Teaching Listening

The previous discussions as a secondary skill, but as an important foundation for the language acquisition
process. Teaching this skill provides an avenue for students to be exposed to rich input and an authentic
sample of oral texts. This allows them to be familiar with what constitutes oral texts like pronunciation,
stress, pitch, and intonation; and, to be exposed to rich vocabulary and language structure that is used in
varied communicative settings.
Likewise, you have also been introduced to the process of listening. Vandegrift (2004) mentioned that
students may use either top-down or bottom-up processes. As one listens, he/she may consciously or
unconsciously use one or both processes. Cahyono and Widiati (2009) mentioned that "successful listeners
are those who can use both bottom-up and top-down processes by combining the new information and the
knowledge that they already know." Brown (2006) in Yildirim (2016) elaborated on this:
...students must hear some sounds (bottom-up processing), hold them in their working memory long
enough (a few seconds) to connect them, and then interpret what they've just heard before something new
comes along At the same time, listeners are using their background knowledge (top-down processing) to
determine meaning with respect to prior knowledge and schemata"
This claim is supported by several authors and thus leads to what Lopez, [Link] (2020) mentions as an
integrative approach' in teaching listening which involves three key stages: before-listening, while-listening,
and after-listening. As (future) language teachers, you should ensure to provide activities that would involve
students processing and decoding the text (bottom-up), and then comprehending it using one's schema (top-
down).
According to Vandergrift (2011), "the greater use of one process over the other will depend on the listening
purpose, the listeners' characteristics, and the context where the listening act takes place". Richards (2008) in
Lopez [Link]. (2020) states that:
In real-world listening, both bottom-up and top-down processes generally occur together. The extent to
which one or the other dominates depends on the listener's familiarity with the topic and content of a text,
the density of information in a text, the text type, and the listener's purpose in listening.
The following are some of the exercises you can use which would develop students' top-down and bottom-
up processing:

