王蔷 英语教学法教程 第二版 Unit9

第9章 Teaching Listening

一、Why does listening seem so difficult?

1. Problems in listening:

Understanding learners’ listening problems is perhaps the first step for developing effective teaching strategies. Goh listed some problems reported by learners when listening to an English text:

①Quickly forget what is heard;

②Don’t recognize words they know;

③Understand the words but not the intended message;

④Neglect the next part when thinking about meaning;

⑤Unable to form a mental representation from words heard;

⑥Don’t understand subsequent parts of input because of earlier problems.

2. Reasons for poor listening:

Listening is often neglected in language teaching due to:

①Lack of teaching materials（audio and video tapes）;

②Lack of equipment（tape players, VCRs, VCDs, computers）;

③Lack of training in how to use the equipment;

④Listening is not included on many important tests;

⑤Lack of real-life situations where learners need to understand spoken English;

⑥Lessons tend to test rather than to train students’ listening skills.

3. Conclusion:

Even if listening were not neglected, it could not be guaranteed that students could have no problems in listening. In foreign language learning, both listening and reading are receptive skills, but listening can be more difficult than reading because:

①Different speakers produce the same sounds in different ways. (different dialects, accents, stresses, rhythms, intonations…)

②The speed of the input of spoken material can’t be controlled;

③Spoken material is often heard only once. And the listener cannot pause the speaker to work out the meaning.

④Speech is likely to be distorted with background noise.

二、Characteristics of the listening process.

According to Ur, characteristics of listening in real life:

①Spontaneity: We often listen to people speaking spontaneously and informally without rehearsing what they are going to say ahead of time.

②Context: The context of listening is usually known in real life. The situation usually helps us predict what we are going to hear.

③Visual clues: While listening, the speakers’ facial expressions, gestures and other body language will provide us visual clues which can help us understand and predict what we hear.

④Listener’s response: Most of the listening allows the listener to respond to the speaker, whether they understand or not.

⑤Speaker’s adjustment: The speaker can adjust the way of speaking according to the listener’s reactions.

三、Principles and models for teaching listening

1. Principles of teaching listening

1) Focus on process:

In listening, people must do many things to process the information they are receiving. They have to hear what is being said, they have to pay attention to catch as much information as possible so as to construct a meaningful message in their mind by relating what they hear to what they already know.

2) Combine listening with other skills:

Listening is not an isolated skill. Listening and speaking skills are closely related. Both of them belong to the oral skill. Such as retelling, interviewing, discussion and answers. Listening can occur with writing, therefore, listening can be practised with a writing task, note-taking.

The important thing in designing listening activities is to give a clear purpose, a specific task and an appropriate context for doing them.

3) Focus on comprehension of meaning:

Listening comprehension is more important than memory test.

4) Grade difficulty level appropriately:

Three main categories affect the difficulty level of listening tasks:

①Type of language used;

②Task or purpose in listening;

③Context in which the listening occurs.

2. Principles for selecting and using listening activities:

(1)The listening activity must have a real, communicative purpose.

(2)The activity must use authentic language without significantly slower or simpler speech.

(3)Pre-listening tasks (e.g. discussing the topic, brainstorming, presenting vocabulary, sharing of related articles) must be used to stimulate the appropriate background knowledge and help learners identity the purpose of the listening activity.

(4)The listening text must offer content that is personally interesting and motivating to learners.

(5)To allow listeners to infer meaning from body language and related context clues, the speakers must be visible whenever possible.

(6)The activity must offer many environmental clues to meaning.

(7)When possible, the whole listening text should be given, and then divided into parts that can be repeated.

(8)At the end, the whole text should be given again, and learners should have the opportunity to discuss their hypotheses and how they tested and altered them.

(9)The activity must require listeners to respond in some meaningful fashion, individually or in small groups.

(10)The activity must be fashioned so that listeners with normal background knowledge are able to understand the topic.

(11)The activity must be typical for its own speech type.

(12)The classroom climate must be non-threatening and positive.

3. Two models used to describe different processes of listening:

（1）Bottom-up model

Listening comprehension starts with sound and meaning recognitions, then to figure out words, phrases, and structures. In other words, we use information in the speech itself to try to comprehend the meaning.

（2）Top-down model

Listening for gist and making use of the contextual clues and background knowledge to construct meaning are emphasized. Listening comprehension involves knowledge that a listener brings to a text, sometimes called ‘inside the head’ information. In such a case, listeners can understand better if they know something about the speaker, the setting, the topic and the purpose of the talk.

四、Three teaching stages of listening

As far as classroom procedures are concerned, the teaching of listening generally follows three stages: pre-listening; while-listening; post-listening.

1. Pre-listening:

(1)Definition:

Pre-listening, during which teachers help the students prepare to listen.

(2)Goal:

They aim to motivate students, to activate their prior knowledge, and to teach key words or key sentences to the students before listening begins.

(3) Some pre-listening activities:

①Predicting

There are many different activities that can be used to encourage students to predict the content of what they are about to hear.

If there is a picture with the listening passage, the students can be asked to predict what the passage will contain before they listen.

Another way of carrying out predicting task is to let students read the listening comprehension questions before they listen.

②Setting the scene

Setting the scene for your students before listening is another type of pre-listening activity. Teacher can help provide the background information to activate your learners’ schema, students will be better prepared to understand what they hear.

③Listening for the gist It will be impossible for students to catch all the details. The key is to ask students one or two questions that focus on the main idea or the tone or mood of the whole passage.

④Listening for specific information

Sometimes we listen only for some specific information and ignore the rest of the entire message. It is important to expose our students to a variety of types of listening texts for a variety of purposes so that they will develop a variety of listening strategies to use for different situations.

2. While-listening

(1)Definition:

While-listening, during which the focus of students’ attention is led to the listening text

and the teachers can guide the students and help them understand it.

(2)Goal:

The while-listening stage is the most difficult for the teacher to control, because this is where students need to pay attention and process the information actively. However, if the teacher provides a reason, goal, or task for the learner, this can encourage and help the listener to focus.

(3) Different kinds of tasks for students while listening:

①No specific responses: by not giving students any task the first time they listen to a passage, it can take the anxiety out of listening.

②Listen and tick: list some objects, then ask students to listen and tick.

③Listen and sequence: listen and number; listen and match.

④Listen and act: “Simon says…”, listen and point.

⑤Listen and draw:

⑥Listen and fill

⑦Listen and take notes

3. Post-listening

(1)Definition:

Post-listening, during which students are offered with opportunities to integrate what they learned from the text into their existing knowledge and communicate with others using the information in the listening text.

(2) Different kinds of tasks for students while listening:

①Multiple-choice questions

②Answering questions

③Note-taking and gap-filling

④Dictogloss:

Preparation

Dictation

Reconstruction

Analysis and correction