Teaching
Listening
Strategies for Developing Listening Skills
Language learning depends on
listening. Listening provides the aural input that serves as the basis for
language acquisition and enables learners to interact in spoken communication.
Effective language instructors show
students how they can adjust their listening behavior to deal with a variety of
situations, types of input, and listening purposes. They help students develop
a set of listening strategies and match appropriate strategies to each
listening situation.
Listening
Strategies
Listening strategies are techniques
or activities that contribute directly to the comprehension and recall of
listening input. Listening strategies can be classified by how the listener
processes the input.
Top-down strategies are listener based; the listener taps into background
knowledge of the topic, the situation or context, the type of text, and the
language. This background knowledge activates a set of expectations that help
the listener to interpret what is heard and anticipate what will come next.
Top-down strategies include
- listening for the main idea
- predicting
- drawing inferences
- summarizing
Bottom-up strategies are text based; the listener relies on the language in the
message, that is, the combination of sounds, words, and grammar that creates
meaning. Bottom-up strategies include
- listening for specific details
- recognizing cognates
- recognizing word-order patterns
Strategic listeners also use metacognitive
strategies to plan, monitor, and evaluate their listening.
- They plan by deciding which listening strategies will
serve best in a particular situation.
- They monitor their comprehension and the effectiveness
of the selected strategies.
- They evaluate by determining whether they have achieved
their listening comprehension goals and whether the combination of
listening strategies selected was an effective one.
Listening
for Meaning
To extract meaning from a listening
text, students need to follow four basic steps:
- Figure out the purpose for listening. Activate
background knowledge of the topic in order to predict or anticipate
content and identify appropriate listening strategies.
- Attend to the parts of the listening input that are
relevant to the identified purpose and ignore the rest. This selectivity
enables students to focus on specific items in the input and reduces the
amount of information they have to hold in short-term memory in order to
recognize it.
- Select top-down and bottom-up strategies that are
appropriate to the listening task and use them flexibly and interactively.
Students' comprehension improves and their confidence increases when they
use top-down and bottom-up strategies simultaneously to construct meaning.
- Check comprehension while listening and when the
listening task is over. Monitoring comprehension helps students detect
inconsistencies and comprehension failures, directing them to use
alternate strategies.
How to summarize the spoken text?
Summarize spoken text question in PTE Academic requires you to listen,
understand to the lecture and then summarize the key points in writing. In
order to succeed try the following strategies:
• Write down as much information as you can, and always note down any new
terms, definitions, facts and statistics. Do not write names of speakers or
people mentioned, but refer to their titles or jobs, e.g., psychologist,
researcher, reporter, etc.
• Do not repeat all the information that you have noted down while
listening. Shorten, simplify, paraphrase and synthesize the information into
50–70 words.
• Check and edit any errors
