AULA 2

ESTUDOS AVANÇADOS DE
LÍNGUA INGLESA –
COMPREENSÃO AUDITIVA E
COMUNICAÇÃO ORAL

Prof. Stephen Greene

INITIAL TALK

In the first module, we looked at what happens when we listen and build
understanding, focusing specifically on what language learners do. For many
people, teachers included, the way to improve your listening skills in a second
language is simply to listen as often as possible. While this will undoubtedly
improve listening skills, there are more efficient and effective ways to achieve this
goal. In this module, we are going to look at what we, as teachers, can do in a
language classroom to help our students become better listeners.

CONTEXTUALIZING

In order to do look at how we can improve our students’ listening skills, we

will try to answer the following questions:

 Why are listening for gist and listening for detail so important?
 What micro skills do good language learners use to be good at listening?
 What different types of classroom activities can we, as teachers, utilise?
 How can we design our own listening activities or adapt published listening
activities?
 What should students do when they are listening?

As we will see, there isn’t necessarily any one correct answer for some of
these questions. However, every teacher should have their own theories about
how to answer the questions, in order to be able to create material that is consistent
and meets the needs of our students.

THEME 1 – LISTENING SKILLS

The two most obvious listening skills, and the two that are constantly
referenced and practised in published course books and exams, are listening for
gist and listening for specific information. Look at any published activity and these
will be the two skills that are practised over and over. Before we can look at any
other potential listening skills, we need to define what these are and why they are
so prolific.

1.1 Listening for gist

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 In the last module, we looked at the top-down and bottom-up processes for
creating meaning when listening. Listening for gist is about getting students to
utilise the top-down processes so they ‘get the idea’ of what is being said. Instead
of listening to clauses, words or individual sounds, students are encouraged to pay
attention to things like the attitude of the speaker, where they are and the topic that
they are talking about.
It is important that students work on their abilities to listen for gist. Even for
advanced learners, there will often be times when some of the words are unknown,
so it is impossible to understand absolutely everything. In cases like this, it is
important to fall back on other strategies to help us understand.
It is also true, as was noted in the previous chapter, that language learners
have a tendency to assume they need to pay attention to every single word.
Encouraging them not do this will be beneficial when they come to listening in the
real world.
Finally, it is an important skill because it can relax students if they realise
that they don’t need to understand everything. The stress of not hearing a word or
phrase can prevent some learners from focusing on the rest of the text. It is much
better for this type of student to accept that they did not catch something and move
on with the goal of understanding, more or less, the whole text.

1.2 Listening for specific information

The other skill which is often practised in published material is that of

listening for specific information. This skill is the opposite of listening for gist in that
it encourages students to use more bottom-up processes. As the name of this skill
suggests, students are expected to find detailed and specific information, for
example the time a film starts or the reason why a student failed to do their
homework. In order to find these answers, the student will need to listen to
individual words or phrases rather than the whole text.
It is important to practise this skill because students often complain that they
miss the detail when they are listening. However, just asking students to do this,
many times, will not in itself improve their listening skills. They are more likely to
improve their ability to listen for gist by improving their vocabulary than just by
repetitively doing listening for specific information tasks.

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1.3 Why focus on these two skills?

We will shortly see other important skills that our students might need to
develop in order to be effective listeners. However, before we do it, it is worth
asking the question: why these two particular skills of listening for gist and detail
seem to be so prevalent in published material?
There probably is not any one answer to this question. Some possibilities
include the fact that these two skills map directly to the top-down and bottom-up
models of processing that we examined in the last lesson. They are also relatively
easy to describe to students and, in addition, easy to design tasks, for the sake of
developing them. Also, as with most things in human life, once a few influential
people start to do something, everyone else follows.
Finally, there is also the unfortunate fact that a lot of English teachers
around the world are not appropriately educated in the art and science of teaching
English. This means they are likely to follow fashions, want something easy to
understand and fail to question what is presented in the material they use.

THEME 2 – OTHER MICRO SKILLS

In 1983, Jack Richards wrote one of the most important articles on teaching
listening skills. In this article, he presented a list of micro-skills that effective
language users use when listening to other people. Checklists like this are an
effective way of making sure we as teachers cover everything in a syllabus that a
student needs. It also helps us as a diagnostic tool to try to decide what might be
going wrong when there is a breakdown in understanding.

