Bahan Skripsi.docx

2.4 Models of the Listening Process Several models have been developed to explain how the listening process functions in adults. In this chapter, we review the most widely known of these models: the bottom-up model, the top-down model, and the interactive model. 2.4.1 The Bottom-Up Model The first model of listening to be developed was the bottom-up model. It was developed by researchers working in the 1940s and 1950s. According to the bottom-up model, listeners build understanding by starting with the smallest units of the acoustic message: individual sounds, or phonemes. These are then combined into words, which, in turn, together make up phrases, clauses, and sentences. Finally, individual sentences combine to create ideas and concepts and relationships between them. According to this model, therefore, the different types of knowledge necessary in the listening process are applied in a serial, hierarchical fashion. Bottom-up models of text processing follow a traditional view of communication as the transmission of information. Figure 2.2 (adapted from Shannon and Weaver 1949) is a representation of this model. According to this model of communication, the sender encodes a message, which passes along the communication channel in the form of a signal and is then decoded by the receiver. Provided that there is no deficiency in the channel and that both the sender and the receiver are using the same code, successful communication is guaranteed. According to this model, communication can take place without any reference to the speaker, hearer, or wider context. 2.4.2 The Top-Down Model

Top-down models emphasize the use of previous knowledge in processing a text rather than relying upon the individual sounds and words. The top-down model was developed when researchers considered the fact that experimental subjects are unable to identify truncated sounds in isolation from the words they form a part of, whereas subjects are quite able to identify truncated words so long as they are presented with the surrounding context. For example, when presented with the sound /m_/ it is not possible to predict which sound follows it. However, if presented with this sound in a context such as “The cat sat on the /m_/,” then it is quite easy to predict that the following sound is likely to be /t/. This suggests that listeners rely on more than just the acoustic signal to decode a verbal message; they rely on the prior contextual knowledge as well. In applying contextual knowledge to utterance interpretation, listeners use pre-established patterns of knowledge and discourse structure stored in memory. These pre-established patterns, or “structures of expectation,” as Tannen (1979:138), after Ross (1975), refers to them, have been conceived of in a number of ways. Terms used include schema, frame, script, and scenario, although schema is often used as a cover term. A schema consists of “an active organization of past experiences,” according to Bartlett (1932:201), whose original

work was the basis for more recent developments. A frame “organizes knowledge about certain properties of objects, events, and action, which typically belong together” (van Dijk 1977:159).A script deals with “event sequences, “while a scenario consists of “representations of situations or events from long term memory” (Schank and Abelson 1977). The basic idea is that human knowledge is organized and stored in memory according to reoccurring events. Schank and Abelson (1977) characterize a restaurant event, or script, as being made up of four “scenes”: entering, ordering, eating, and exiting, along with necessary “props” (tables, menu, etc.), roles (customer, waiter, etc.), entry conditions (customer is hungry, customer has money, etc.), and results (customer has less money; customer is less hungry, etc.). Once the structure of an event is stored as a schema in memory, it aids individuals in negotiating future events, in allowing them to predict what is likely to happen. In a similar way, knowledge of previous texts (spoken or written) also aids in negotiating subsequent texts. Thus studies have shown that subjects’ levels of comprehension are considerably higher if the subjects are already familiar with the subject matter and/or text type they are presented with than if they have not previously encountered the subject matter or text type. Knowledge of the overall structure and meaning of the text at this macro-level, it is hypothesized, compensates for any problems in understanding micro level elements, such as sound discrimination, syntax, and word and utterance level semantics. Listening is purpose-driven in this model, and listeners attend to what they need. They only activate those expectations that they deem to be relevant to the text being processed. 2.4.3 The Interactive Model

If listening involves both bottom-up and top-down processing, it follows that some sort of model that synthesizes the two is required. This we have in the so-called interactive model, as developed, most notably, by Rumelhart (1975). According to Rumelhart, whose theory was developed within the context of reading, but which applies equally well to listening, language

is processed simultaneously at different levels. In this parallel processing, phonological, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic information interact, although it is not clear exactly how. Rumelhart sought to demonstrate his hypothesis by having subjects report “on-line” as they read a text. At various points in their reading, subjects were asked to describe their present understanding of the text and, based upon this understanding, what they hypothesized would come next. These hypotheses, or expectations, were then checked against subsequent developments in the text, as noted by the subjects when they continued reading. In this way, Rumelhart demonstrated how readers invoke schemata to make predictions as they read and how these schemata are confirmed or modified as reading (or listening) progresses. An important advantage of the interactive model over hierarchical models, whether they be bottom-up or top-down, is that it allows for the possibility of individual variation in linguistic processing. From the pedagogic point of view, this opens up the possibility of a model that is sensitive to individual learning styles, on the one hand, and group needs, on the other. At the level of the individual, some individuals may prefer to rely more on top-down processing, while others may favour an approach with more emphasis on bottom-up processes. At the level of the group, beginners are likely to need to spend more time on developing basic bottom-up skills of decoding. For more advanced learners, however, who have mastered basic phonology and syntax, emphasis on the development of top-down skills of applying schematic knowledge may be more appropriate, although even advanced learners need to work on bottom-up features of fast speech.

5.5 Listening Strategies in the Classroom A second way in which students can become aware of how to develop better listening habits is by the integration of listening strategies into language lessons. From a think-aloud procedure (a technique in which learners are asked to record their thoughts or strategies as they perform a language task), with learners listening to various texts in a second language, Vandergrift (1997:392–4) produced a summary of listening strategies. Figure 5.3 is based on Vandergrift’s taxonomy, but in the figure, we illustrate how each strategy can be implemented in the controlled environment of the

classroom.

Developing Listening Skills Through Technology 9.1 Introduction With the ever-increasing accessibility of technology and the fast pace at which technology is changing today, the styles and strategies of students’ learning are also developing and expanding. In this chapter, we look at how using technology can help develop listening skills. First, we look at lowtech components: radio, tape recorders, and language laboratories. Then we examine the huge influence video has had in language teaching. This area we categorize as mid-tech. Finally, we explore some of the high-tech features of computer technology in and out of the classroom.

Video The use of video to help develop listening skills has received much attention since it began to appear regularly in language classes in the mid 1970s. The obvious contextualization of language provided by video made it a popular medium in non-English-speaking countries (see Baltova 1994). Over the past two decades, researchers have shown that many other facets make video useful to language learners. Some of these are that video often promotes the motivation to listen; it provides a rich context for authenticity of language use; the paralinguistic features of spoken text become available to the learners (compared with radio, that is); and it aids learners’ understanding of the cultural contexts in which the language is used. ACTIVE VIEWING

Throughout this book we have made the case for listening to be treated as an active process. Video viewing, however, can be a relatively passive activity and still benefit the listeners. Most often this type of viewing is done at home, or as part of private study time. Active viewing is what is most frequently promoted in the classroom setting. Both active and less active viewing of videos are beneficial in helping learners develop their listening skills. When using video in the language class, the teacher must take on some new and important roles. For instance, apart from selecting the video material and supporting materials (something which the teacher may be expected to do in any situation), the teacher must decide how to integrate the video into the lesson and what types of listening skills the video encourages. In addition, the teacher must learn how to control the video playback facilities in order for the learners to focus on the video material and not on watching the teacher try to solve technical problems. The type of follow-up activities and tasks is also an important issue for the teachers to consider in order exploiting the material. Learners also have a change in roles when viewing video material. They need to become participants in the process of listening and to engage in the pre-, while-, and post viewing activities in order to develop their listening skills. VIEWING FOR PLEASURE

Often, viewing of videos is related to listening for pleasure, as in watching a movie. Studies in the L1 context have shown that viewing a movie for pleasure can be as effective as actively viewing it. Kenelfield (1977) set up a video lesson whereby one class was allowed to view a movie for entertainment while another group of learners was required to complete tasks in a more educational setting while viewing the same movie. As Kenelfield states: “There was no evidence that the entertainment group learned or understood less than the educational group.” The difference, though, lay in the feedback. Learners who had watched the movie in a relaxed atmosphere tended to give more personalized accounts of what they saw, whereas the learners who watched under classroom conditions gave more factual and content-oriented accounts. However, students are often unaware of the benefits they can derive from viewing videos for pleasure. Many students consider viewing a movie for fun as a no listening activity. Gardner and

