Teaching Listening Skills in ELT

TL;DR: Teaching Listening Skills in ELT

Teaching Listening Skills in ELT involves more than just hearing; it's an active process of constructing meaning from spoken language. This guide explores the different types of listening (gist, specific, detailed, inferential), the cognitive processes involved (aural reception, context), and effective teaching principles. We'll cover practical pre-, while-, and post-listening activities, essential learner strategies (bottom-up, top-down, avoidance, achievement, repair), and how to prepare for and excel in listening assessments. Understanding these elements is key to developing strong English listening comprehension.

Unlocking Effective Listening in English Language Teaching (ELT)

Listening is a fundamental skill in language learning, yet it's often misunderstood. In English Language Teaching (ELT), mastering listening means equipping students with the tools to actively engage with and extract meaning from spoken messages. Unlike passive hearing, listening is a dynamic, active process where we construct meaning from what we hear.

Hearing vs. Listening: What's the Difference?

While hearing can be a passive condition, listening is always an active process. It requires paying attention and actively trying to understand the meaning of something we hear. As listeners, we must constantly engage in constructing a coherent message from the sounds received.

Different Types of Listening Skills

We engage in various types of listening daily, each with a different purpose:

• Listening for gist: This involves understanding the general idea of what's being said, including who is speaking to whom, why, and how successfully they communicate their point.
• Listening for specific information: Here, we only focus on a particular piece of information and ignore everything else. For example, while listening to a list of delayed trains, you are only interested in news about your particular train.
• Listening in detail: This type requires understanding everything, such as when checking for errors or determining differences between passages. You can't afford to miss anything because you don't know what information will be crucial.
• Inferential listening: This is when we listen to understand how the speaker feels.

What Makes a Good Listener?

Both in general communication and in a second language, certain characteristics define a skilled listener:

A Good Listener (General):

• Uses attentive body language, like nodding frequently.
• Looks the speaker in the eye.
• Uses expressions such as "mhm," "I see," or "yes" to show engagement.
• Asks questions if they don’t understand something.
• Tries to predict what the speaker is going to say next.
• Notes the meaning of silence.

A Good Listener (in L2/ELT Specific):

• Motivated: Those who have a stake in what is being said are more likely to listen attentively.
• Predictive: They tend to think ahead, predicting and grappling with the meaning of the whole text.
• Tolerant of unknowns: They don’t worry about unknown words.
• Fills gaps: They fill gaps in a narrative.
• Participatory: They are participants in an interaction.
• Takes ownership: They take ownership of what they hear.
• Strategic focus: They focus on valuable information while ignoring everything else they hear, reducing the load on their short-term memory.
• Adaptive: They listen to different things in different ways, adapting their strategies to the text.
• Identifies problems: They pinpoint specific problem areas, saying not "I don't understand" but rather "I didn’t understand the bit where she said...".
• Organized: They are strategic, having a plan to achieve the task.

The Cognitive Process of Listening

Understanding how we process spoken language is vital for effective teaching. Aural reception involves several stages before meaning is fully constructed.

Aural Reception: How We Process Sounds

When we listen, three main stages occur:

1. Sensory Store (Echoic Memory): Sounds initially go into a sensory store, or echoic memory, for about one second.
2. Meaningful Units: They are then organized into meaningful units, according to the language knowledge the listener already has.
3. Short-Term Memory Processing: The information is processed by the short-term memory (a few seconds): words and groups of words are checked and compared with information already held in the long-term memory, and the meaning is extracted from them.

Once the listener has constructed a meaning, they might transfer the information to the long-term memory for later use, often in a reduced form (people usually only remember the gist of what has been heard, rather than the exact words spoken).

The Power of Context and Prior Knowledge

Comprehension doesn't happen in a vacuum; it relies heavily on context and our existing knowledge structures.