2.1 Micro skills checklist

In class, many students find it hard to complete listening activities. However,

if you ask them to read a transcript and listen at the same time, their performance
improves dramatically. One reason for this is the way words are produced when
they come into contact with other words. So, for example, ‘Did you eat yet?’ can
sound something like ‘Djeetyet?’
The original checklist has been adapted and added to over the years. A
more recent up to date list has been proposed by H. Douglas Brown (2001, p. 256).
In this list, Brown claims that when effective language users are listening, they can:

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 1. Remember chunks of language of different lengths in the short-term
memory;
2. Identify the distinctive sounds of English;
3. Recognize English stress patterns, words in stressed and unstressed
positions, rhythmic structure, intonational contours, and their role in
signalling information;
4. Understand reduced forms of words;
5. Identify word boundaries and interpret word order patterns;
6. Process both fast and slow rates of speech
7. Process speech containing pauses, mistakes, corrections, reformulations
and other performance variables;
8. Recognise grammatical words and clauses (nouns, verbs, etc.), systems
(e.g., tense, agreement, pluralisation), patterns, rules and elliptical forms;
9. Detect sentence constituents (the parts of a sentence that can be moved
around) and distinguish between major and minor constituents (often, but
not always, verb clauses and noun clauses rather than prepositional or
adjectival clauses);
10. Recognise that a particular meaning may be expressed in different
grammatical forms;
11. Recognise cohesive devices in spoken discourse;
12. Recognise the communicative functions of utterances, according to
situations, participants, goals;
13. Infer situations, participants, goals using real-world knowledge;
14. From events, ideas, etc., described, predict outcomes, infer links and
connections between events, deduce causes and effects, and detect such
realisations as main idea, supporting idea, new information, given
information, generalisation, and exemplification;
15. Distinguish between literal and implied meanings;
16. Use facial, kinetic, body language, and other non-verbal clues to decipher
meanings;
17. Develop and use a battery of listening strategies, such as detecting key
words, guessing the meaning of words from context, appeal for help and
signal comprehension of lack thereof.

An interesting point with regards to this list is not that the listener must
explicitly understand or recognise the items. Some effective listeners would not be

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able to explain what a word boundary is, for example; however, they would still be
able to listen and understand where one word starts and another one ends. This
has implications for testing, as it is not enough to ask about word boundaries; we
must, instead, ask about meaning that will tell us if the word boundaries have been
identified.
It is worth noting that if this is a useful checklist of what effective listeners
do, then we should not only be giving our students opportunities to practise these
micro-skills, but also be actively teaching them. It is worth going through any
published material you may use in the classroom and checking how much these
micro-skills are covered. If they are not covered, then you might need to either
adapt the material or find a new book.

THEME 3 – LEARNING STRATEGIES

The final point on the list of micro-skills adapted from Richards (1983) in the
previous section is ‘to develop and use a battery of listening strategies’. This raises
an important aspect to consider: is good listening just about listening to the
speaker? Or is good listening also about considering the best way to listen?
Learning strategies, as opposed to more focused listening strategies, are
concerned with what good language learners do. Oxford (1990) attempted to
create an inventory to describe all of the learning strategies that could be
employed, as well as a questionnaire for students to be able to take, which aims
at identifying their strengths and the areas they need to work on. As listening is an
important area of language, a lot of the learning strategies are directly linked to
listening.

3.1 Listening strategies

Unfortunately, there is not one accepted list of all the different listening
strategies we can employ. However, Buck (2001, p104) writes about two
categories of skills he calls Cognitive Strategies and Metacognitive Strategies.
Cognitive strategies relate to understanding and storing messages in the short-
term memory. This storage is important in order to understand and compare to
expectations. Metacognitive strategies, meanwhile, are associated with the
decisions about which cognitive strategies to use and when.