Miller, in an extensive survey of independent learning facilities in Hong Kong (Gardner and Miller 1997), observed that many ESL students used their private study time by watching movies in English. However, when asked what they did with their study time, few of the students admitted to watching videos. When questioned later about this, the students admitted that they thought watching movies “didn’t count” as a language-learning activity. When suggesting movies for students to view, teachers need to be aware of some potential problems concerning content. Garis (1997) provides an overview of some of the problems in choosing appropriate movies. Such things as sex and nudity, violence, profanity and slang, and controversial issues may all cause offense to some learners. If the purpose of viewing the video is to use this activity for classroom discussions, then careful selection of the movie with the intended audience in mind is required; otherwise, previewing sessions that deal with some of the more controversial elements in the movie may allow students to decide whether they wish to view it. Listening may be severely hampered by students tuning out if they are shocked by the content of a movie. General viewing of videos can be exploited later, after watching the movie for fun. Learners can be encouraged to employ their extensive listening skills by having group discussions, in or out of class, after watching a particular movie. In addition, generic worksheets may be developed to help those students who would like more focused attention when watching movies in an L2. Figure 9.3 is an example of the type of sections that might make up a generic worksheet to use when watching movies. INTEGRATED VIEWING

Until recently, it was difficult to use television programs in the language class. The programs had to be viewed when they were broadcast because recording and replaying them sometimes infringed copyright laws. Furthermore, off-air television was sometimes rather difficult for many low-level learners, and it also had to be viewed while it was being transmitted, as opposed to watching a video recording, which could be paused and replayed. Recently, however, broadcasting companies have produced video packages of their programs that are intended for language learning/teaching purposes. The ABC News ESL Video Library is such a package and helps the learner integrate passive viewing with active viewing. Focus on American Culture (Henly 1993) is part of the Focus on America series. In this package, which consists of a video, a student’s book, and a teacher’s booklet, students are exposed to U.S. culture as it appears on local news broadcasts. The four units in the series cover family, work, education, and trends in America. Within each unit are two to three segments that can be treated as individual lessons. Each lesson follows a similar format. The lesson begins with a Previewing section. Here students’ schemata are activated via general discussion questions, and essential vocabulary is presented. The Global Viewing section aims at getting students to relax and enjoy viewing the video segment (passive viewing). In this part, students may focus on some global questions that will help them understand the main point in the segment. Next is the Intensive Viewing segment. Students view the segment again, and this time they listen for details (active viewing) and relate their listening to other tasks – note taking, cloze-type exercises, and ticking boxes. After this type of listening, there is a Language Focus section in each unit. In this part of the lesson, the teacher can highlight some particular grammatical structure or vocabulary that occurred in the video. Last, there is a Post Viewing section. This allows the students to use the information from the video to engage in discussions or do some other activity, such as complete a graph. As can be seen from this outline, the aim of the Focus on America video series is to attempt to get learners to develop their extensive and intensive listening skills by way of authentic television programs and a structured format. TYPES OF VIDEO MATERIAL

Different types of video material can be used to develop listening. Table 9.1, drawing from ideas in Lonergan (1984), illustrates five of these and gives the advantages and disadvantages of each. Table 9.1 Some Types of Video to Promote Listening Types of Video Material Advantages Disadvantages

1. Video for language learning • Videos can be fully exploited through teacher control. • New videos have high quality of visuals and sound. • Language in the video has been graded. • Videos have accompanying written materials. • Language may be viewed by learners as unauthentic, as it has been specially prepared. • Videos can become dated quite quickly. • Videos are expensive to buy. 2. Video from domestic broadcasts • Learners are exposed to authentic language. • The speakers in the video may be from the learners’ own country so learners may tune in to the accent easily. • Learners can use this medium outside the classroom. • The language level may be too high for learners and so demotivate them to try and listen. • For copyright reasons, it is difficult to record off-air programs and show them in class. Therefore, the viewing must be done in real time. 3. Documentary videos • Documentary videos are helpful in tertiary-level contexts because learners can get extra information by seeing the pictures (e.g., the life of a whale for biology students). • Voice-overs can prove very difficult and even hinder comprehension (see MacWilliam 1986). • Documentary videos are usually made for L1 listeners, so social and cultural contexts may not be explained. 4. Teacher-produced videos • These can focus on students’ specific needs (see Brennam and Woodbury Miller 1982). • If the teachers are the actors, then the learners may be familiar with their accents. • Teacher investment in making the videos may mean that they are used more. • Unless a high level of technical support is given

them, the videos may look and sound unprofessional. • Making videos is time consuming. 5. Student-generated videos • These videos help learners integrate their listening skills with their other language skills because they need to produce something. • Students usually work in groups and so establish a support system to help one another. • Editing requires intensive listening skills (see Brennam and Woodbury Miller 1982). • Students may require much assistance in learning about the technology before they can use it. • Teachers have to be on hand to ensure quality control. • Students may feel shy about speaking on film.

Why Listening? No model of second language acquisition does not avail itself of input in trying to explain how learners create second language grammars. (Gass, 1997: 1) It has been claimed that over 50 percent of the time that students spend functioning in a foreign language will be devoted to listening (Nunan, 1998). Despite this, we often take the importance of listening for granted, and it is arguably the least understood and most overlooked of the four skills (L, S, R and W) in the language classroom. Listening is the natural precursor to speaking; the early stages of language development in a person’s first language (and in naturalistic acquisition of other languages) are dependent on listening. Indeed, Gillian Brown and others (see, for example, Brown, 1978; Brown, Anderson, Shillcock and Yule, 1984) showed that both oracy and literacy development needed ongoing attention in first language education. Prior to this, it was taken for granted that first language speakers needed instruction in how to read and write, but not how to listen and speak because these skills were automatically acquired by native speakers. Similarly, in second language learning, several writers and researchers in the early 1980s suggested that listening had a very important role (Winitz, 1981). This emphasis on listening was related to a corresponding drop in the importance given to speaking in the early stages of learning, with several writers saying that speaking early in a course should be actively discouraged. One of the strongest arguments for emphasising listening and delaying speaking is based on a particular view of what it means to learn a language. Some approaches to language teaching have given a lot of importance to speaking. In the very first lesson learners did speaking drills involving repetition and substitution. The lessons involved almost as much speaking as listening, because listening was seen as a way to present models that

learners immediately copied. The aim of learning a language was to speak, and language was viewed as a type of behaviour. Approaches that gave more importance to listening were based on different ideas. Nord (1980: 17) expresses this view clearly: Some people now believe that learning a language is not just learning to talk, but rather that learning a language is building a map of meaning in the mind. These people believe that talking may indicate that the language was learned, but they do not believe that practice in talking is the best way to build up this “cognitive” map in the mind. To do this, they feel, the best method is to practice meaningful listening. In this view of language learning, listening is the way of learning the language. It gives the learner information from which to build up the knowledge necessary for using the language. When this knowledge is built up, the learner can begin to speak. The listening-only period is a time of observation and learning which provides the basis for the other language skills. What conditions are necessary for language learning to occur? Several writers (Krashen, 1981; Newmark, 1981; Taylor, 1982; Terrell, 1982) using different terminology found considerable agreement. Newmark (1981: 39), for example, said: A comprehension approach can work . . . as long as the material presented for comprehension in fact consists of (1) sufficient (2) language instances (3) whose meaning can be inferred by students (4) who are paying attention. Terrell (1982) and Krashen (1981) would also add that the learner must not feel anxious or threatened by the situation. Gary and Gary (1981) described the many benefits of delaying speaking and concentrating on listening. These benefits include the following: 1. The learner is not overloaded by having to focus on two or more skills at the same time—a cognitive benefit.