• Context of situation: Comprehension can only occur when the listener can place what they hear in the context of the situation.
• Co-text: This refers to whatever has already been said in a particular event, which helps us predict what will follow.
• Schema: A complex knowledge structure in the mind which groups all that an individual knows about, or associates with, a particular concept. For example, your schema for a "restaurant" includes food, tables, waiters, menus, etc.
• Script: A sequence of activities associated with a stereotypical situation. For example, "I answered the phone" usually implies that the phone rang, I heard it, I found it/walked to it, I pressed a button, I said 'hello'.

Native speakers fill the parts of the message unconsciously, based on what they expect to hear.

Effective Principles for Teaching Listening Activities

Teaching listening should actively help students to improve their listening, not merely test it or use it solely to focus on language systems. Here are key principles:

• Pre-listen and Plan: Always listen to the material yourself before using it and plan how to engage the students.
• Grade the Task, Not the Text: If the text is difficult, set a simpler task.
• Choose Engaging Topics: Select an interesting topic that will motivate students.
• Involve Students: Get ideas from students on the topic to activate prior knowledge.
• Structure Activities: Think of appropriate pre-listening, while-listening, and post-listening activities.
• Encourage Prediction: Help students anticipate the content of the audio.
• Pre-teach Essential Vocabulary: Only pre-teach vocabulary that is absolutely essential for basic comprehension.
• Set Clear, Realistic Tasks: Give students a clear, realistic task and a clear purpose in listening.
• Prioritize Purpose: What we ask students to listen for should resemble the information they would listen for in real life. The task must be useful or realistic.
• Questions Before Listening: Set the questions before the material is listened to.
• Avoid Memory Tests: Listening activities should not be primarily memory tests.
• General to Specific: Move from general tasks to more specific ones.
• Sufficient Playbacks: Play the audio a sufficient number of times.
• Respond to Content: Students should be encouraged to respond to the content of listening, not just to the language.
• Focus on Process: Emphasize the process over the product; the learning journey is more important than getting the right answer. The main goal is the listening itself!
• Facilitate Peer Discussion: Give students the opportunity to discuss their answers in pairs or groups, as two heads are often better than one.
• Guide, Don't Just Give Answers: Don't immediately acknowledge correct answers by facial expression. Throw the answers back at the class ("Do you agree?"). Aim to get the students to agree without your help. Provide help when they are stuck, but with the aim to let them work it out (e.g., "There are three words in the sentence."). It is by listening and re-listening and by testing hypotheses for themselves that learners progress.
• Control Pace (if possible): The listener should be able to control the pace, to have control over the CD player. Otherwise, they may be replaying clear passages (use headphones, give listening homework).
• Manage Expectations: Do not expect students to remember or understand every word.
• Focus on Achievement: Let's not focus on the difficulties. Let's show the students what is possible to achieve despite the difficulties, giving them a sense of achievement.

Practical Techniques and Activities for ELT Listening

Structured activities before, during, and after listening sessions are crucial for skill development.

Pre-Listening Activities

These activities activate prior knowledge and prepare students for the listening task:

• Prediction/Anticipation: Students are given the title, a brief description of the text, or pictures, and they consider, discuss, or write down ideas/language items they expect to occur in the text.
• Brainstorming: Students brainstorm what they know about the topic.
• Question Formulation: Students put together questions they expect to be answered or think about information they would like to find in the text.
• Role-Play Anticipation: Students try to think how they would behave in the situation introduced in the text.

While-Listening Activities

These tasks guide students' attention during the listening process:

• Answering Questions: Can involve reading and writing. If a student gives a wrong answer, it may not be due to a failure of listening. There has therefore been a move towards checking understanding by setting tasks rather than questions, e.g., completion of grids.
• Multiple-Choice Questions: Be aware that students sometimes devote excessive amounts of time trying to establish why a particular option is wrong rather than focusing on those that are right.
• Checking Predictions: Students verify whether their initial predictions were right.
• Form/Chart Completion: Filling in missing information on a form or chart.
• Seeking Specific Items or Information: Identifying particular details.
• Text Completion (Gap-filling): Filling in missing words in a transcript.
• Picture-Based Tasks: Marking/checking items in pictures, putting pictures in order (story line picture sets), picture drawing, labeling diagrams/pictures.
• True/False Statements: Identifying whether statements are true or false.
• Which Picture?: Selecting the correct picture.
• Spotting Mistakes: Identifying errors in a given text or scenario.
• Note-Taking: Making notes in a not well-written summary (underlining important points, putting brackets around unimportant points), noting three points made by the speaker that are most important, listening to a wordy speaker and making a note of the most important point, identifying an important sentence and then finding another sentence that says the same (recognizing redundancy).

