UNIT 1 TEACHING LISTENING -I

Structure
1.0 Objectives
1.1 Introduction: Need for listening
1.1.1 Why listening has been neglected so far?
1.1.2 Importance of listening at secondary school
1.1.3 Need for good listening behaviour

1.2 Listening skills and strategies

1.2.1 The nature of listening
1.2.2 The Decoding process
1.2.3 Meaning making process

1.3 Effective listening

1.3.1 Kinds of listening
1.3.2 Factors that influence listening
1.3.3 The listening environment
1.3.4 Readiness for listening, the motivated listener

1.4 Developing listening tasks

1.4.1 Approaches to listening
1.4.2 Micro and Macro skills of listening
1.4.3 Processes in listening comprehension

1.5 Let us sum up

1.6 Answers

1.0 OBJECTIVES
After completing the unit you will be able to:
 state the need for listening
 explain what the listening process comprises
 state the different kinds of listening and develop activities to exercise them
 take into account the factors that influence listening while organising the
activities
 develop listening tasks keeping in mind the different stages of a listening
lesson
 organise listening lessons in a way that ensure motivated listening

1.1 INTRODUCTION : THE NEED FOR LISTENING

The fact that listening is basic to learning and language learning is well established.
Much of the information we acquire is through listening whether it is during a lecture,
over the radio or television, advice from people, instructions and directions,
suggestions and so on.
A growing change in communication patterns has made the skill of listening more
important than ever. We have now BPO’s, Customer Care Cells, recorded railway
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Listening Comprehension schedules or live problem-solving of mal-functioning gadgets that come to us over
and Speaking
the telephone, when sought. This makes it imperative that we learn to listen well
whether in formal or informal contexts.
Unfortunately, this is one skill that has often been neglected in the language class. If
at all any listening is being done, it is done hastily as a part of the integrated skill
approach. Most of the listening that students do in class is listening to instructions
and explanations by the teacher, and at home to moralizing by the parent. Although
focused listening to different genres of literature has made a beginning in our
classrooms, the strategies to listen to a particular text are seldom provided.

1.1.1 Why has Listening been Neglected So Far

The reasons for neglecting this vital skill are various. They maybe any or some of the
following:
 Teachers felt that it was more important to present new language items to the
class. They used listening only to practice those items.
 They focused on emphasizing those skills that enabled more systematic instruction
and evaluation like grammar, reading and writing.
 Listening has been viewed as a passive skill.
 It is a difficult skill to teach and not possible to assess listening comprehension
which takes place in some hidden recesses of the listener’s mind. The outcome
of listening is not tangible like writing or speaking.
 Often after a lot of listening practice there is no perceptible improvement which
is frustrating for the teacher.
 Teachers believe that listening activities take up a lot of teaching- learning time
and may require technical equipment.
 Some believe that this skill will be automatically picked up through exposure to
the target language. It can be acquired naturally in response to the spoken
word as with L1.
But over the years teachers’ experience with young learners has shown that:
 Listening is the foundation of literacy.
 Listening vocabulary is the first vocabulary of any child. A child acquires the
vocabulary she listens around her. Exposure to new words through reading
comes much later.
 There would be no language without the aural/oral component. A large part of
communication is aural and oral.
 We need skills in listening for the very business of living, study and work, even
to run businesses and governments.

1.1.2 The Impact of Listening at School

The aim of teaching a language is to prepare the learner for life. Listening, being a
significant part of the business of daily living, needs to be practised extensively.
Learners need to be prepared to handle situations in life even beyond the classroom
and after leaving school where they might need to obtain information from radio or
television talks and chats, videos on various themes, announcements, telephonic
6 information, directions, or simply, as oral information from another person.
Why is listening important? Taching Listening-I

