TEACHING ENGLISH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE

TEACHING LISTENING

Written for Complying the Presentation Assignment

of TEFL Subject
lectured by:
Prof. Nur Mukminatien

Presented by:
ANDIKA AGUS DEWANTARA
DIYAH WULANDARI
ELVA YOHANA

GRADUATE PROGRAM
ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHING
UNIVERSITY OF MALANG
2011
 TEACHING OF LISTENING

A. INTRODUCTION

Listening is an activity absorbing of the meanings of words and sentences by the brain. It leads
to the understanding of facts and ideas, but listening takes attention, or sticking to the task at hand in
spite of distractions. It requires concentration, which is the focusing of our thoughts upon one
particular problem. A person who incorporates listening with concentration is actively listening. Active
listening is a method of responding to another that encourages communication. One of the purposes
of teaching listening is triggering students to be active listeners. Active listeners often must process
messages as they come intentionally, even if they are still processing what they have just heard,
without backtracking or looking ahead. In addition, listeners must cope with the sender's choice of
vocabulary, structure, and rate of delivery.
Far from passively receiving and recording aural input, listeners actively involve themselves in
the interpretation of what they hear, bringing their own background knowledge and linguistic
knowledge to bear on the information contained in the aural text. Not all listening is the same; casual
greetings, for example, require a different sort of listening capability than do academic lectures.
Language learning requires intentional listening that employs strategies for identifying sounds and
making meaning from them.
Given the importance of listening in language learning and teaching, it is essential for language
teachers to help their students become effective and active listeners. In the communicative approach
to language teaching, modeling listening strategies and providing listening practice in authentic
situations is important so that they can use the language for communication outside the classroom.
(Harmer, 2007)

Why teach listening?

Harmer (2007:97) stated that there are two main reasons for teaching listening, the first is let
the students learn the different varieties and accents of language in different context of
communication rather than just the voice of their teacher with its own idiosyncrasies. Students need
to be exposed not only to one variety of English (e.g., British English), but also other varieties e.g.,
American English, Australian English, and others. Besides the varieties and dialects of language,
students also need to be taught the different contexts of language use. Using language in casual
greetings will be obviously different with the use of language in formal situation. Students need to be
introduced the various contexts of language use in different situations. They are expected to be able
to interpret any aural inputs they receive, then use it in the proper context of communication.

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The second main reason for teaching listening is because it helps students to acquire language
subconsciously even if teachers do not draw attention to its special features. Exposure of language
is a fundamental requirement foe anyone wanting to learn. Thus, the use of appropriate tapes plays
important role to provide such exposure and enable students to get vivid information, not only about
grammar and vocabulary, but also about pronunciation, rhythm, intonation, pitch, and stress. Just as
with reading, students will get better at listening when the more they do it, because listening is an
active skill which requires active and intensive activities to practice.

B. OBJECTIVE OF TEACHING LISTENING

According to Ur (1996:105), in principle, the objective of listening practice in the classroom is

that students should learn to function successfully in real-life listening situations. It means that
teaching listening functions to make students to be able to comprehend any aural inputs
satisfactorily in a variety of situations. Thus, it is important to teach students the listening strategies
to maximize their comprehension of aural input, identify relevant and non-relevant information, and
tolerate less than word-by-word comprehension.
To accomplish this objective, Burkart (1998) recomended the following that teachers should
focus on the process of listening rather than on its product:
1 Focus on the Listening Process
 Developing students' awareness of the listening process and listening strategies by asking
students to think and talk about how they listen in their native language.
 Allowing students to practice the full repertoire of listening strategies by using authentic
listening tasks.
 Behaving as authentic listeners by responding to student communication as a listener rather
than as a teacher.
 Showing students the strategies that will work best for the listening purpose and the type of
text. They explain how and why students should use the strategies, when working with
listening tasks in class.
 Having students practice listening strategies in class and ask them to practice outside of
class in their listening assignments. They encourage students to be conscious of what
they're doing while they complete listening tape assignments.
 Encouraging students to evaluate their comprehension and their strategy use immediately
after completing an assignment. They build comprehension checks into in-class and out-of-

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class listening assignments, and periodically review how and when to use particular
strategies.
 Encouraging the development of listening skills and the use of listening strategies by using
the target language to conduct classroom business: making announcements, assigning
homework, describing the content and format of tests.
 Not assuming that students will transfer strategy use from one task to another. They
explicitly mention how a particular strategy can be used in a different type of listening task
or with another skill.
By raising students' awareness of listening as a skill that requires active engagement, and by
explicitly teaching listening strategies, teachers help their students develop both the ability and the
confidence to handle communication situations they may encounter beyond the classroom. In this
way they give their students the foundation for communicative competence in the new language.