Post-Listening Activities

These activities consolidate learning and extend comprehension:

• Identifying Relationships: Determining the relationship between speakers.
• Jigsaw Listening: Different groups listen to different parts of a text and then share information.
• Problem-Solving/Decision-Making: Using information from the listening text for problem-solving and decision-making activities.
• Extending Information: Extending lists or word sets based on the listening.
• Summarizing: Condensing the main points of the text.
• Sequencing/Grading: Ordering events or ideas.
• Form/Chart Completion: Further consolidating information.
• Establishing Mood/Attitude: Establishing the mood, attitude, or behavior of the speaker.
• Role-Play/Simulation: Acting out scenarios based on the listening.
• Written Responses: Extending notes into written responses.
• Discussing Strategies: Reflecting on the listening strategies used.

Processing Information: Top-Down vs. Bottom-Up

Effective listening combines two main processing approaches. Both are interdependent and cannot be taught independently; the listener needs both systemic (linguistic knowledge) and schematic (non-linguistic knowledge) sources of information.

Bottom-Up Processing in Listening

This approach proceeds from sounds to words to grammatical relationships to lexical meanings, etc., to a final message (e.g., a chunk of phonemes to a word to a sentence). Bottom-up techniques usually focus on sounds, words, intonation, grammatical structures, and other components of spoken language.

Bottom-Up Techniques and Concepts:

• Listen and repeat.
• Getting the meaning (e.g., of individual words).
• Intensive listening: Listening carefully for condensed information.
• Decoding: Making sense of the speech signal, achieving greater automaticity (from highly controlled processing to easy recognition of words and chunks).
• Working at word and chunk level: From slow and careful to rapid and relaxed.
• From one familiar speaker to many unknown speakers; from one familiar accent to many accents; from fluent and planned speakers to dysfluent and spontaneous speakers.
• Parsing: Identifying the grammatical pattern that binds a group of words together.

Grammar and Intonation Activities:

• Marking pauses: Students listen to a short recording and mark pauses on a transcript, deciding which are hesitation pauses and which indicate syntactic boundaries.
• Predicting next words: The teacher gives the first word of a sentence (live or recorded) and asks the class to predict what will come next. This continues with more words, drawing attention to collocations and other chunks.
• Recalling words: Students listen to a recording for general understanding. The teacher replays a section, pausing halfway through each sentence, asking students to try to recall the words that come next.
• Suggesting endings: The teacher says the first part of a sentence, stopping before a highly predictable word. Learners suggest an ending (e.g., "I'm waiting...," "I'm listening...," "I'm very good...").

Top-Down Processing in Listening

This approach begins with the schemata or background knowledge that the listener brings to the text. Top-down techniques focus on the activation of background knowledge and the meaning of the text, concentrating on macro-features such as the speaker’s purpose, the topic of the message, and the overall structure of the text. Pre-listening activities are essential for this.

Top-Down Techniques and Concepts:

• Activating background knowledge.
• Extensive listening: Listening to long stories for pleasure.
• Inferring word meaning: If you missed an answer, make a guess using the context.
• Describing emotional reaction: Students listen to utterances and describe the emotional reaction they hear (e.g., happy, sad).
• Selecting pictures: Students listen to a sentence describing a picture and select the correct picture, or listen to a conversation and choose a picture showing the correct location of the dialogue.

Meaning Building: Beyond the Literal

Meaning building involves enriching the meaning and handling the information based on the listener’s knowledge of the world, the speaker, and co-text. This process relies upon functions that should already be established in the first language, and our goal is to help learners transfer them into L2.