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 While Oxford (1990) is more concerned with learning strategies rather than
just listening strategies, she does go into some detail about how these strategies
can be used by effective learners and, thus, listeners. Her strategy inventory
provides a detailed taxonomy of all the strategies good language learners use.
This inventory is broken up into various categories with Memory strategies, how to
retain chunks of language and Cognitive strategies, used for organising the
language and compensation strategies, those that a good learner uses when they
do not understand something, being known as Direct strategies. Her second group
of Indirect strategies are more associated with how we manage learning and
include Metacognitive strategies, which look at focusing on learning, Affective
strategies which look at motivations and Social strategies which deal with working
with others to learn language. As previously mentioned, this list is not specifically
aimed at listeners, but it does, obviously, have implications for good language
learners.

3.2 Listening strategies in the classroom

Raising awareness of what students are doing, and what they need to do,
is the first step we must take when trying to improve our students’ listening
strategies. This will not work with younger students, who are probably unaware of
what they are doing, but getting adults to question the processes involved can lead
to enlightening moments. Asking students, and indeed providing your own input as
a successful learner, can make listening strategies appear more real. If you feel
the need for an authoritative voice to reinforce the idea, it is a good idea to use or
adapt Oxford’s questionnaire.
We then need to analyse the tasks we are using to see if they include
different listening strategies, or at least the learning strategies that our students
need to work on. Finally, after each activity, ask students which strategies they
employed and how successful they were. Try to move the discussion on to what
other strategies students could have used if they were to do the task again.

THEME 4 – TYPES OF CLASSROOM TASK

So far, we have been looking at what our students need to do in order to be

good listeners. This is essential as without knowing this it is impossible to create
or adapt listening activities to meet their needs. If we know what good listeners do,

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then we can identify problems that our students might have and help them to
become better listeners. Now, however, it is time to turn our attention to things we
can do in the classroom, in order to meet our aim of improving listening skills.
There are a number of ways of classifying the types of listening tasks we
can perform in class. Brown (2001) sets out to classify them on the grounds of
what we ask our students to actually do when they are listening.

4.1 Reactive

This is the most superficial listening activity because it merely requires the
student to repeat back what they have just heard. It may be a justifiable activity
when it comes to activities such as drilling, but it is otherwise very limited as there
is no need to create meaning.

4.2 Intensive

This task requires students to listen in great detail to individual sounds,

words, intonation, etc. This type of activity would be most useful when focussing
on bottom-up processing skills. It could also be of use if you want to use a listening
except to teach specific lexis or a structure.

4.3 Responsive

A lot of the time taken up in the classroom is not listening to a CD or other

published recording. It is instead taken up with listening to a teacher and
responding appropriately. The teacher might ask students a question, give
commands, seek clarification or check understanding of another point. In each
case, the student will have to respond to the teacher. A false response could
indicate a breakdown of understanding.

4.4 Selective

During a selective type task, the listener is asked to find certain information.
It is tempting to assume that the information required will need bottom-up
processing skills, and this is often the case. When a learner is asked to, for
example, find a name, a date or location, they will more likely need to pay attention
to specific words or chunks. However, the objective of this type of task is to find
certain information among a lot of other, distracting information. This means that
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students could be asked to identify main ideas or conclusions, which would entail
more top-down processing.

4.5 Extensive

If intensive tasks aim to develop bottom-up processing, then extensive is

purely associated with top-down processing. Extensive listening involves listening
to long speeches, lectures or watching films. Students need to understand a
comprehensive message and often entails other skills, not normally associated
with listening skills, for example taking notes, discussing ideas. Extensive listening
is probably the least used activity type in the classroom, as it is difficult to get
students to listen to a long, uninterrupted text without levels of motivation falling. It
can also be difficult for a teacher to justify spending so long on one activity.
However, for some students, such as those hoping to study abroad, it would make
a useful task in certain circumstances.

4.6 Interactive

There is no reason why we must use only one of the previous tasks at a
time. It is perfectly possible that tasks like debates, discussions, pair work and
group work could use two or more of the above tasks. In this case, the task could
be called interactive. While it is often necessary to concentrate on discrete task
types in order to more easily improve them, there is also a need to mix up the tasks
to imitate how students will need to operate in the real world. This is an important
aspect that we will come back to in the next section.