Models of Listening Listening was traditionally seen as a passive process by which the listener receives information sent by a speaker. More recent models view listening as a much more active and interpretive process in which the message is not fixed but is created in the interactional space between participants. Meanings are shaped by context and constructed by the listener through the act of interpreting meaning rather than receiving it intact (Lynch and Mendelsohn, 2002: 194). Types of Listening

We can distinguish two broad types of listening:

1. One-way listening—typically associated with the transfer of information (transactional listening). 2. Two-way listening—typically associated with maintaining social relations (interactional listening). Again, we can distinguish traditional, conventional views of listening from more contemporary views. Traditionally, listening was associated with transmission of information that is with one-way listening. This can be seen in the extensive use of monologues in older listening materials. While this is fine if we are relating primarily to listening in academic contexts for example, it fails to capture the richness and dynamics of listening as it occurs in our everyday interactions (two-way listening). Most contemporary materials reflect this re-emphasis with a move towards natural sounding dialogues.

Listening Processes Bottom-up Processes These are the processes the listener uses to assemble the message piece-by piece from the speech stream, going from the parts to the whole. Bottom up processing involves perceiving and parsing the speech stream at increasingly larger levels beginning with auditory-phonetic, phonemic, syllabic, lexical, syntactic, semantic, propositional, pragmatic and interpretive (Field, 2003: 326). Top-down Processes Top-down processes involve the listener in going from the whole—their prior knowledge and their content and rhetorical schemata—to the parts. In other words, the listener uses what they know of the context of communication to predict what the message will contain, and uses parts of the message to confirm, correct or add to this. The key process here is inferencing. When we put these two types of processing together we see listening not as a single skill, but as a variety of sub-skills. It is possible to make sense of a spoken message by drawing cues from context and picking up a few key words, but without attending to the grammatical form of the message. In other words, comprehension is possible without noticing. This problem with the comprehension approach was identified by Merrill Swain who investigated language development in French and English immersion programmes in Canada in the 1970s and 1980s (Swain, 1985). She found that English students in French immersion classes were performing as well as French students in subject matter, but their writing and speaking was seriously flawed grammatically despite many hours listening to subjects taught in French. On the other hand, when we have to say or write something we need to compose the sentence in our head and this involves more attention to grammar; to the syntactic layer of language. So although meaningfocused listening is important, learners also need opportunities to pay attention to language details so they can learn those parts of the language system that may not be so important for basic communication but are important for accuracy.

Meaning-focused listening typically emphasises a top-down approach to listening comprehension. However, Lynch and Mendelsohn (2002), report on a number of recent studies which have shown the importance of bottom-up processing in second language listening. Tsui and Fullilove (1998) found that more skilled listeners performed better on comprehension questions for which the correct answers did not match obvious content schema for the topic. The implication is that less skilled listeners relied too much on content schemata to assist with guessing. While this helped with items for which the content schemata matched the correct answer, it did not help when there was no match. A second study by Wu (1998) asked learners to think back on how they derived their answers to multi-choice questions in a listening comprehension test. The responses showed that successful comprehension was closely allied with linguistic (bottom-up processing). So evidence suggests that learners need to be proficient with these bottom-up processes and that learners can benefit from being taught how to listen. Lynch and Mendelsohn (2002:207) suggest the following targets for practice: •

Animated Films are ones in which individual drawings, paintings, or illustrations are photographed frame by frame (stop-frame cinematography). Usually, each frame differs slightly from the one preceding it, giving the illusion of movement when frames are projected in rapid succession at 24 frames per second. The earliest cinema animation was composed of frame-by-frame, hand-drawn images. When combined with movement, the illustrator's two-dimensional static art came alive and created pure and imaginative cinematic images - animals and other inanimate objects could become evil villains or heroes. Animations are not a strictly-defined genre category, but rather a film technique, although they often contain genre-like elements. Animation, fairy tales, and stop-motion films often appeal to children, but it would marginalize animations to view them only as "children's entertainment." Animated films are often directed to, or appeal most to children, but easily can be enjoyed by all. See section on children's-family films. Also see this website's related sections on Pixar-Disney Animations, Visual and Special Effects Milestones in Cinematic History as well as AFI's 10 Top 10 - The Top 10 Animated Films. Early Animation: The inventor of the viewing device called a praxinoscope (1877) , French scientist Charles-Emile Reynaud, also created a large-scale system called Theatre Optique (1888) which could take a strip of pictures or images and project them onto a screen. He demonstrated his system in 1892 for Paris' Musee Grevin - it was the first instance of projected animated cartoon films (the entire triple-bill showing was called Pantomimes Lumineuses), with three short films that he had produced: in order:   

"Pauvre Pierrot" (Poor Pete) - the only surviving example (500 frames) "Le Clown et Ses Chiens" (The Clown and His Dogs) (300 frames) "Un Bon Bock" (A Good Beer) (700 frames)

To create the animations, individually-created images were painted directly onto the frames of a flexible strip of transparent gelatine (with film perforations on the edges), and run through his projection system. The three animated films lasted about 12-15 minutes each. Depending upon one's definition of terms, some consider Pauvre Pierrot the oldest-surviving animated film ever made and publically broadcast. The predecessor of early film animation was the newspaper comic strips of the 1890s. Historically and technically, the first animated film (in other words, the earliest animated film ever made on standard motionpicture film) was Humorous Phases of Funny Faces (1906) by newspaper cartoonist J. Stuart Blackton, one of the co-founders of the Vitagraph Company. It was the earliest surviving example of an animated film. It was the first cartoon to use the single frame method, and was projected at 20 frames per second. In the film, a cartoonist's line drawings of two faces were 'animated' (or came to life) on a blackboard. The two faces smiled and winked, and the cigar-smoking man blew smoke in the lady's face; also, a circus clown led a small dog to jump through a hoop.

This was soon followed by the first fully-animated film - Emile Cohl's Fantasmagorie (1908, Fr.), which consisted solely of simple line drawings (of a clown-like stick figure) that blended, transformed or fluidly morphed from one image into another.

http://www.filmsite.org/animatedfilms.html

5 Types of Listening to Become an Awesome Listener April 7, 2014 by Travis Bennett Leave a Comment

With every different situation, the way you listen requires a different approach. You may be trying to learn something new, develop a relationship, build an appreciation for something, discriminate or even make a logical evaluation. If you’ve never really had success in this area, start with this course on how to become someone that people love to talk to. Generally you need to be able to receive, focus and understand to be able to listen, but each different type has different special skills that are needed to master the techniques. As follows are the five different types of listening.

Discriminative In this listening type the objective is to focus on the sounds. At its most basic level this is akin to distinguishing the speakers gender, or the number of people in a conversation. This is the most important type, because it forms the basis of the other four. People who are sensitive to the speakers tone, rate of speech, pitch and emphasis allow you to better understand when there are differences in meaning. When considering discriminative listening there are three key parts: 1. Ability to hear. If you lack an ability to hear well you will have difficulty when you try to discriminate between sounds. In different people this can be more acute on specific frequencies, where they may have more trouble picking sounds from a bass voice than a highly pitched voice. 2. An awareness of sounds. When you’re a native speaker you often recognize the sounds of vowels and consonants that may not have been said by a speaker. In English a listener may hear “this sandal” when what was actually said by the speaker was

“this handle.” Being attuned to the sound structure will make you a much better discriminative listener. 3. Understanding nonverbal clues. Often a person’s words do not communicate their true feelings or emotions, which means discriminative listeners need to look at the way a speaker acts, or how the words are said to really understand the intended meaning of the speaker. Start here and learn the secrets of body language in this course. In our own language we rapidly learn to distinguish the different sounds, but it soon forms a habit which makes it very difficult to hear the different sounds in another language. This is the reason many people struggle to speak a second language perfectly, because they are unable to fully distinguish all of the subtle sounds.