You have also been introduced to the interactive process of combining both top-down and bottom-up as
teachers design teaching-learning listening activities. Thus, the activities above may be integrated and
divided into three key stages in teaching listening: before-listening, while-listening, and after-listening.
Richards (2008) in Lopez, [Link]. (2020) explains that:
 the before-listening stage prepares students for both types of processing through activities that require
activating their previous knowledge, making predictions, and revising key vocabulary:
the while-listening stage focuses attention on comprehension through activities that require selective
listening, listening for main ideas (gist listening), or understanding the sequence of events (sequencing):
and in the post-listening phase, students should express their opinions on the topic and respond to
comprehension. This stage may also include a detailed analysis of some sections of the text that could not be
understood by the students.
Moreover, since in most actual listening students are exposed to real-life conversations, teachers are
encouraged to contextualize materials and anchor activities on real-life situations.
The following are some of the exercises using the principle of interactive approach in listening. Remember
that deciding on what tasks to give and at which stage they will be given also depends on the learning
outcomes students are expected to achieve during the session.
Suggested Activities
PRE/BEFORE LISTENING
Introduce some vocabulary words from the text.
Encourage students to write down questions which they would ware to answer after listening.
Have students sort a text from a jumbled version.
Ask them to predict what the oral text will be based on its title.
Ask students questions related to the oral text to activate prior knowledge.
Pre-listening tasks may include but are not limited to discussion vocabulary work, prediction and
brainstorming the topic, eliciting real-world knowledge related to the content.
DURING/WHILE LISTENING
Instruct students to list down important words.
Let students guess the meaning of unknown words from the oral texts.
Ask students to list expressions that occurred while listening.
Ask students to do cloze exercises while listening.
Let them show evidence of understanding or non-understanding through gestures (thumbs up or thumbs
down) while listening.
As the teacher reads the text, or as the audio recording plays the teacher may stop at some parts to ask
students to write down important points or give descriptions, etc..
POST/AFTER LISTENING
Ask students to think and talk about what they heard.
Let them create and share their dialogues from what they have listened to.
Let them write their own opinions and share them with the class.
Ask them to sequence important events from the stories listened to.
Let them complete gaps in the text, tick words, and phrases that are heard, or match and choose pictures.
Ask questions for comprehension.
Introduce memory games.
Let students complete tables, charts, diagrams, sentences.
Let them answer multiple-choice and true/false questions.
Let them do character portrayals.
The teacher can also build and expand students' understanding through integrating other language skills.
Putting relevant and be able to prior know comprehend students org understanding
Setting be made cl they going specific poi prepared at listening. W or to eval
Format of a Listening Lesson
In the previous discussion, we have established the following points:
 Teachers have to provide activities that supplement comprehension goals with acquisition goals.
 Successful listeners are those that can use both bottom-up and top-down processes thus, teaching-
learning activities should provide students the opportunity to practice both.
 The three key stages in listening may be used as an outline in designing a listening lesson that
ensures an interactive process approach in teaching listening.
So how do you craft a listening lesson with all three stages: pre-listening. while-listening, after-
listening?
Pre-listening
This stage sets the context of the listening activity that will be given to students. In this stage, the following
will help you in getting your students ready for the listening task:
Identifying vocabulary/comprehension needs. As language teachers, you should have information on your
students' listening skills as well as their vocabulary level.
This is very helpful not just when designing pre-listening vocabulary activities but also when choosing
specific materials for listening activities. Teachers should help students better understand the listening or
oral texts by identifying possible difficult words or presenting specific vocabulary expressions which
students would need while listening. Before listening, you can already select some vocabulary for students
to study. You can give them word-definition matching or fill the gaps in sentences.
Activating interest. Teachers would always start with motivational activities to set the classroom mood. The
goal is for students to be ready and be motivated to listen. The listening text should be 'familiar', interesting,
and within students' level of understanding. From this, you should design tasks that will arouse your
students' interest and curiosity. You may use video and audio segments, songs, and/or stories that students
find interesting. You may refer to the suggested activities given above.
Putting it in context. Teachers should choose oral and listening texts that are relevant and interesting to the
students. During pre-listening, the teacher should be able to design contextualized listening activities that
would activate students' prior knowledge and help them form appropriate inferences which they need to
comprehend the message. According to Vandergrift (n.d), teachers need to help students organize their
thoughts, activate appropriate background knowledge for understanding and to make predictions to prepare
for listening.
Setting the purpose. At the onset, the purpose of the listening activity should be made clear to the students.
Are they listening for information? for gist? Or are they going to do intensive listening? Students should be
cued in advance on what specific points they need to attend to when listening. This will help them to be
more prepared at the same time know the listening strategies they will have to use while listening. What is
the purpose of listening to gain information, or to be entertained, or to evaluate, or to give support or
understanding to the speaker? Students will better understand if they know why are they made to listen in
the first place.
Remember as well that before starting the while-listening activities, you have to ensure that students will
have no distractions.
While-listening
In planning the while-listening activities, you may need to consider the following:
Listening and re-listening. Most students may need to listen to a text several times before they can
understand. Listening becomes more challenging if you're using adapted audio texts from foreign speakers.
In this case, you may want to inform your students ahead that such audio recordings will be played more
than once so as not to put too much pressure on them. Likewise, depending on the purpose of the listening
task and the listening material, as a teacher, you need to assess how much your students can take and
whether listening once is enough for them. If students are listening independently, they can stop the audio
and think or listen again as needed.
Guided listening and Scaffold note-taking. While-listening focuses on comprehension through exercises that
require selective listening, gist listening, sequencing, etc. If you need your students to complete something
while listening, you have to make sure that they have previewed and understood the written task first before
listening begins. Remember that these tasks are given to guide your students in the listening task and not to
distract them. Thus, you also have to keep writing tasks to a minimum especially if your goal is
comprehension. You can provide listening organizers to help students focus on important details which can
help them deepen their understanding of the listening material/task. You can also direct them to find clues
from the listening text which would help them understand better. These activities may be done by pairs on in
groups. Although listening is an individual activity, sometimes students become more confident if they are
working with a partner especially in completing while-listening activities.
"Thinking space'. Just like any classroom activity, students need 'breathing' or 'thinking space' between and
after listening activities. Give them time to process the information by pausing in between paragraphs, and
check now and then if they are still following. If there are parts that students have difficulty understanding.
they may start to wander off and lose focus in the activity. Thus, you have to be keen and address these
difficulties while in the process. You may summarize, use questions, point out significant details so that
students will be able to recognize important parts of the message.
There's a lot of listening texts you can use in your classroom. However, providing students with a "more real
act of communication" through authentic listening texts provides a better way for students to understand the
language when used in the real context. Your listening texts may be from any of the following:

Post-listening
As there are many post-listening activities that you can give, remember that this stage serves as a follow-up
to the listening activity done while taking into account the primary purpose of the listening task. Thus, post-
listening activities may focus on:
Responding to the text. It is important that students share their reactions to the content. You can provide
discussion questions or evaluative questions that would guide students in processing what they feel and the
ideas they got after listening. They can give opposing views, connect their ideas based on their experience,
or even answer the questions they have raised during pre-listening. You can better engage them by providing
post-listening tasks that would let students categorize, synthesize, and clarify ideas or reflect upon the
message. You can engage them in synthesizing.
Analyzing linguistic features of the text. Depending on the goal of your listening task, you can also ask
students to analyze language forms from the script. You can also use the listening script/task as a
springboard in teaching grammatical functions.
Integrating speaking and writing. Since listening is a receptive skill, you may also want to design tasks that
would require students to use their productive skills. In this case, students are allowed to use the language
creatively. They may write dialogues and short compositions, role-play a certain scene, or express their
appreciation and reaction through written and oral tasks.
Generic Format of a Listening Lesson