THEME 5 – DESIGNING LISTENING ACTIVITIES

We are now in a position to be able to diagnose what might be going wrong

when a student presents difficulties with listening skills. We have also looked at
some of the necessary aspects that are needed in the classroom to overcome
those difficulties. We are almost ready to design our own activities or adapt ones
from published material. Before we do, it is important to have a set of principles to
guide us when we are creating our activities. Brown (2001), Scrivener (2005) and
Harmer (2007) have all attempted to provide principles for creating listening
activities. The following list is adapted from all three writers.

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5.1 Authentic task

If we are training our students to perform in the real world, then it stands to
reason that we must use real world activities. There might be some justification for
using an occasional activity that is not authentic, but this justification will rarely be
about improving listening skills. Ask yourself how often you merely listen and
repeat something, without ascribing any meaning whatsoever to what you are
saying? The answer is probably very rarely. So why do some teachers insist on
incorporating these tasks in the language classroom? In the example above, about
using reactive tasks, there might be a justification for using it – for example, it helps
language to ‘stick’ in the brain, or students appreciate the opportunity to manipulate
the sounds without worrying about the meaning. However, these justifications are
not associated with improving listening skills.
There are further problems with using non-authentic tasks in the classroom.
Students quickly wonder why they are being asked to perform artificial activities
and become demotivated, as they cannot see the relevance of what they are doing.
Sometimes, students cannot understand what they are meant to do, as the task is
so artificial. Finally, it is also questionable as to whether non-authentic tasks are
an effective use of time compared to authentic tasks. Another way of saying this is
that students simply do not learn when consistently presented with artificial tasks.

5.2 Authentic language

Many is the time a student has studied fastidiously, done all the homework
and got good marks. As soon as they go off to the UK or the USA, or they find they
have to work with an Australian or an Irish person, they realise they cannot
understand a word. There are many reasons for this, but many of the reasons boil
down to the type of language they are exposed to in the classroom. The language
might be too slow, or too simple. There might not be any hesitation or false starts.
There might be not be enough idioms or phrasal verbs. There might be too much
support, or the questions are too easy.
More often than not, the reason for this is that the task designers want their
students to complete the task so that they can increase their confidence; after all,
if we failed every listening task, we would soon come to the conclusion that we
were terrible at listening. However, it is not always possible, not desirable, to
expose our students to real authentic language, for fear of our students being

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overwhelmed by the lexis, rate of delivery and any of the other factors that make
listening the challenge that we looked at in the first lesson.
The solution, therefore, lies in making sure we use authentic-like language
that displays some of the features we want to focus on. A listening task does not
need to include all the features, but enough to help students train themselves to
listen to authentic language in the future. It also requires that teachers be aware of
what students need and be able to help them.

5.3 Student response

As we have seen previously, there are a number of potentially different

responses we can encourage students to make, from reactive to responsive and
from intensive to extensive. While we have mentioned that an interactive response,
one that mixes up different types of response in the same listening is perhaps the
best, this is not always possible. While we may not be able to ensure that there is
a variety of responses during the one task, it is more than possible to vary the
responses over a number of tasks that use the same listening. For example, the
first time a student listens to something they might be asked to listen for the main
ideas (a selective response), while the second time they could be asked to listen
for specific names or times (an intensive response).
It is also useful to think about what the students are going to do when they
listen to something. Are they going to talk about what they have heard? Are they
going to write an answer, make notes or answer a multiple-choice question? Are
they going to move around the room according to what they hear? The action you
ask them to perform also need to be varied so that students do not grow bored or
blasé about what they are asked to do.

5.4 Wide range of strategies

At the start of this unit, we looked at how a lot of the published material
encourages students to focus on either listening for gist or listening for detail.
Undoubtedly, these are two important listening strategies, but they are by no
means the only ones. We have looked at other strategies that involve ways to place
chunks of language in the short-term memory, cognitive and metacognitive
strategies. As mentioned, there is no one definitive list of all the strategies that can
be used when listening, so this means that we as teachers need to develop our

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own understanding of what strategies are useful. We can do this by reading other
ideas, reflecting on our students’ performance, and analysing the material we use
and thinking on our own performance, both in our first and second languages.
Once we have decided what strategies are important, we need to make sure we
provide students with ample opportunity to practise and develop them.
Unfortunately, most language students are totally ignorant of the strategies
they use in order to listen effectively in their first language. It also seems that just
because you can listen well in your first language does not mean you will also be
able to listen well in a second language. While the skills and strategies needed are
transferable between languages, they do not automatically transfer, and so the
teacher has to facilitate the transference. Some examples, as well as listening for
gist and detail, include identifying key words, predicting answers, guessing
answers, and using non-verbal clues.