Comprehensive The ultimate goal of comprehensive listening is to understand the message the speaker is communicating. The problem is that many people often interpret the same conversation in different ways, depending on their individual and social backgrounds. To fully comprehend what is being said requires you to hear the words, understand the body language and take it to the next step by extracting the key message from a long spiel. This listening type is found in nearly all aspects of our life, and is one of the primary ways that we learn. In university we listen to lectures from the instructor, and what we learn is based on how well we can listen. The same applies to your work, as you listen to new procedures, instructions, briefings and reports, how well you can do your job is directly related to understanding what you’re being told. If you don’t listen effectively, your work will suffer. Comprehensive listening demands that you concentrate on the message and its source, and you can work to improve your ability by focusing on these three variables. 1. Vocabulary. It’s hard to determine the precise relationship, but having a larger vocabulary significantly increases your ability to understand what’s being said. Luckily it’s never too late to improve the different words you know, so make a conscious effort to learn new words and understand the unfamiliar. This recent post is a great start if you’re trying to expand your business vocabulary. In a pinch you can also use the context of what’s being said to help you understand a word you don’t know, but this can hinder your overall understanding if you get it wrong. 2. Concentrating. It’s difficult to stay focused when you’re in a lecture that isn’t exciting, or a meeting in the office that is drawn out and dancing around the point. We’ve all had times in our lives where we can admit that we haven’t concentrated on what was being said to us. Sometimes this happens because your attention is divided, or the listener is preoccupied with something else. Sometimes the listener is simply more concerned with their own needs, and lacks the curiosity, interest and energy to stay focused. Good concentration skills require motivation and discipline. 3. Memory. Because you cannot process information without using your memory, it’s critical in comprehensive listening. It helps you to establish expectations of what you’ll encounter, and gives you the background and experiences to function in the world. Understanding at its simplest point is knowing the meaning behind words,

concepts and ideas, so you can communicate with other people. If you’re interested in harnessing all the power of your memory check out this course and learn how to drastically increase your memory.

Relationship Relationship listening is a therapeutic listening type, because the ultimate goal of the listener is to be a sympathetic ear, without requiring detailed verbal responses. The best example is helping a friend talk through a problem, and is critical as a base for building strong interpersonal relationships. Being the person that’s there for a friend when they need to “get things off their chest” is what can make your friendship even stronger. Relationship listening does require you to listen to the information, the focus you need to have is on simply understanding the speaker. There are three key behaviors that help to boost your abilities in this listening type: 1. Being present. You need to be paying attention to the speaker. This is critical because they have a problem they want to tell you about, and you can’t let your focus drift. All your focus needs to support that you’re listening, and be careful because whilst you can read the speakers non-verbal behavior, they can also read yours! Make sure you are present and pay attention to the speaker. One of the best ways to do this is with eye contact, looking comfortably at the speaker helps you connect much better than a frequently shifting gaze as you look all around the room. Your body language also reinforces your attention, leaning towards the speaker with an open posture shows your interest, while leaning back with crossed arms shows a lack of it. Build on this with smiles, frowns, nodding and small phrases like “oh I see,” “uh huh” and “yes” are all supportive, and using a pleasant tone of voice with a genuine concern for the other party will help your relationship immensely. 2. Being supportive. There are many responses that can have an adverse affect on your relationship, and you should never interrupt the speaker, change the subject or spin the conversation so you can talk about yourself. All of these prove your lack of concern for the speaker, and in many cases giving advice and attempting to influence the conversation will have an adverse effect on the relationship you’re trying to build. Often the best response is to remain silent, because many speakers are simply looking for a sounding board – someone to listen while they talk through the problem they are having. To be a great relationship listener you need to know both when to talk and when to listen, and they generally listen much more than they actually talk. Aim to be discrete, show a belief in the ability of the speaker and have patience as they talk it out. Master these three and you’ll make great progress as a relationship listener! 3. Being empathetic. This is all about feeling and thinking with the speaker. If you’re truly an empathetic listener you can see the problem from the speakers eyes and feel what they feel. If you can do this effectively, you’ll form very strong relationships with your friends. Obviously the more experience you have in your life allows you a better chance to do this, as an individual who has never gone through a divorce, lost a child, or declared bankruptcy is going to have a much more difficult time relating to their friends who are going through a similar problem. The risk is that you can’t be effective as an empathetic listener without getting involved, and sometimes you can learn more than you really wanted to know.

Focus on learning the most you can about the other person, and accept them even if there are certain aspects of their behavior you don’t agree with. We’re all capable of being fantastic relationship listeners, and doing it well will strengthen your interpersonal relationships immensely.

Critical When listeners have to evaluate a message and respond with their opinion, this is called critical listening. You need to scrutinize what is being said, and play an active role because it usually requires you to make a decision, form an opinion or solve a problem. Making a judgment requires you to assess the situation, and requires you to both listen to what’s being said while analyzing it at the same time. While practicing critical listening you need to ask yourself    

What is the speaker actually trying to say? How do I feel about their opinion? What is the main argument that is being presented? Does what I am hearing align or differ to my own beliefs and opinion?

Being able to listen critically is fundamental to being able to truly learn. All of the decisions we make on a daily basis have a basis (however small) in critical listening. It’s important that you have an open mind and not let bias or stereotypes influence your judgment, and by doing so you’ll become a much better listener. Focus on these three aspects as you perfect your critical listening skills 1. Is the speaker a credible source, who is both an expert on the subject being discussed and that I can trust to be giving honest and unbiased information? 2. Reflect on what’s being said and decide for yourself if it’s true. Consider the sources of information, the data used, and if it really is the right conclusion that has been drawn. 3. Think about the speaker’s intent, and make sure you’re not following an emotional response. Sound critical listening skills are based on logic.

Appreciative The final type of listening is listening for the sake of pure enjoyment. This includes music, theater, television, radio and films, where the ultimate response is the one from the listener (not the speaker). Listening appreciatively differs for everyone, and the quality of it depends on three factors. 1. Presentation. This includes the medium, the setting and who the speaker is. Sounds can be produced in many different ways, and their presentation is key – most of us have particular ways we like to listen. 2. Perception. Your expectations play a large part in your appreciation, which is based on your attitude. Everything we listen to has been selected by us, and is the core of what we listen to in the first place.

3. Past experience. There’s many reasons why we enjoy listening to certain things, whether we’re an expert in the area, have positive experiences linked to the sounds, or simply want to learn. Being an appreciative listener is not fixed, and as you learn and discover more about yourself, you can open your mind and appreciate more of what is out there in the world and become a better appreciative listener. Most people take listening for granted. They see it as something that just “happens” and don’t ever make an effort to develop their skills. It’s only when you stop and look into the details that you realize it’s one of the most important skills you can develop, and will have a positive impact on every other aspect of your life. Not only personally, but in your business as well. Find out in this course how you can apply all of this to really listen to your customers. Start your journey today and build your own fantastic skill set – for every type of listening. Introduction: English as a foreign language has the greatest motion in Bangladesh. Status of English as the "library language" and the increased "international inter-dependence" are the two reasons of this which led to a greater focus on face-to-face language usage crossing the margin of pen and paper exercise. As the decline of Grammar-Translation method in 1960s proved that language learning might not be limited to "reading and writing" or 'literacy', the provisional continuation of Direct Method confirmed too that 'listening and speaking' that is 'oracy' is not all that is language. Language must be taught in an integrative way where all four skills are focused. But most often, even in the modern methods of SL teaching, quite surprisingly, listening skill is ignored in a way or another! David Nunan (1997) commented that listening is the "Cinderella Skill" which is overlooked by its elder sister "speaking" in SL learning. As 'to expertise the productive skills like speaking and writing' has become the standard of the knowledge of second language, listening and reading have been turned to be the secondary ones. Besides, in our schools, colleges and even in the higher levels, instructors direct how to read and write, not how to speak or listen. It is believed that these would be mastered by the learners automatically. Although listening had a boost up in 1960s (direct method) and in 1980s (Krashen's input hypothesis, 1981; James Asher's Total physical response, 1988 and Gillian Brown, 1988), it turned a fashion in most cases! In this article, I have tried to show how listening helps EFL learners to develop language skill. Despite the fact that it is not a research article, a small scale survey has been done at Noakhali Science and Technology University, Bangladesh in order to demonstrate that listening practice is insisted by the learners and they find it functional in language learning. What is listening? Listening is a skill in a sense that it's a related but distinct process than hearing which involves merely perceiving sound in a passive way while listening occupies an active and immediate analysis of the streams of sounds. This correlation is like that between seeing and reading. Seeing is a very ordinary and passive state while reading is a focused process requiring reader's instrumental approach. Listening has a "volitional component". Tomatis' (2007) view is, while listening; the desire to listen, as well as the capability to listen (comprehension) must be present with the listener for the