Listening helps to develop a person’s spoken competence which gets enriched with
 new grammatical structures when a speaker uses expressions that are new to
the listener
 new vocabulary as listening exposes a person to the vocabulary in context
 new phonological patterns which enable the listener to learn the permissible
combinations of sounds and the phonemic clusters as part of words in a particular
language
 pragmatic information like deriving meaning from stress, tone, expression and
body language of the speaker, which is an indicator of the speaker’s meaning,
intent and purpose
Thus it is important that we provide listening experiences of different kinds based on
a variety of contexts so that students can handle listening (encounters) situations in
the real world adequately. We need to open up a rich source of linguistic material for
the L2 learners. This implies that students need to be exposed to a lot of language in
the form of day to day conversation, stories, poems, plays, directions, discussions
and announcements.
Listening is basic to oral skills
Developing fluency in speaking has always been an important goal for language
teachers. Often, in their enthusiasm to teach speaking they have overlooked the fact
that any oral communication involves a lot of listening. Even a simple conversation
cannot be sustained if one of the interlocutors does not have adequate listening
skills. Just as speaking, listening too has its own fluency and accuracy without which
communication may break down.
 Fluency: acquiring the patterns of listening like paying attention to the key
words, using non-linguistic clues to arrive at the meaning, not having to listen
word for word (meaning-making skills)
 Accuracy: ability to decode pieces of connected speech, word by word,
noticing word boundaries (decoding skills)
Hence teachers in the classroom need to provide practice with goals and processes
in mind. Listening should be practised at every level of language learning or acquisition.
The goals could be:
 Pronunciation teaching (to identify and discriminate between sounds,
utterances)
 Modelling (for contractions like I’m/We’ll, or minimal pairs which distinguish
certain sounds (Èship sip)È and stress patterns (Èpresent preÈsent).
 Pragmatic input (what certain utterances would mean in certain contexts like
‘I’m afraid… as being the beginning of a complaint or an expression of
dissatisfaction or even a warning)
 Feedback: whether they missed the main ideas or misinterpreted the words
of the speaker etc. (Perhaps you missed what I said about…./What I really
meant was…)

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Listening Comprehension The processes are the following:
and Speaking
 Decoding processes
 Meaning -making processes
Since much of the information made available to the students is through the voice of
the teacher or through audio material, apart from the visual medium like books and
the chalk board, the ability to understand speech in the target language becomes
absolutely necessary. The teacher’s role would be to provide adequate assistance in
understanding the oral form of L2.
Learner concerns
Most learners of L2 when asked of their area of difficulty often cite listening as the
area where they feel most insecure. The reasons may be:
 They do not have concrete evidence that they are making progress in the skill.
 Listening happens in real time, which means that it is supposed to be understood
at the moment in order to make a suitable response. One cannot play it back in
one’s mind to decipher its meaning.
The L2 learner begins to feel inadequate at this deficiency and also begins to think
that L2 speakers speak very fast. This creates a sense of insecurity amongst the L2
learners.
Listening and other language skills
Listening is inextricably linked to the exercise and development of the other language
skills. Say, for example listening is directly linked to speaking. Although listening is
an internal encounter yet we can get an idea of the extent of comprehension when
the listener encodes his/her response in the spoken form, whether in a conversation
or while answering questions in different formal and informal situations. All children
need to have a human model to interact with linguistically in order to learn speech.
Though an oral response is a significant way to measure comprehension while listening,
it may be borne in mind that many attentive listeners do not express their understanding
in the spoken form.
Listening and reading are both decoding skills. Listening depends upon sounds and
is an aural experience whereas reading depends upon the written text and is a visual
experience (depending upon graphemes). In fact listening provides the foundation
for reading:
 Decoding and auditory discrimination is the first step in reading where beginner
readers try to sound out the words.
 Non-linguistic clues like pauses, voice variation and inflection can at later stage
provide clues to meaning while reading.
 A child utilises her listening vocabulary as a basis for reading and those with a
limited listening vocabulary may have limited reading and writing vocabulary.
Listening can be evaluated through listening comprehension scales which range from
no comprehension to a high level of inferential comprehension. The levels of
comprehension are the same as for reading beginning with literal comprehension
(factual recall), interpretation (making logical guesses, finding relationships, using
contextual clues) and then critical comprehension wherein the listener or the reader
8 evaluates what she hears or reads. Thus it is necessary that students be provided an
opportunity to exercise all of the above skills through graded tasks. We all know Taching Listening-I
that writing is nourished by the other skills of the language and that our listening
vocabulary and the kind of language we listen to influence the skills of writing. It thus
becomes evident from the above discussion that listening is vital to the learning of
L2.