Two important functions:

1. Amplifying: Adding information that the speaker has taken for granted.
2. Organizing: Structuring the information that has been received.

External knowledge is key, including world knowledge, topic knowledge, speaker knowledge, knowledge of the situation, and knowledge of the setting. Activating relevant schemata and scripts in pre-listening activities can prepare the listener for what they are likely to hear, activate associated words, unload unnecessary information, and fill in information that the speaker does not specifically provide.

When handling information, not all of it is of the same importance. Some may not be relevant or may be repetitive. The listener has to make judgments and has three options:

• Abandon: Discard irrelevant information.
• Store: Retain important information.
• Generalise: Retain information with details omitted.

Strategies for English Language Learners (ELT)

Learners employ various strategies to enhance comprehension and compensate for understanding gaps.

Pro-Active Strategies

These strategies are consciously used to manage the listening process:

• Pre-listening:
• Task evaluation: Matching the amount of strategy use to the required depth of listening.
• Rehearsing: Anticipating in one’s head the words that a speaker might use.
• Activating appropriate schemas related to the topic.
• Anticipating likely issues: Forming questions in advance.
• During listening:
• Counting points: Mentally numbering the main points.
• Retrieval cues: Associating a word or an image with a main point made by the speaker.
• Post-listening:
• Review: Mentally rehearsing the main points made by the speaker.
• Application: Relating the main points to information from elsewhere.
• Reflection: Thinking about the angle taken by the speaker.

Learner Listening Strategies

These are broader behaviors that help learners manage listening challenges:

Avoidance Strategies:

• Message abandonment: Abandoning the message as unreliable.
• Generalisation: Accepting a version of the message that is not very specific.
• Message reduction: Accepting a partial message but remaining aware of gaps in it.

Achievement Strategies:

• Hypothesis formation: Inferring meaning, using incomplete evidence from the input.
• Translation: Constructing a message by converting words into L1.
• Key words: Listening for words associated with the topic, paying attention to the words around them.
• Prominence: Focusing attention on words bearing sentence stress.
• Reliability: Focusing attention on lexically stressed syllables.
• Approximation: Accepting an indeterminate sense for a word (e.g., "oak" = some kind of tree).
• L2 analogy: Using analogy with other words in L2.
• L1 analogy: Seeking cognates in L1, working out the word’s spelling by means of L2 spelling rules.
• Similar sounding words: Accepting an approximate lexical match.

Repair Strategies:

• Direct appeal for help: "I don’t know what that means."
• Indirect appeal for help: Listener signals lack of understanding.
• Request for repetition: "Sorry?" "What was that?"
• Request for clarification: "What do you mean?" (listener repeats utterance with rising intonation).
• Request for confirmation: "Do you mean...?"
• Summary for speaker to comment on: Paraphrase of speaker’s message.
• Other checking strategies: Circumlocution, use of approximate words, switching into L1.

Assessing Listening Skills in ELT

Testing listening requires careful consideration to ensure validity and reliability, and to accurately measure comprehension without solely testing memory or other skills.

Formative vs. Summative Assessment

• Formative assessment: Is ongoing and takes place informally every time students engage in listening. It is process-oriented and designed as a diagnostic tool to help students improve. Think of it as "when the cook tastes the soup."
• Summative assessment: Is the type required by schools, colleges, and governments. It is formal and results-oriented, meaning students always receive a grade. Think of it as "when the customer tastes the soup."

Key Considerations in Listening Tests (Validity, Reliability)

• Validity: Concerns the use and interpretation of the test, and whether the exam really tests what it is supposed to test (i.e., listening comprehension).
• Reliability: Ensures certainty that the test will produce consistent results no matter who is marking it or what mood they are in.

Factors That Make Listening Difficult (and Tests Unfair)

Several elements can hinder listening comprehension, some of which can make tests unfair:

• The Message: Cultural issues included in the message (if students know nothing about the topic, the problem is not listening but background knowledge), or a student may understand the passage but not the accompanying questions.
• The Delivery: Speed, accent, clarity.
• The Listener: Background knowledge, motivation, prior experience.
• The Environment: Noise, poor audio quality.