Strategies and Examples in Teaching Listening

Effective and successful listening skill requires practice and you need lots of it. As a language teacher, you
need to provide varied and relevant listening opportunities for your students in and outside the classroom.
Here are some examples that you can use.
Assessment in Teaching Listening
Since listening is an internal activity, it is difficult to know what goes in the mind of the student as he/she
listens. However, teachers can check for retention, comprehension, and acquisition through the different
listening tasks in each listening stage. Assessment in listening is as important as assessment in other macro
skills. Teachers have to employ mechanisms on how to monitor students' progress and performance at
different stages of the listening process. Thus, activities are provided in pre-, while-, and post-listening
stages.
An initial assessment may be done during pre-listening tasks where teachers can determine students
strengths and weaknesses. Formative assessment is done throughout the listening tasks to check for students'
progress and ability to complete the listening tasks. Summative assessment may be given as part of the post-
listening activities to find out how successful learners have been in the listening tasks or to find out what
they can or can't do.
Remember that summative assessment is not an end in itself. Teachers need to reinforce students' learning
by providing scaffolding strategies in teaching listening and giving regular feedback on students' listening
skills.
Other than checking students' progress and reinforcing learning, assessment is also important as this will
serve as a basis for teachers to make informed decisions as to his/her teaching practices. If teachers find out
that listening tasks are too difficult or too easy (for example) as reflected in students' performance in the
listening tasks, they can make necessary changes. This will also help the teacher decide on what to do next
to help the student improve.
What do we assess?
Although there are a lot of listening tests you can give to your students, it is important to ask yourself the
following questions: Am I assessing for students' ability to comprehend? Am I assessing for students' ability
to decode language components? Am I assessing for students' ability to focus on important details after
listening?
What is the purpose of the listening tasks and what particular aspect of listening skills are you going to
assess? To help determine this, you have to consider the competencies under Listening Comprehension (LC)
in the K to 12 Curriculum Guide for English. For what particular LC competency will the student be tested?
Moreover, you may also want to delve more into the different types and purposes of listening tasks. It is
important to know what listening text to use and what type of listening to assess.
Brown (2004) identified the types of listening. Teachers can identify. the purpose of the task and then
identify specific listening tests to give to students. Most of these tasks have already been identified in the
previous lesson.
How do we assess
Regardless of macro skill, certain principles serve as guidelines when assessing.
Reliability. A reliable test is consistent and dependable. Bachman & Palmer (1996) describes it as
getting the same results when the same tests were to be administrated to the same group of individuals
on two different occasions in two different settings. Considerations may include: choosing listening tasks
and tests that are practical and anchored on real-life situations; considering a range of short tasks rather
than very long texts and tasks; and making sure that the tests assess the actual skill of the students.
Validity. Brown (2006), states that validity reveals the extent to which the test measures what it is
supposed to measure and nothing else. He added that it is by far the most complex criterion of a good
test. You need to make sure that assessment tasks reflect or measure the competencies or objectives as
stipulated in the curriculum guide. Remember that in this case, you are testing students' listening skills
and not speaking or writing skills.
Practicality. This means that the tests should consider constraints like
limitations, time constraints, ease of administration, scoring, etc. Although it is good to give students as
many listening tasks as possible, in reality, there are other competencies (from other macro skills or
other subjects) that they still have to accomplish. Time is often limited, resources may not be available,
and students' concentration is finite. This means that teachers should also consider the quality of the
listening tasks over quantity.
Authenticity. Authenticity describes the relationship between the test and the real world. Assessment
tasks should be reflective of real-life situations which would trigger mental processes similar to that of
what students hear and use in their daily life. Moreover, Galaczi (2021) further explained that "tasks that
have interactional authenticity may not necessarily replicate a real-world context, but they elicit a
cognitively authentic linguistic experience since they create a context in which realistic uses of language
can occur".
Language teachers, particularly in teaching listening, should consider the level and the assessment
methods appropriate for the students. Feedbacking is also an important aspect of assessment. For
students to know how to improve, Grant Wiggins (1998) in Tsagari [Link]., (2017) suggested that they
need to understand three things about their performance:
what they are doing well,
what they are struggling with, and
what they need to do differently to be more successful.
Students should be informed of their progress regularly, at the same time, teachers should continuously
revisit teaching strategies to meet students' listening-skill needs.