1.1.3 Need for Modelling Good Listening Behaviour

Listening has been made unpopular by adults, namely parents and teachers. Often
parents, busy with their day to day chores or occupations, tend to ignore what the
child is trying to say and rarely respond with more than impatient noises. They do
not make eye contact and show cursory interest. This kind of behaviour is learned
by the child who learns to switch off when asked to listen. On the other hand,
parents demand the child’s attention when they discuss matters of importance to
them or simply indulge in moralizing.
Teachers, too with their injunction to listen often make the act of listening, an unpleasant
experience. On the other hand when the student is speaking, teachers tend to interrupt
to correct and improve them. There are interruptions during a listening experience
which may be caused by bells, announcements or peons coming in with notices.
Last but not the least, listening appears to be a daunting task for the students when
instructions are not properly given and the students do not know what is expected
of them.
It is therefore, important that both teachers and parents model active listening by
doing the following:
 Put aside other work and pay attention to the child.
 Make a note of significant points and ask questions to clarify or repeat to
confirm if that is what the child meant
 Show that they are registering what the child is saying.
 Make eye contact and lean forward to indicate interest and attentive behaviour.
 Ask questions to clarify.
 Allow the child to complete what he/she is saying without interrupting and then
ask questions.
This will model good listening behaviour and it will also allow the child to learn how
to listen well and how to negotiate the meaning of what they are listening to.
Check Your Progress 1
1. Why is it important to develop the skill of listening?
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2. In what way does listening contribute to an individual’s linguistic competence?
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Listening Comprehension .................................................................................................................
and Speaking
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3. What are the difficulties in teaching listening?
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4. What are the different ways parents and teachers model good listening behaviour
which will encourage children to listen?
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1.2 LISTENING SKILLS AND STRATEGIES

In real life listening tends to be a more difficult skill than reading since the listening
text is not permanent and there is no possibility of playing it back or referring to the
text again. One can, however, negotiate meaning by asking the speaker for
clarifications or asking the speaker to repeat what he or she said. But most of the
time listening is done through discrimination of sounds and words, evaluation and
processing of the message which involves many other non-linguistic clues. Often the
emotional factor is very important and these comprise the speaker’s expression, the
social setting, the speaker’s stance and the listener’s own expectations.
Thus two major processes are involved in listening. These are:
 The Decoding process- analyzing what is in the speech signal
 The Meaning-making process- the process used to build meaning by bringing
in outside knowledge
An efficient listener engages with the listening text and processes the language at
both the levels in order to arrive at the meaning. Needless to say that motivation to
listen plays a significant role in the comprehension or auding (making meaning of
what is said) of a listening text. There are various sub-skills that go into listening
comprehension but these are not discrete and often function in relation to each other
in clusters. Hence we cannot make hierarchies of the listening skills.

1.2.2 The Decoding Process

The decoding process is the process of translating the sounds (acoustic input) that
10 the listener receives into standard forms of language (words, phrases or sentences)
using clues like pronunciation and inflection. Hence a piece of speech is reshaped Taching Listening-I
into larger units of language.
The listener’s ears receive the phonemes of the language which are clustered into
syllables and the syllables into words. The words fall into familiar clusters as in
phrases and clauses or lexical clusters.
The decoding happens at the phoneme level, syllable level, word form level and
chunk level. Then it happens at syntax level and intonation level and lastly at the
meaning level- followed by the response of the listener.
Some of the significant decoding processes are at:
 Phoneme level: identifying the different consonants and vowels
 Syllable level: recognising the syllable structure by paying attention to the
variation in stress, weaker syllables and so on.
 Word Level: identifying word boundaries (where they begin and end in
connected speech, i.e. Whatdoyousay?= What+do+you+say?) matching
sequences of sounds to words, matching words that are in their standard forms
and figuring out new words
 Syntax level: isolating phrases and clauses, making predictions using the
beginnings of phrases and clauses, and anticipating the syntactic patterns and
checking hypothesis (whether what was anticipated is true or not)
 Intonation level: making use of sentence stress, using intonation to support
syntax, recognizing chunks of language (pauses between sense groups, tone
groups)
Thus a listener uses the grammatical structure of the utterance and the pattern of
intonation that binds together words in order to understand what is being said.
Initially these decoding routines are conscious and require effort but as the listener
becomes more efficient these routines become automatic. A competent listener does
not have to make a conscious effort to match the group of words in the listening
input to her own vocabulary or try to recall a group of words several seconds after
they have passed. Automaticity requires minimal mental attention.
To summarize, following are the sub-skills that are exercised in the decoding process:
Perception skills
 Recognizing individual sounds “ /p/, /b/, /k/, /t/
 Discriminating between sounds “ /pin/, /bin/
 Identifying reduced forms in connected/fast speech (elision and assimilation) “
‘fish and chips’ ‘fishnchips’
 Identifying stressed syllables – Èpolitics, poÈlitical, poliÈtician
 Identifying stressed words in utterances – I Èwent to the Èmarket.
 Recognizing intonation patterns:
o Falling tone – Who is he?
o Rising tone – Is she here?
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Listening Comprehension Language Skills
and Speaking
 Identifying individual words and groups and building up possible meanings for
them
 Identifying discourse markers which organize what is being said, for example,
then, I was saying, as a matter of fact, to start with etc.
Thus in the L2 classroom we need to provide the learners adequate decoding practice
to reach greater automaticity where the recognition of words and chunks comes
easily. In the following units you shall look at various activities that help the learner to
practice the decoding process.