5.5 Vary processing techniques

Take a look at traditional course books from the 1970s or earlier, and most
of the listening material focussed on bottom-up processes. From the 1980s, with
the rise of the communicative approach and a better understanding of the
processes involved when listening is a second language, there was a shift to
focusing on top-down processes. However, we have noticed that good listeners
will probably use both top-down and bottom-up processes at the same time, in
order to be able to check the individual words and sounds, based on their
knowledge of the world, the context and the global meaning of what they are
listening to. It is not good enough to use only, or mainly, top-down processes or
bottom-up processes. We need to use both. This can be done with the same
listening text, as we will see in a later lesson, or it can be done over the duration
of a class or a semester.

5.6 Intrinsically motivating

All of our students have different reasons for being in the classroom and
have different motivations for wanting to learn. While it can be challenging to meet
all of these different motivations all of the time, we need to stablish a goal that we
always have in mind. We should also be trying to make the tasks themselves
intrinsically motivating. The phrase intrinsically motivating in this context means

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creating activities that, once started, make the students want to complete just for
the sake of the activity. This type of task will vary greatly from student to student
and from class to class, but the ability to do so is the mark of a great teacher.

CONCLUDING

In this lesson, we have looked at how important it is to be aware of the

different micro skills we employ when creating understanding while listening. It is
true that most published materials include ample opportunity to practise the skills
of listening for detail and listening for gist, but this is not enough, as listeners have
to do so much more. In addition to other micro skills, there is also the question of
learning strategies that language learners can learn to employ. Following on from
this, we examined a classification for the type of activity that students can be asked
to perform in class and then some important considerations to take into account
when creating our own material or adapting published material. Finally, we drew
up some principles to keep in mind when creating our own listening material, or
adapting material from published sources.

MANDATORY READING

Theoretical approach texts

RAHIMIRAD, M.; MOINI, M. R. The challenges of listening to academic lectures

for EAP learners and the impact of metacognition on Academic Lecture Listening
Comprehension. Sage Learners, Jun. 25, 2015. Available at:
<journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2158244015590609>. Retrieved: 18 jun.
2018.

Practical approach texts

AHMED, R. Five essential listening skills for English learners. British Council,
Jun. 18, 2015. Available at: <https://www.britishcouncil.org/voices-magazine/five-
essential-listening-skills-english-learners>. Retrieved: 18 jun. 2018.

Further knowledge

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ZANETTI, A. Listen to learn, learn to listen. Richmondhare, Ago. 25, 2017.
Available at: <http://www.richmondshare.com.br/listen-to-learn-learn-to-listen/>.
Retrieved: 18 jun. 2018.

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REFERENCES

BUCK, J. Assessing Listening Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

DOFF, A. Teach English: A training course for teachers. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1997.

DOUGLAS BROWN, J. Teaching by Principles: An interactive approach to

language pedagogy. New York: Pearson Education, 2001.

HARMER, J. The Practice of English Language Teaching. Harlow: Longman

Group Ltd, 2007.

MORLEY, C. Listening: Top-down and bottom-up. 2007. Available at:

<https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/listening-top-down-bottom>.
Retrieved: 18 jun. 2018.

OXFORD, R. Language Learning Strategies: what every teacher should know.

Boston: Heinle & Heinle Publishers, 1990.

RICHARDS, J. Listening Comprehension: Approach, Design, Procedure. TESOL

Quarterly, v. 17, n. 2, p. 219-240, 1983. Available at:
<www.jstor.org/stable/3586651>. Retrieved: 18 jun. 2018.

SCRIVNER, J. Learning Teaching. Oxford: Macmillan Publishers Ltd: 2005.

TENNANT, A. Listening Matters: top-down and bottom-up listening. 2007.

Available at: <http://www.onestopenglish.com/skills/listening/teaching-
tips/listening-matters/listening-matters-top-down-and-bottom-up-
listening/154567.article>. Retrieved: 18 jun. 2018.

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