successful recognition and analysis of the sound. What 'listening' really means is 'listening and understanding what we hear at the same time'. So, two concurrent actions are demanded to take place in this process. Besides, according to Mecheal Rost (1991), listening comprises some component skills which are: &bulldiscriminating between sounds, &bullrecognizing words, &bullidentifying grammatical groupings of words, &bullidentifying expressions and sets of utterances that act to create meaning, &bullconnecting linguistic cues to non-linguistic and paralinguistic cues, &bullusing background knowledge to predict and later to confirm meaning and recalling important words and ides. As McDonough and Shaw ( 1993) and Rost (1991) explain that a listener as a processor of language has to go through three processes using three types of skills: a. Processing sound/ Perception skills: As the complete perception doesn't emerge from only the source of sound, listeners segment the stream of sound and detect word boundaries, contracted forms, vocabulary, sentence and clause boundaries, stress on longer words and effect on the rest of the words, the significance of intonation and other language-related features, changes in pitch, tone and speed of delivery, word order pattern, grammatical word classes, key words, basic syntactic patterns, cohesive devices etc. b. Processing meaning/ Analysis skills: It's a very important stage in the sense, as researches show, that syntax is lost to memory within a very short time whereas meaning is retained for much longer. Richards (1985:191) says that, 'memory works with propositions, not with sentences'. While listening, listeners categorize the received speech into meaningful sections, identify redundant material, keep hold of chunks of the sentences, think ahead and use language data to anticipate what a speaker may be going to say, accumulate information in the memory by organizing them and avoid too much immediate detail. c. Processing knowledge and context/ Synthesis skills: Here, 'context' refers to physical setting, the number of listener and speakers, their roles and their relationship to each other while 'linguistic knowledge' refers to their knowledge of the target language brought to the listening experience. Every context has its individual frame of reference, social attitude and topics. So, members of a particular culture have particular rules of spoken behavior and particular topic which instigate particular understanding. Listening is thought as 'interplay' between language and brain which requires the "activation of contextual information and previous knowledge" where listeners guess, organize and confirm meaning from the context. However, none of these micro-skills is either used or effective in isolation or is called listening. Successful listening refers to 'the integration of these component skills' and listening is nothing but the 'coordination of the component skills'. Nature of listening as a skill: Besides the division of the skills as 'receptive' and 'productive', another subdivision focuses on 'one-

way reception' and 'interactive reception' in this age of active learning. Reading and writing are oneway skills where learners don't get direct feedback. But in speaking and listening, learners may have their understanding and reproduction checked instantly. Thus active and self-learning takes place. Moreover, there is a traditional labelling for reading and listening as "passive" skills. But linguists believe that a listener is involved in guessing, anticipating, checking, interpreting, interacting and organizing by associating and accommodating their prior knowledge of meaning and form. Rost (1990) thinks, listeners "co-author" the discourse and they construct it by their responses. Even as a receptive skill, listening differs greatly with reading as reading materials are printed and permanent enough where the learners are required to interact with the next sentence using the knowledge of the previous one while listening involves continuous material presentation where they have to respond to the immediate expression. From the view point of "product" or "process", listening is more a process than a product which instantly shapes the understanding and utterances of the learners. Why listening? No doubt, listening is the most common communicative activity in daily life. according to Morley (1991, p.82), "We can expect to listen twice as much as we speak, four times more than we read, and five times more than we write." So, listening, as a skill, is assuming more and more weight in SL or FL classrooms than ever before. Rost (1994, p. 141-142), points out, "listening is vital in the language classroom because it provides input for the learner. Without understanding input at the right level, any learning simply cannot begin. Listening is thus fundamental to speaking." Limited listening input fails to promote face-to-face communication by shaping their social development, confidence and self-image. Adequate listening practice could give the learners essential contact with handy input that might trigger their utterances. Teacher talk or peerinteraction might be the options for this. But according to Rod Ellis (1990), it's not only the exposure to L2 that is enough, and learners need L2 data suited to the accurate stage of their development. If the learners don't have "optimal" exposure in the target language, they can't transmit the "comprehensible input" into "intake" through "production strategies" where learners attempt to use L2 knowledge. Krashen's (1981) view is that "acquisition" takes place as a result of the learner having understood input that is a little beyond the current level of his competence that is 'the i+1 level'. We must take into account that the level of listening input must be higher than the level of language production of the target learners. So, language teaching pedagogy must incorporate academic and designed listening practice. Obviously listening influences other skills. A theory of Tomatis shows that "the quality of an individual's listening ability will affect the quality of both their spoken and written language development". He also views that if the sounds of the target language are presented to the learners before presenting them in written form, the ease with which they integrate those sound will be reflected in their understanding and production of the language. However, a pre-exposure or a following-exposure to listening input is a must on the part of a learner.

It is widely known that individual's ability to process and analyze the sounds influence their ability to translate the sounds of language into their written form. We know, reading is not only a visual process rather involves the rapid analysis of letters and words that represents sounds and it is sound which gives the words meaning. A learner can decode the graphic images or recognize their meaning efficiently if their auditory processing skills are well developed. In a similar way, sounds are translated into graphic form in writing and if the sounds are poorly integrated their graphic representation will be hampered and problems like spelling mistakes may arise. So, we see the foundation on which reading and writing skills are built is spoken language again listening is the fundamental to spoken language as without listening anything we can't reproduce or reply. In a learner-centered approach, it is deducted that listening provides the learners with the following features of the target language: &bullHow the language is organized &bullHow native speakers use the language &bullHow to communicate in the language Strategies for Listening: Two types of strategies for listening have been in practice. They are defined so according to the ways of processing the text while listening: a. In Bottom up processing, like reading, learners utilize their linguistic knowledge to identify linguistic elements in an order from the smallest linguistic unit like phonemes (bottom) to the largest one like complete texts (top). They link the smaller units of the language together to form the larger parts and it's a linear process where meaning is derived automatically at the last stage. It is absolutely "text based" process where learners rely on the sounds, words and grammar in the message in order to create meaning. b. Top- down interpretation, on the other hand, requires learners to go to the listening with their prior knowledge of topic, context, and type of text as well as knowledge of language to reconstruct the meaning using the sounds as clues. "This back ground knowledge activates a set of expectations that help the listener to interpret what is heard and anticipate what will come next." It is assumed that bottom up process is applied while practicing minimal pairs, taking pronunciation tests, listening for specific details, recognizing cognates and word-order pattern but top-down interpretation is used in the activities like listening for the main idea, predicting, drawing inferences, and summarizing where learners relate what they know and what they hear through listening comprehension. According to the types of situation where the understanding takes place, listening is divided into: a. Reciprocal or interactive Listening where the listener is required to take part in the interaction and alternately listens and speaks. Interactive listening situations include face-to-face conversations and telephone calls in which listener has a chance to ask for clarification, repetition, or slower speech from conversation partner. b. Non-reciprocal or non-interactive Listening where the listener is engaged in listening passively to a

monologue or speech or even conversation. Some non-interactive listening situations are listening to the radio, CDs, TV, films, lectures etc. and here listener usually doesn't have the opportunity to ask for clarification, slower speech or repetition. We believe, this type of listening is not totally non- interactive too. The interaction takes place here is the 'cognitive' one where students respond through understanding and creating the meaning. On the other hand, this might be turn to semi- reciprocal if the instructor makes them responding while checking their understanding through question-answer or discussion and clarification in the class or lab. Methodology: Methods applied for the survey included questionnaire and group interviews taken with 40 students who attend listening classes in the language lab regularly and it has been observed by the author that they do better in speaking and reading than others. The subjects are the students of 1st year 1st term from the department of Pharmacy and CSTE, ACCT, and FIMS. Although they are really not beginners and have learnt English at their secondary and higher secondary level, they have no exposure to authentic English speaking and listening. Here they have been practicing listening in a language lab using headphone using audio and video for three months. The purpose of the survey was convincingly explained to them and they took 30 minutes to think on the questions and to answer them. Findings: 30 students claim that listening practice has raised their confidence by throwing away their fear, hesitations, inertia and shyness that they had before to speak in English. &bull All of the 40 students have told that watching video clippings and movie while listening enables to identify the right responses, styles, expressions, behaviors, attitudes and emotions in particular situations through concentrating on gesture, body language, non- linguistic cues, planning utterances, adjacency pairs, turn-taking, repairing utterances by asking for repetition, pre-closing and closing. &bull5 students have said that it has quickened their planning to respond as they listen to faster speaking than their own. &bull35 students opine that exposure to naturally spoken input by native speakers gives them practical experience of using language in target situations. &bull20 students who are highly motivated have found a change in their speaking style. &bull36 students think that listening to dialogues and conversation enriches their vocabulary and teaches how to use them appropriately. &bull10 students have found that intensive listening practice helps to remember the syntactic structures, spelling, accent and intonation. &bull19 students mention about learning of the cultures, feelings, reactions, trend and customs of the English speaking people that helps them feel motivated (integrative) to speak English. &bullAll of the 40 students opine that watching movie or video clippings draws more attention during the class and add to their learning. &bullAll of the 40 students believe that interaction with teachers for assessment or other purposes while listening help them greatly to remove confusion and use their newly gained knowledge immediately and make it regular in use.

