting the scene
 Listening for the
gist
 Listening for
specific information
6. While-listening activities
 Nonspecific responses
 Listen and tick
 Listen and fill
 Listen and guess
7. Post-listening activities
 Multiple-choice questions
 Answering questions
 Note-taking and gap-filling
 Dictogloss :
 1)Preparation
2)Dictation
3)Reconstruction 4)Analysis
and correction
Thank you