1.2.3 The Meaning – Making Process

In order to understand the import of an utterance a listener does not need decoding
processes alone, although these seem to dominate in the early stages. To arrive at a
full meaning of the speaker’s message, the listener uses various non-linguistic clues
and a range of contextual information that may be independent of the actual words
used; this is referred to as pragmatics earlier in the unit.
The following come into play for arriving at the real meaning of what a speaker is
saying:
 Listener’s knowledge of the world
 Knowledge of the speaker
 Knowledge of what has been said so far
According to Goodith White using knowledge of the world includes the processes
below:
 Connecting groups of words to non-linguistic features such as expressions,
gestures, or objects, in order to get clues to meaning
 Using previous knowledge of the topic to guess what the speaker might be
saying about it
 Using knowledge about the patterns that certain oral interactions typically take
in order to predict what is being said “ ordering in a restaurant, making a
telephone call to the travel agent, etc.
It is important for the listener to decide whether the piece of information he or she is
receiving is important or not and how it relates to the previous piece of information
or the context. It is also important to see how it relates to the interests of the listener.
Although practice in decoding is essential, these processes of meaning making must
not be ignored even in the early stages of learning language, for these are cognitive
processes and help to develop thinking amongst the learners.
In brief we can sum up the meaning-making processes as:
 Using the knowledge of the context (topic, social situation, cultural knowledge
and comparing with earlier similar encounters etc.)
 Deriving meaning: storing the literal meaning of an utterance and accepting an
approximate meaning and checking understanding
 Adding to the meaning by making inferences, conjecturing where things not
12 clearly stated and dealing with pronouns and linkers to make connections
 Selecting information and recognizing redundant information Taching Listening-I

 Integrating information by connecting ideas, carrying information obtained so

far and noticing the connecting words used by the speaker.
While interacting with a speaker the listener needs to:
 Cope with the speed of talking and accent of the speaker
 Recognize the speaker’s intention in saying something
 Identify the speaker’s mood/attitude to arrive at the real meaning
 Recognize the speaker’s cues about things such as when to take a turn at
speaking and when there is a change in topic
 Predict what the speaker will say next
The teacher needs to decide whether she wishes to practice the decoding processes
or meaning-making processes but these processes can be clubbed so that they feed
into one another. Efficient listening also requires discourse skills which can be
developed through conversation and extended talk. In conversation, the social
interaction is more obvious as each short turn responds to previous turns and
contributes to the development of the talk.
Similarly, students can be exposed to extended talk like the teacher’s little stories or
the retelling of stories, incidents from life, anecdotes or interesting quips suited to the
level of the learner.
Exposure to literature and ‘narrative’ continues not just as a discourse form but as a
mode of mental organization, eliciting personal responses, retelling and extending
the story and creative use of language, after the listening experience is over.
Check Your Progress 2
1. Explain the decoding process in a few sentences.
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2. What are the different ways a listener negotiates the meaning of what is being
said?
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Listening Comprehension
and Speaking 1.3 EFFECTIVE LISTENING
During the course of daily living we listen to a variety of things in various formal and
informal situations. The things we listen to range from polite exchanges and enquiries
to listening to talks, news and lectures. We may have discussions on serious or non-
serious issues or seek consultation and guidance from different kinds of professionals.
Some of these require a response from the listener for communication to continue
while some do not offer any scope for the listener to respond in real time.
Listening may be reciprocal or non-reciprocal or it may be academic or
conversational. Each situation requires different skills of listening.
A brief discussion on kinds of listening follows.