2 Integrating Metacognitive Strategies in Teaching of Listening Activity

Burkart (1998) in www.nclrc.org formulates the following tasks by integrating metacognitive
strategy1) for listening activities:
Pre-Listening Activity: Plan for the listening task
 Set a purpose or decide in advance what to listen for.
 Decide if more linguistic or background knowledge is needed.
 Determine whether to enter the text from the top down (attend to the overall meaning) or from
the bottom up (focus on the words and phrases).
Whilst Listening Activity: Monitor comprehension
 Verify predictions and check for inaccurate guesses.
 Decide what is and is not important to understand.
 Listen/view again to check comprehension.
Post Listening Activity: Evaluate comprehension and strategy use
 Evaluate comprehension in a particular task or area.
 Evaluate overall progress in listening and in particular types of listening tasks.
 Decide if the strategies used were appropriate for the purpose and for the task.
 Modify strategies if necessary.

1)
Metacognition refers to learners' automatic awareness of their own knowledge and their ability to
understand, control, and manipulate their own cognitive processes.
(http://education.calumet.purdue.edu/vockell/edPsybook/Edpsy7/edpsy7_meta.htm)

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3 Using Authentic Materials and Situations

Authentic materials and situations prepare students for the types of listening they will need to do
when using the language outside the classroom. Nunan (1991) suggests the following two kinds of
communication model for teaching of listening:
a. One-Way Communication
One-way Communication is an interaction, which is done by students without having transactional
dialogue, using the following materials:
 Radio and television programs
 Public address announcements (airports, train/bus stations, stores)
 Speeches and lectures
 Telephone customer service recordings
b. Two-Way Communication
In authentic two-way communication, the listener focuses on the speaker's meaning rather than the
speaker's language. The focus shifts to language only when meaning is not clear. Note the
difference between the teacher as teacher and the teacher as authentic listener in the dialogues.

C. APPROACHES IN TEACHING LISTENING

According to Richards (2008:3), there are two approaches in teaching listening:
1) Listening as Comprehension,
Listening as comprehension is the traditional way of thinking about the nature of listening.
Indeed, in most methodology manuals listening and listening comprehension are synonymous. This
view of listening is based on the assumption that the main function of listening in second language
learning is to facilitate understanding of spoken discourse. This approach is based on the
assumption that the role of listening in a language program is to help develop learners’ abilities to
understand things they listen to.

2) Listening as Acquisition.
This approach considers how listening can provide input that triggers the further development of
second-language proficiency. This approach is based on the following assumptions:
 Listening serves the goal of extracting meaning from messages.
 To do this, learners have to be taught how to use both bottom-up and top-down processes to
understand messages.

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 The language of utterances – the precise words, syntax, and expressions – used by speakers
are temporary carriers of meaning. Once meaning is identified, there is no further need to attend
to the form of messages unless problems in understanding occurred.
 Teaching listening strategies can help make learners more effective listeners.
Tasks and materials which are employed in classroom should enable listeners to recognize and
act on the general, specific, or implied meaning of utterances. These tasks include sequencing, true-
false comprehension, picture identification, summarizing, and dicto comp, as well as activities
designed to develop effective listening strategies.

D. LISTENING STRATEGIES
Listening strategies are techniques or activities that contribute directly to the comprehension
and recall of listening input. Listening strategies can be classified by how the listener processes the
input. Nunan (1991:17) proposes the following strategies in teaching listening:
1. Top-down strategies are listener based; the listener taps into background knowledge of the
topic, the situation or context, the type of text, and the language. This background knowledge
activates a set of expectations that help the listener to interpret what is heard and anticipate
what will come next. Top-down strategies include:
 listening for the main idea
 predicting
 drawing inferences
 summarizing
2. Bottom-up strategies are text based; the listener relies on the language in the message, that is,
the combination of sounds, words, and grammar that creates meaning. Bottom-up strategies
include:
 listening for specific details
 recognizing cognates
 recognizing word-order patterns
3. Metacognitive Strategies
To gain the better results, strategic listeners should use metacognitive strategies to plan,
monitor, and evaluate their listening:
 They plan by deciding which listening strategies will serve best in a particular situation.
 They monitor their comprehension and the effectiveness of the selected strategies.

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 They evaluate by determining whether they have achieved their listening comprehension
goals and whether the combination of listening strategies selected was an effective one.

E. LISTENING ACTIVITIES
Before doing the listening activities as Burkart (1998) proposes, teachers should define the
following activity's instructional goals and type of response:
 Identification: Recognizing or discriminating specific aspects of the message, such as sounds,
categories of words, morphological distinctions
 Orientation: Determining the major facts about a message, such as topic, text type, setting
 Main idea comprehension: Identifying the higher-order ideas
 Detail comprehension: Identifying supporting details
 Replication: Reproducing the message orally or in writing
The following are the examples of listening activites:
4 Pre-listening activities
During pre-listening phase the teacher may:
 explore students' background knowledge of the topic and linguistic content of the text.
 provide students with necessary background knowledge for their comprehension of the
listening passage or activate the existing knowledge that the students possess.
 clarify any cultural information which may be necessary to comprehend the passage.
 make students aware of the type of text they will be listening to, the role they will play, and
the purpose(s) for which they will be listening.
 provide opportunities for group or collaborative work and for background reading or class
discussion activities.
The following are the samples of pre-listening activities:
 looking at pictures, maps, diagrams, or graphs
 reviewing vocabulary or grammatical structures
 reading something relevant
 constructing semantic webs (a graphic arrangement of concepts or words showing how they
are related)
 predicting the content of the listening text
 going over the directions or instructions for the activity
 doing guided practice

