Listening Skills: Processes,

types and others

What is Listening?

 Listening is the ability to hear what someone is saying and paying attention to
their words and their meaning at the same. If you listen carefully, you can
hear the emotion in people’s minds.
 Listening involves recognizing, understanding, and accurately interpreting
messages received.
 Listening is an ACTIVE receptive skill that requires energy.
Why do we listen?

 Listening for gist/global listening: for occasions when the purpose is to have a
superficial idea or overall idea of a discussion
 Listening for specific information: for situations when the goal is to
understand particular information
 Listening for details: when the needs are to comprehend every piece of
information
 Inferential listening: to guess and interpret the implied message
Processes of Listening
a) BOTTOM-UP PROCESSING

 Deriving the meaning of a text based on the incoming language data e.g: sounds,
words
 Use linguistic knowledge, both lexical and grammatical to understand the
meaning
 Examples of bottom-up processes in listening include:
1. Scanning the input to identify familiar lexical items
2. Segmenting the stream of speech into constituents- e.g. in order to recognize that
‘aboookofmine’ consists of four words
3. Using phonological clues to identify the information focus in an utterance
4. Using grammatical clues to recognize the input into constituents-e.g. in order to
recognize that in ‘the book which I lent you’ [the book] and [which I lent you] are
the major constituents
 Meaningful Information

Sound words phrases grammar

Processes of Listening:
b. Top-down Processing:

 Use background knowledge to derive meaning from the interpreted message

 Predict meaning using knowledge of the topic or situational or contextual clues or schema and
combine them with background knowledge
 Schema: In order to make sense of any text we need to have pre-existent knowledge of the
world that is often regarded as schemata. -Cook (1989)
Content schema: general information based on previous learning and life experience
Textual schema: awareness of the kinds of information used in a given situation
 Learner’s mental knowledge is termed as schema
 Schemata change moment by moment as the information is received.
 Topic/ Genre

Prior knowledge Context Experience Prediction

Meaningful Information
Processes of Listening:

C. Interactive Process

 Combination of both top-down and bottom-up processing

 Proficient listeners
 Interactive and simultaneous information processing
Functions of Language
 Transactional :
Message-oriented
Accuracy and explicitness of information
Crucial traits: Coherence, Context, and Clarity
Examples: Giving lectures, discussions, instructions, news broadcasting etc
 Interactional:
Listener oriented
The goal is social; establishing harmonious relationships and maintaining goodwill
Orderly presentation of information is not necessary
The notion of FACE is important
Examples: Greetings, little chit chat, compliments, telling jokes, etc
Why does listening seem so difficult?

 Trouble with sound, accent, and pronunciation

 Have to understand every word
 Can’t understand fast natural speech
 Need to hear things more than once
 Find it difficult to keep up
 Get tired
Other difficulties

 Lack of background knowledge

 Difficulties with multiple voices
 Limited vocabulary
 Noise
 Speed of delivery
Teaching Listening in Bangladesh:
Challenges
 Lack of teaching materials
 Lack of equipment/audio-visual aids
 Lack of training in how to use the equipment
 Listening is not included in many important tests
 Lack of real-life situations where language learners need to understand
spoken English
 Lessons tend to test rather than to train students’ listening skills
 Large classrooms
 Class time constraints
 Lack of communicative tendency