1.3.1 Kinds of Listening

It is necessary to understand the different kinds of listening that occur in
communication. This will help the teacher to organise activities so that various kinds
of listening skills are exercised and developed.
Passive or Marginal Listening
This kind of listening happens when our attention is partially divided like when children
are doing their homework with the television turned on in the background, or when
students are discussing in different groups within the classroom. There is a momentary
‘tuning out’ but there is enough consciousness to return to the activity on hand. In the
classroom the teacher’s voice alerts students to attention. This happens on many
occasions in real life.
Attentive Listening
There are situations in life when accuracy of comprehension is involved for the
information received is vital as in directions, instructions, announcements and
introductions. Failure to understand or remember any portion of the information
might lead to problems. The importance of attention skills and negotiating skills
becomes paramount in these situations. The listener has to pay close attention to
what is being said and stop to ask questions, sum up what the speaker says in order
to confirm if he/she has understood correctly or even ask the speaker to repeat
what he or she said.
A teacher can develop activities based on directions and instructions such as when
students carry out an experiment, or a process following the instructions step by
step.
Responsive Listening
Responsive listening falls under the category of reciprocal listening for it requires a
response from the listener in order to continue with the communication. Thus it is
similar to attentive listening because the listener has to pay attention to the speaker’s
words in order to make an appropriate response. This requires a different mindset
and can be practised by creating situations where the students:
 Participate in a discussion
 have a conversation
A teacher may provide a theme or a situation for the students to discuss after they
have heard a story, read a passage or a news item. Students may also practise
14 conversation in simulated conversations based on different situations of life.
Selective Listening Taching Listening-I

This kind of listening happens when the listener is looking for a certain piece of
information in a part of the listening text. It also happens when the teacher explains
parts of a process or material from which the Students choose certain parts. The
teacher may ask the Students to pay attention to certain parts of the listening text, or
may give a few questions beforehand so that the Students know what to look for in
the text and become alert when they think that portion is coming.
Appreciative Listening
Appreciative listening is a pleasurable activity wherein a listener settles down to
enjoy a dramatization, a story or a poem. This results in some kind of emotional
reaction when the listener begins to identify with the character or shares the emotions
that accompany the situations in the story.
Rendering of poems, stories on CD or told by the teacher or listening to a play can
be followed by asking students’ response to theme, storyline, situation, character,
motives and relationships.
Creative Listening
This involves the process of developing new and original solutions to problems
presented through the spoken word. It is also the act of entering imaginatively into
the experiences, the setting and the feelings of the characters in a story. (Being
narrated, read aloud, over the radio or stage). The listener may listen to a situation
and suggest solutions or after listening to a story give the story a different end.
Analytical or Critical Listening
Analytical listening makes a great demand on the listener because the listener needs
to be careful, accurate and attentive in order to make inferences and value judgements
regarding situation, process, places, persons or things.
The listener weighs what he/she hears against personal experience and forms an
opinion. While listening critically the listener is alert to the attempts of the speaker to
sway his/her opinion by the devices of propaganda or through an exaggeration as in
advertisements.