Teaching listening: Unfortunately, as I find a very diminutive effort in teaching listening in our country, this discussion may appear too much redundant to read to the language teachers! What we find in a traditional EFL classroom? Most of the classes complete their Language course without practice listening even for a day! Very few ELT trained teachers, now-a-days, in line with the flow of CLT; efforts for listening practice consisted of teacher reading aloud a written text slowly, once or more so that it is understood and than asking some comprehension questions. It seems the objective here is 'to present the written language in an alternative way' where characteristics of naturally spoken language is totally absent and listening practice is farther beyond. If the materials used for listening class comply with that in speaking class, it will, certainly, give a fully fledged input to the learners. Teaching listening requires a bit more on the part of the teacher than that of the learners. One of the main principle of teaching listening, as I believe, should be " Language material intended to used for training listening comprehension should never be presented visually first." Good listening lessons go beyond the main listening task itself with related activities before and after the listening. The format may be like the following: a. Pre-listening Stage: Some activities before listening may serve as preparation or warm-up for listening in several ways. These function as 'reference' and 'framework' by giving prior knowledge of listening activities. Some recommended per-listening activities include: a.Introducing the topic and assessing their background knowledge of the topic or content of the material through commenting on a picture or photograph. b.Activating their existing knowledge through discussion. Reading through comprehension questions in advance, working out own opinion on a topic, predicting content from the title etc. can be done. c.Clarifying any necessary contextual information and vocabulary to comprehend the text. In this regard showing pictures maps or graphs and may be helpful. d.Informing them of the type of text, their role, purposes of the listening etc. A short reading passage on a similar topic may help them. b. While-Listening Stage: activities in this stage must follow the learners' specific needs, instructional goal, listening purposes and learners' proficiency level. While listening activities directly relate to the text and listeners are asked to do these during or immediately after listening. . Some specific cares are required in designing while-listening activities. These are: a.If the students are asked to give written information after listening, they should have chance to listen the text more than once which makes it easier for them to keep concentration while listening with specific purposes. b.Writing activities should be to a minimum. As comprehension is the prime target, writing would make the listening more demanding. are samples of this. c.Global activities like getting the main idea, topic, setting, summary that focus on the content and forms of the text should be given more so that listeners are guided through the text. Listening for the gist is such an activity. d.More questions should be set up in order to focus student's attention on the crucial elements that might help to comprehend the text. Following the rout on a map or searching for specific clues to

meaning, or identify description of the given pictures might be appropriate here. e.Attaching predicting activities before listening so that students can monitor their comprehension as they listen. Listening with visuals may serve here. f.Giving immediate feedback to make the students examine their responses and how it was. Checking off items in a list, distinguishing between formal and informal registers conducted by teacher are examples here. Listening activities here become varied according to their purposes and objectives. Four major distinctions include Attentive listening, Extensive listening, Intensive listening, Selective listening and Interactive listening. Attentive listening: Both of the ideas are true that attentiveness is a prior condition for understanding and listener often lapse attention for various reasons. Losing interest, inability to keep up with, losing track of goals, less confident are some of them. Teacher can help the listeners to hold their attention by personalizing the martial, using the target language while talking to them to keep flow, and lessening their stress and motivating by asking oral responses repeatedly. Activities in this stage would be interesting and easy including face to face interaction, using visual and tangible topics, clear description of the listening procedure, minimum use of written language, and immediate and ongoing responses etc so that learners can easily keep pace with the text and activity. Listening to short chunks, music image, personal stories, teacher- talk, small question- answer, and interview etc may be applied in this stage. Extensive listening: This type of listening has also a greater ease than other types as it is concerned to promote overall comprehension of a text and never requires learners to follow every word and understand them. Learners need to comprehend the text as a whole which is called global understanding. Activities in this section must be chosen in terms with the proficiency level of the listeners. At the lower level they may have problems to organize the information, so some non-verbal forms in responding might be given such as putting pictures in a right sequence, following directions on a map, checking of items in a photograph, completing a grid, chart or timetable etc. At the developed stage, some language based tasks requiring constructing meaning, inferring decisions, interpreting text and understanding gist are usually recommended. Completing cloze exercises or giving one or two word answers, multiple choices, predicting the next utterances, forming connected sets of notes, inferring opinions, or interpreting parts of the text are some samples. Intensive listening: 'Hearing clearly' is also a prime aspect of listening as it includes accurate perception without which the second phase of processing meaning becomes very difficult. Listening intensively is quite important to understand the language form of the text as we have to understand both the lexical and grammatical units that lead to form meaning. So, intensive listening requires attention to specific items of language, sound or factual detail such as words, phrase, grammatical units, pragmatic units, sound changes (vowel reduction and consonant assimilation), stress, intonation and pauses etc. Feedback on accuracy and repetition on the teacher's part promote success here.

Paraphrasing, remembering specific words and sequences, filling gaps with missing words, identifying numbers and letters, picking out particular facts, discriminating the pronunciation of same phoneme in different positions, replacing words, finding stress and boundaries are some good intensive listening practice. Selective listening: It involves listening to selected part of a text, as it's name suggests, to predict information and select 'cues' surrounding information. Thus, the listeners may have an assessment of their development in listening to authentic language. Here the focus is on the main parts of the discourse and by noticing these parts listener construct their understanding of the meaning of whole of the text through inferring. As the expectation on understanding is focused and has a purpose, in these activities, listeners have the chance of second listening to check understanding and have feedback repeatedly. Listening to sound sequences, documentary, story maps, incomplete monologues, conversation cues and topic listening are examples of selective listening. Interactive listening: This is a very advanced stag of listening practice as it implies social interaction in small groups which is a 'true test' of listening. In interactive listening, learners, either in pairs or in groups, receive new information, identify them continuously. Besides, they have to work out the problems of understanding each other and formulate responses immediately as we are required to do in real life. So, in spite of calling 'practice', this goes beyond of it. As this phase involves both comprehension and production, it directly promotes speaking skill. Teachers have a central role in this stage. They have to set up specific goals so that learners can asses their own performance, observe learners' language in order to provide immediate feedback on their interaction strategies. Group survey, self introductions, short speeches, chatting and discussing, exchanging news and views, interviewing and being interviewed etc. might be appropriate here. c. After-listening Stage: post listening activities can be used to check comprehension, valuate listening skill, use of listening strategies and use the knowledge gained to other contexts. So, these are called listening exercises at all and defined as 'follow-up works.' The features of these activities are: a.Related to pre-listening activities, such as predicting. b.May create a real life situation where students might be asked to use knowledge gained through listening. c.May extend the topic and help the students remember new vocabulary. Using notes made while listening in order to write a summary, reading a related text, doing a role play, writing on the same theme, studying new grammatical structures, practicing pronunciation, discussion group, craft project etc. are some post-listening activities. Variables affecting and effecting successful listening: Noise: Distractions and noise during the listening segment should be reduced and sound-proof language lab is perfect for this purpose.