Mismatches of schemata and scripts of different languages and cultures can also be a factor. Teachers can help identify such areas during pre-listening activities.

Preparing Students for Listening Tests

Listening tests are often regarded with outright fear by students due to lack of control over input, lack of interaction with the speaker, and real-time speed. Teachers can alleviate this by:

• Transparency: Make sure students know exactly what is in the test: the number of passages, approximate length, type of questions, and how many times the recording will be played.
• Topic Preparation: Prepare students for the types of topics that occur and ensure they have mastered the basic vocabulary pertaining to these topics.
• Administrative Details: Make sure students know administrative issues such as where they will write their answers and how long the whole test will last.
• Practice Tests: Do several practice tests, preferably in the same room and setup as the real test.
• Easy Start: Include an easy initial question to increase confidence and allow students to ‘tune in’ to the speakers.
• Demystify: Go over the answers in practice tests to demystify the exam. Get students to justify their answers, including correct ones.

Student Strategies for Listening Tests

Equip students with effective strategies to tackle listening exams:

• Read and Predict: Read the questions before listening. Predict answers based on world knowledge (e.g., what animals will a South African hunter speak about?) and linguistic knowledge (e.g., what type of word will go here - noun or verb?).
• Get Ready: Have the pen or pencil poised above the page before the recording starts.
• Answer Immediately: As soon as you hear the answer, write it down. Do not rely on your memory to ‘serve up’ the answer later.
• Be Word-Wise: Listen for the words in the questions and synonyms of these words. They will alert you to the fact that the answer is coming.
• Focus Your Listening: Don’t listen generally; target your listening so that you only focus on the information necessary to answer the questions.
• Don’t Give Up: If you get lost, keep listening; you may not have missed any important information and you may be able to get back on track.
• Listen for Pauses: Pauses always mean something. They may tell us that there is a change of topic or a transition point, or that the speaker is building up to an important moment.
• Notes First: If you have to write at the same time as listening, write notes first. Write full sentences from your notes once the recording is over.

FAQ: Teaching Listening Skills in ELT for Students

What are the main types of listening I need to master in ELT?

You should focus on mastering four main types: listening for gist (general idea), listening for specific information (particular details), listening in detail (every element), and inferential listening (understanding feelings or hidden meanings). Each type requires different levels of attention and strategy.

How can I improve my listening comprehension when I encounter unknown words?

Don't panic! Good L2 listeners don't worry about every unknown word. Instead, try using achievement strategies like hypothesis formation (inferring meaning from context), focusing on key words and prominence (stressed words), or using L1 analogy (looking for cognates). The goal is to get the overall meaning, not necessarily every single word.

What's the difference between bottom-up and top-down listening, and why are both important?

Bottom-up listening focuses on individual sounds, words, and grammar to build meaning, like assembling puzzle pieces. Top-down listening uses your existing knowledge and context to predict and understand the overall message, like looking at the puzzle box cover. Both are crucial because bottom-up helps you decode the language, while top-down helps you contextualize and enrich that meaning based on your knowledge of the world. Effective listening combines both.

How can my teacher make listening activities more effective for me?

Your teacher can make activities more effective by choosing interesting topics, setting clear and realistic tasks, encouraging prediction, and pre-teaching only essential vocabulary. They should also provide enough opportunities to listen, focus on the process of listening rather than just getting the right answer, and encourage discussion among students. Good teachers also help you develop specific strategies for different listening challenges.

What are some good strategies for preparing for and taking listening tests?

To prepare, always read the questions before listening to predict answers and focus your attention. Listen for keywords and synonyms in the questions to know when an answer is coming. During the test, write down answers immediately and don't rely on memory. If you get lost, don't give up; keep listening. Remember that pauses often signal important information. Practice tests are also vital to familiarize yourself with the format and timing.