EN 1103: Listening in English I
Nature of listening and factors that affect
listening
· What is listening?
Ability to identify and understand what others are saying, involves
understanding a speaker’s accent/pronunciation/grammar/ vocabulary and grasping
the meaning.
· Factors that
affect listening:
- Get the students to discuss and write a list in
small groups.
- Whole class discussion. Use the following factors
in the discussion:
Listening passage is heard only once, content usually
not well organized, cannot be listened to at a slower speed (message on radio,
on tape), difficult to recognize individual words in the stream of speech, may
contain colloquial words and expression and redundant utterances: repetitions,
false starts, rephrasing, self-corrections, elaborations, meaningless
utterances (e.g. I mean. you know...), no body language and facial expressions,
etc
Extract specific information – selective listening
· Purpose: not to
look for global / general meaning, but to be able to find necessary
information. Students listen for names / dates / certain facts and events /
location / situation / context, etc.
· Types of tasks:
- Listen to news. In the work sheet tick the category
to which the news items you hear fall into.
- Listen to announcements e.g. Airline arrivals and
departures. Fill in the flight numbers, destinations, gate numbers, departure
times etc.
Listening for the main idea and specific details
· Types of
activities
- Listen and take notes under given headings
- Listen and answer comprehension check questions
· Text types:
Interviews, speeches
(Ref. Headway Intermediate Page 66)
Understanding planned monologues
· In planned
monologues the language is carefully structured. Provide the students with a
task sheet to be completed while listening.
· Types of
activities: weather reports, news readings
Understanding unplanned monologues
· In unplanned
monologues which are usually crated on the spot in response to an initial
question there is a lot of pauses, redundancy and fragmentary utterances.
· Types of tasks:
- Identify the meaningless speech, list them, and
compare with others
- Comprehension questions