Equipment: If the cassette player or CD player being used does not produce acceptable sound quality, it may harm developing skill or motivation. Repetition: playing the text 2-3 times might be required in respect of the types of texts. In case of no chance of repetition, learners may become anxious about catching it all the first time and that will impede their actual performance. Content: It is a strong variable to be able to make difference in developing skill. The material should be interesting and appropriate for the class level in topic, speed and vocabulary. Some guidelines for judging the relative ease or difficulty of a listening text for a particular purpose or particular group of students might be: a.The selected material must be relevant to student's real life; language of the text should be authentic and would vary in terms of learners' interest and age group. b.The storyline, narrative, or instruction should confirm common expectation in organization. It may contain main idea, details, and examples. An informative title might also be helpful. c.Learners have to be familiar with the topic. They might feel major comprehension difficulties because of misapplication of background knowledge due to cultural differences. d.At the beginner level of proficiency, the language of listening text should discard redundancy while in the higher proficiency level students may benefit from redundant language. e.If the text involves more than one individual, the differences between them should be marked conspicuously which can make the comprehension easy. f.Most texts should have visual supports like clippings, maps, diagrams, pictures or images in video that contextualize the listening input and provide clues to meaning in order to aid their interpretation. Recording own tape: Any way, recording must be of an English speaker. Copying recording two to three times is preferred in order to avoid rewind which may discrete attention of the listeners. Using video: Using video clippings with sound off and then asking students what dialogue is taking place is a good practice. Next, the teacher may play sound and check their understanding and interpret them about the discrepancy between their predictions and reality. It may also be done with the video first and giving only sound to guess what the context is can obviously effect comprehending. Homework: In teaching listening, homework is a must. A listening task between two classes prevent them forgetting. Encouraging public listening and having notes on them is a free pave to walk in teaching listening which leads to success. Providing tape recording with questions, dictation, or a worksheet to complete may bring the expected results. Using internet: If learners have opportunity to use a computer with internet access and headphones or speakers, teacher may direct them toward some listening practice sites and home works can also be assigned from these accesses

Limitations of the essay: This essay doesn't focus on every aspect of teaching or developing listening skill; rather it focuses mainly on the necessity and functions of listening input in learning a foreign or second language. The survey also reflects on the service of listening to the EFL learners who are instrumentally motivated. The context of the assay is this country though it reflects that of some other countries where the features don't vary much. Conclusion: Definitely we have to admit that language learning depends on listening as we respond only after listening something. Listening provides the aural input that serves as the stimuli for language acquisition and make the learners interact in spoken communication. So, effective and ideal language instructors should help the learners to be introduced with native speaking, to be respondent to that both cognitively and orally. In order to do so, first, they should show the students how they can adjust their listening behavior to deal with variety of situations, types of input, and listening purposes.

Questionnaire Name: Role: Department: Q1: Does practice listening in the language lab help you to develop English skill? Q2: How does it promote your learning? Q3: Do watching movies or using video clippings add to your understanding? Q4: How does interaction with teacher or interference of teacher while listening help you? Reference: Byrnes H. (1984). The role of listening comprehension: A theoretical base. Foreign Language Annals, 17: 317-329. Coakley CG & Wolvin AD. (1986). Listening in the native language. In B. H. Wing (Ed.), Listening, reading, writing: Analysis and application (pp. 11-42). Middlebury, VT: Northeast Conference. Gass SM.(1988). Integrating research areas: A framework for second language studies. Applied Linguistics. 9:198-217. Lund RJ. (1990). A taxonomy for teaching second language listening. Foreign Language Annals, 23: 105-115. Mendelsohn DJ & Rubin J. (1995). A guide for the teaching of second language listening. San Diego, CA: Dominie Press.

Morley J. (1991). Listening comprehension in second/foreign language instruction. In M. CelceMurcia (Ed.), Teaching English as a second or foreign language (pp. 81-106). Boston, MA: Heinle & Heinle. Nunan D & Miller L. (Eds.). (1995). New ways in teaching listening. Alexandria, VA: TESOL. Omaggio-Hadley A. (1993). Teaching language in context (2nd Ed.). Boston. MA: Heinle & Heinle. Peterson PW. (1991). A synthesis of methods for interactive listening. In M. Celce-Murcia (Ed.), Teaching English as a second or foreign language (pp. 106- 122). Boston. MA: Heinle & Heinle. Richards JC. (1983). Listening comprehension: Approach, design, procedure. TESOL Quarterly. 17: 219-240. Rixon S.(1981).The design of materials to foster particular linguistic skills. The teaching of listening comprehension. (ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. ED 258 465). Rost M. (1990). Listening in language learning. London: Longman. Rubin J. (1987). Learner strategies: Theoretical assumptions, research history and typology. In A. Wenden & J. Rubin (Eds.), Learner strategies in language learning (pp. 15-30). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Rubin J. (1995). The contribution of video to the development of competence in listening. In D.J. Mendelsohn & J. Rubin (Eds.), A guide for the teaching of second language listening (pp. 151-165). San Diego, CA: Dominie Press. Underwood M. (1989). Teaching listening. London: Longman. Tomatis.com http://www.streetdirectory.com/travel_guide/106689/languages/teaching_listening_as_an_english _language_skill.html

The teaching of listening How does this view of listening compare with that in teaching guides such as Mary Underwood’s Teaching Listening (1989)? She recognizes three stages of teaching: ● pre-listening, where the students activate their vocabulary and their background knowledge; ● while-listening, where ‘they develop the skill of eliciting messages’; ● post-listening, which consists of extensions and developments of the listening task. Some of the elements are similar. It is rightly considered important to get the students’ background scripts working and the appropriate vocabulary active in their minds. What seems overlooked is parsing. Listeners do need to know the structure of the sentence in some way. Teaching has mostly ignored the process of syntactic parsing, perhaps because of its unwelcome overtones of grammar. But, as with reading, some attempt could be made to train both top-down and bottom-up parsing skills. One development has been task-based teaching of listening. The students carry out

a task in which they have to listen for information in a short piece of discourse and then have to fill in a diagram, check a route on a map or correct mistakes in a text. The COBUILD English Course 1 (Willis and Willis, 1988), for example, asks the students to listen to tapes of people speaking spontaneously and to work out information from them. Lesson 9 has a recording of Chris telling Philip how to get to his house in Birmingham. The students listen for factual information, such as which buses could be taken; they make a rough map of the route, and they check its accuracy against an A–Z map of Birmingham. One teaching motivation is the practical necessity of checking that comprehension is taking place. Unfortunately, in normal language use, there is rarely any visible feedback when someone has comprehended something. A visible sign of comprehension is useful to the teacher to see if the student has understood. This check can range from a straightforward question to an action based on what has happened. If you shout ‘Fire’ and nobody moves, you assume they have not understood. Much teaching of listening comprehension has made the student show some sign of having comprehended, whether through answering questions, carrying out tasks, or in some other way. In task-based listening activities, information is being transferred for a communicative purpose. Task-based listening stresses the transfer of information rather than the social side of language teaching. In the COBUILD example, the student is practising something that resembles real-world communication. The information that is being transferred in such activities, however, is usually about trivial topics or is irrelevant to the students’ lives. The factual information the students learn in the COBUILD exercise is how to get around in Birmingham, somewhere only a few of them are ever likely to go. Often such exercises deal with imaginary towns, or even treasure islands. Task-based exercises often neglect the educational value of the content that can be used in language teaching, as discussed in Chapter 13, although much psychological research shows that, the more important the information is to the listener, the more likely it is to be retained. Box 7.4 gives an example of a teaching exercise that solves this problem by choosing a topic of ‘manufacturing systems’ appropriate to ESP students, and making the students employ an integrated range of skills and strategies to achieve the point of the task.

Listening matters: Process listening By Adrian Tennant Level: Pre-intermediate, Intermediate, Upper intermediate, Advanced Type: Article     

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The first in a series of articles by Adrian Tennant looking at various aspects of teaching listening. The first article takes a look at 'process listening'. The article starts by outlining some of the issues surrounding the way listening is often taught (or not). It focuses on why listening is often seen as something of a ‘black box’ and goes on to suggest some practical activities that look at teaching listening and going beyond simple ‘Did you understand?’ or ‘Can you answer question five?’ activities.