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5 While-listening activities
While-listening activities relate directly to the text, and students do them do during or
immediately after the time they are listening. Teachers should keep these points in mind when
planning while-listening activities:
 If students are to complete a written task during or immediately after listening, allow them to
read through it before listening. Students need to devote all their attention to the listening task.
To make sure they understand the instructions.
 Keep writing to a minimum during listening, because having students to write while listening
may distract students from this primary goal.
 Organize activities so that they guide listeners through the text . Combine global activities such
as getting the main idea, topic, and setting with selective listening activities that focus on details
of content and form.
 Use questions to focus students' attention on the elements of the text crucial to comprehension
of the whole. Before the listening activity begins, have students review questions they will
answer orally or in writing after listening to help them recognize the crucial parts of the
message.
 Use predicting to encourage students to monitor their comprehension as they listen. Do a
predicting activity before listening, and remind students to review what they are hearing to see if
it makes sense in the context of their prior knowledge.
 Give immediate feedback whenever possible. Encourage students to examine how or why their
responses were incorrect.
Sample while-listening activities:
 listening with visuals
 filling in graphs and charts
 following a route on a map
 checking off items in a list
 listening for the gist
 searching for specific clues to meaning
 completing cloze (fill-in) exercises
 distinguishing between formal and informal registers

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1. Post Listening Activity

In Post-Listening Activities, teacher may:
 Review the listening activity they did.
 Have students to make the conclusion about the topic they did.
 Ask students difficulties when they did the activities.
 Ask students’ feeling about the activities
 Inform the follow-up activities.

F. CURRENT ISSUES ON TEACHING LISTENING

The teaching of listening has attracted a greater level of interest in recent years than it did in the
past. Now, university entrance exams, exit exams, and other examinations often include a listening
component, acknowledging that listening skills are a core component of second-language
proficiency, and also reflecting the assumption that if listening isn’t tested, teachers won’t teach it.
Earlier views of listening showed it as the mastery of discrete skills or micro-skills, such as
recognizing reduced forms of words, recognizing cohesive devices in texts, and identifying key words
in a text, and that these skills should form the focus of teaching. Later views of listening drew on the
field of cognitive psychology, which introduced the notions of bottom-up and top-down processing
and brought attention to the role of prior knowledge and schema in comprehension. Listening came
to be seen as an interpretive process.
Nowadays, current views of teaching listening emphasize on the role of the listener, who is seen
as an active participant in listening, employing strategies to facilitate, monitor, and evaluate his or her
listening. In recent years, listening has also been examined in relation not only to comprehension but
also to language learning for communication. Since listening can provide much of the input and data
that learners receive in language learning, an important question is: How can attention to the
language the listener hears facilitate second language learning?
This raises the issue of the role “noticing” and conscious awareness of language form play, and how
noticing can be part of the process by which learners can incorporate new word forms and structures
into their developing communicative competence.

G. CONCLUSION
Common view that ‘listener as tape recorder’ is not a tenable anymore. In comprehending aural
language, listeners do a great deal of constructive and interpretative work in which they integrate

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what they hear with what they know about the world. In other words, listening is not a passive activity
in which, the implementation in the classroom, both students and teachers should be the active parts
of the activity. Teachers should be able to provide effective ways relating the students’ background
knowledge with the matter they will catch, indeed, it is also said that the needs, levels, and interests
of the students will determine the kind of listening that teacher use. Furthermore, the students should
be able to internalize the information they get and implement it in the context of communication.

H. REFERENCES
American Council for the Teaching of Foreign Languages. 1983. ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines.
Revised 1985. Hastings-on-Hudson, NY: ACTFL Materials Center.
Brown, Douglas H. 2007. Teaching by Principles. An Interactive Approach to Language Pedagogy.
San Fransisco: Addison Wesly Longman, Inc.
Harmer, Jeremy. 2007. The Practice of English Language Teaching. Edinburg Gate: Pearson
Education Limited
Harmer, Jeremy. 2007. How to Teach English. Edinburg Gate: Pearson Education Limited
Hogue, Ann. 2003. The Essentials of English: A Writer’s Handbook. New York: Pearson Education.
Hudson, Thom. 2007. Teaching Second Language Reading. New York: Oxford University Press.
National Capital Language Resource Center (NCLRC). (n.d.). The Essentials of Language Teaching.
Retrieved April 23, 2007 from http://nclrc.org/essentials.
Nunan, David. 1991. Language Teaching Methodology. Textbook for Teachers. New York: Prentice
Hall.
Richards, Jack. C. 2008. Teaching Listening and Speaking. New York: Cambridge University Press
Ur, Penny. 1996. A Course in Language Teaching: Practice and Theory . Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press

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