Introduction | Practicing and teaching listening | So, what can we do? | But can't our students already listen? | What makes listening tricky? | So, what should classroom listenening be like? | Some practical ideas | Conclusion

Anchor Point:1Introduction When we ‘teach’ listening in the class there is a fairly standard approach which involves setting the topic, preteaching some vocabulary, setting some gist questions, playing the recording, checking the answers, setting an intensive task, i.e. comprehension questions, true / false, complete the table, fill in the blanks etc. But, is this really ‘teaching’ listening or is it, at best, practising and nothing more? To me, it all seems rather superficial and rather productorientated. In other words, it suggests that the reason to listen is to answer the questions and if the students can’t answer the questions, it means they didn’t understand the recording. To my mind, this seems to be wrong. Firstly, the purpose of any listening activity shouldn’t be simply to answer some questions, it should be to develop a specific skill. Secondly, if a student can’t answer a particular question, it doesn't necessarily mean they are bad at listening or even that they didn’t understand most of the recording, simply that they couldn’t answer that question. In fact, there may be other reasons they couldn’t answer the question. For example, they didn’t understand the wording of the question, they didn’t hear the part where the answer was, and so on. Listening in the classroom is usually a very artificial activity in that it almost always relegates the student to the role of ‘eavesdropper’. The student is overhearing a conversation or listening to a monologue without any active participation. Of course we do experience this kind of listening in real life. For example, we might overhear a conversation on the bus (but then we are rarely tested on what we heard with a series of comprehension questions!) or we might be listening to the radio. However, we also experience many other types of listening and these are often neglected in the classroom (or dealt with within another skill).

Anchor Point:2Practicing and teaching listening There is a time and a place for the listening where the focus is on answering comprehension type questions, but this is not ‘teaching’ listening. It is listening comprehension and listening practice. It is essential that we differentiate between practicing and teaching and it is also necessary that we try and go beyond the superficial in our classrooms. One of the problems is that as teachers we like our students to always get the correct answer. And, as such, we will preteach vocabulary to help comprehension, grade questions, ask the students we know/think will have the right answer, etc. This is even more likely when we are being observed: if a student is unable to answer a question correctly the observer will often comment on the fact as though it is a problem either with the teaching or with the ability of the learner. Teaching is not about everyone getting correct answers it is about developing skills and learning.

This is why I refer to the ‘black box’. By this I mean the student's brain. It is impossible for the teacher to know what is actually going on in a student’s brain and, although questions help, they do not necessarily indicate whether learning is taking place or not.

Anchor Point:3So, what can we do? The first thing we can do is start thinking about what listening means to us in our everyday lives. What are the different situations in which we listen to things? What do we listen to? Why do we listen? What are the skills we employ during these different ‘listening’ situations? Then we need to think about what exactly we can ‘teach’ to enable our students to cope with the same situations when they encounter them.

Anchor Point:4But can’t our students already listen? I’ve often heard the sentence, ‘But we don’t need to teach our students to listen, they can already do this in their own language.’ Although this might be true to some extent listening is not necessarily the same in every language and students often don’t think about ‘how’ they listen in their own language and therefore are unable to easily transfer the skills from listening in their own language (L1) to listening in a second langauge (L2). How many times have you seen students struggle with a listening task? Of course, it might be the actual language (the vocabulary and grammar) that is the problem. It might be the speed of the recording, but it could equally well be that students don’t know how to process the information they are hearing. It may also be worth pointing out that when students complain that something is too fast for them, what is often happening is that they are ‘shutting down’ and not processing the information in the way that they would if they were native speakers (or listening to their own L1). Therefore, what students need is to be directed (possibly through a task) in order to process the information in the most effective way. An example task could be:      

How many people are speaking? What do you think they are talking about? What words did you hear that helped you identify the topic? Can you think of any other words that you might hear when people are speaking about this topic? Listen again and see if you can hear any of these words. Discuss your ideas with a partner.

Anchor Point:5What makes listening tricky? There are a number of particular ‘features’ of listening that make it a tricky skill. Firstly, it takes place in ‘real’ time. This is one of the arguments for repeating recordings a number of times. However, this does not accurately reflect either real life listening or the way in which listening (even classroom listening) is processed. Listening naturally includes redundancy (when information is repeated either with the same words and expressions or in a slightly different format), yet we often fail to exploit this fact when teaching the skill in class. We are more likely to say, "They hear that piece of information more than once," than to treat it as a natural feature inherent in listening. We need to help our students deal with the real-time element and use the redundancy to help process the information being conveyed. Secondly, unless students are aware of the purpose of the redundancy it can often cause problems in itself. Students need to be made aware of the fact that redundancy occurs in natural speech, and why it occurs. Then they can use it to help them. Thirdly, background noises, speed of speech, the fact that there are often several people speaking at the same time, or overlap (where someone cuts into another person) will all cause problems. Students need to face these problems and talk about them in order to find ways of dealing with them whenever they occur. Finally, what often makes the task of listening particularly tricky is the view of many students and teachers that it is a passive skill. There appears to be this idea that you can just let the monologue or dialogue ‘flow’ over you and take in what you hear. However, in many cases in real life listening is not passive, it involves the listener in a meaningful engagement, often with the speaker, and is a co-constructed activity. Unfortunately, most classroom listening activities are not like this and thus do not really prepare our students for ‘real’ listening.

Anchor Point:6So, what should classroom listening be like? To start with listening needs to be ‘taught’. It needs to be seen as an active skill in which students take part and in which there are opportunities to interact, negotiate, discuss and become part of the event rather than being an ‘eavesdropper’. The majority of real-life listening involves all of these things and yet learners are often denied them in the classroom. As teachers we should start trying to bring to life the listening activities our students undertake. At lower levels, in particular, listening tasks should focus on helping students feel competent and believe in their ability. This means that it is essential to move away from a productorientated (answers to questions) approach. When students feel there is a need to understand every word (whether or not that is necessary to achieve the task) they will never become

‘good’ listeners. Ultimately, teaching listening should be about just that, ‘teaching’ not testing. If the focus is on getting the correct answer, then we are failing our students.

Anchor Point:7Some practical ideas What did you hear? Play a recording and ask students to note down who was speaking, what they were speaking about and any other things they think they heard. Emphasize that there are no ‘correct’ answers and that you want them to write down what they think and/or hear. Put students in pairs or small groups and ask them to discuss their ideas. Play the recording again, if necessary. Discuss the ideas as a class, asking people to explain why, but trying not to make judgements as to whether their ideas (answers) are right or not. Rationale: It is extremely interesting to find out what students hear rather than focusing attention on what they should hear according to a set of predetermined questions. The activity probably needs to be used two or three times with different recordings before students start to feel comfortable and realize that they are not being tested (i.e. you really aren’t looking for correct answers). No questions Choose a recording from a coursebook. Play the recording once and then tell the students you want them to write some questions about the recording. They will ask other students these questions. Play the recording a further two or three times (more if the students ask) and get them to write their questions (this could be done in pairs or small groups). Finally, swap the questions around and play the recording again so that the students can answer each other's questions. Rationale: This activity gets the students to focus on what they think is important in a listening text and not what the coursebook or teacher feels is important. It is quite interesting to compare the questions the students write to those in the book. Add a third Choose a coursebook dialogue (between two people). Play it and get the students to think about who the people are and what they are talking about. Then ask the students to think about the dialogue and imagine what it would be like if there was a third person involved/speaking. Get the students to turn to the transcript and rewrite the dialogue adding the third person (this can be done working in groups of three). Finally, ask a few groups to read out their new dia(tria)logue. Rationale: Coursebook dialogues are often ‘neat’ in a way in which real-life conversations aren’t. Getting students to add a third person also demonstrates a deeper understanding of the material than standard comprehension questions ever could. We often interrupt

Choose a dialogue from a coursebook, e.g. A phone conversation. Read the first line of the dialogue. Ask the students to take on the other role (but without referring to the transcript). Once they have heard your line they should respond. Continue the process (either by using the next line of the coursebook dialogue – this then forces the students to readjust their thoughts, or simply by responding to what the students have said). Finally, if you want, you can get everyone to look at the original transcript. Rationale: Most coursebook listening activities put the students in the position of eavesdroppers. This is actually a very unnatural state of affairs in most real-life listening. One aim of this activity is to make the listening activity much more realistic by making the listener take on an active role.

Anchor Point:8Conclusion In this article we have only really scratched the surface in terms of the complexities of teaching listening in the classroom. A few key points I’d like to come back to are:    

We should ‘teach’ listening not simply practice or test. Teaching listening means focusing on the processes not just getting answers right. As teachers we really need to think about what listening entails not simply stick a tape or CD on and play it. Finally, listening needs to be seen as an active skill not simply a receptive one.