1.3.2 Factors that Influence Listening

It has been noticed that often children fail to listen properly because they may not
have a pleasant association with listening. Often the teacher forces them to listen to
her, to what she is saying, the rules they have to follow, often sermonising or scolding.
At home, parents do not indulge in active listening and often continue to pay attention
to the activity on hand while just muttering ‘uh-huh’ or ‘hmm’ to what the children
are saying. Hence, these occasions do not have pleasant associations, and as with
other learned behaviour, the child is unable to listen wholeheartedly. In the classroom
there may be frequent disruptions caused by the bells or announcements. Sometimes
the students are not clear about what needs to be done.
Hence it becomes imperative that the teacher be the model of a good listener in the
day to day classroom activities by listening to the students actively, responding to
them and encouraging them to talk. The teacher can do so by making eye contact,
asking questions or summarizing what the child just said in order to confirm what the
child meant. Before the activity the teacher needs to provide clear instructions with
a demonstration about what is to be done and how.
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Listening Comprehension There are certain factors that might influence listening. They are:
and Speaking
Physical conditions of the student like:
 Hearing problems
 Fatigue, pain or illness
Or the physical conditions in the environment such as:
 Temperature and humidity causing sweating, shivering or discomfort
 Distracting noises in the environment
 Distracting mannerisms of the speaker /teacher like running hands through
hair, smoothing clothes, or repeated phrases etc.
Psychological factors that may interfere with effective listening can be:
 Boredom
 Lack of interest in the subject
 Improper attitude towards school and teacher
 Prejudice and misconception about the topic
Experiential background
Attitudes of people grow out of their pleasant or unpleasant experiences. This
may lead to:
 Lack of interest which may be marginal or totally absent
 Antagonistic attitudes that have grown out of unhappy experiences
Listening Vocabulary
It has been seen that children do not hear ideas that are beyond their
understanding and words that are not in their listening vocabulary are not paid
attention to. Hence it is important for the teacher to build the Studentslistening
vocabulary.

1.4.1 Approaches to Listening

Instruction in listening can be given in many ways. As stand -alone activities or
integrated with other skills in a communicative task. Technically there are four
approaches to teaching listening.
1. Direct Approach
Focused listening activities can be organised to enable students to realize the
importance of listening. The teacher can also discuss what the listening process
involves and enumerate the characteristics of good or poor listening. The students
are aware of what they are doing and during feedback the possibilities of not having
listened well are discussed. This makes the students aware of their listening behaviour
and makes them more attentive.
2. Integrated process
At times a teacher may reorient a reading or writing task and integrate with teaching
of listening. The students may be asked to listen to a text and later read a summary
of it to find out whether the summary is accurate or not. Alternately, they listen to a
situation, following which the students write a letter or a report.
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3. The Incidental Approach Taching Listening-I

This is the most common occurrence in the classroom where the teacher draws the
attention of the learners to various things during the teaching learning process. Since
the information provided is incidental which does not require students to do a task,
many do not tend to listen carefully enough to retain the information they received
thus. This approach does not prove to be very effective in training students to listen.
4. The Eclectic Approach
The eclectic approach is a combination of approaches 1 and 2 where the teacher,
while integrating the listening activity with other skills focuses student’s attention to
what they need to listen for and how.
In this unit we shall be discussing the first two approaches to teaching listening.

1.4.2 Micro and Macro skills in listening

There is a list of sub skills of listening prepared by Goodith White, 1998. They have
been divided into perception skills, language skills, use of language of the world,
dealing with information and interacting with the speaker. Amongst these, the first
two can be termed as Micro skills and the remaining three Macro skills, which
enable a person to understand a listening text in the right perspective.
Listening incorporates the following sub-skills (Goodith White, 1998)
Perception Skills
 identifying individual sounds
 discriminating between sounds to be able to get to the meaning
 identifying reduced forms of speech by noticing the weak forms of words
in a flow of speech
 recognizing the elision of words and make appropriate guesses
 identifying stressed syllables and words in an utterance
 recognizing intonation patterns and their contribution to meaning
Language Skills
 Identifying words and phrases and constructing meanings from them
 Identifying discourse markers which organize the ideas in a text i.e. then,
as a matter of fact, to reiterate, to conclude, however, etc.
Using language of the world
 Connecting groups of words to non-linguistic features such as expressions,
gestures or objects in order to get clues to meaning
 Using knowledge of the topic to guess what the speaker might be saying
about it
 Using knowledge patterns of social intercourse in order to predict the
meaning i.e. formulaic language as in ordering in a restaurant or making a
telephone call.
Dealing with information
 Understanding the gist or the essence of an utterance(overall idea of
what you heard) 17
Listening Comprehension  Understanding the main points and how they are related to each other
and Speaking
 Understanding details i.e. train time , flight details
 Inferring the information which is not explicitly stated or has been missed
(ellipsis)
Interacting with a speaker
 Coping with variations among speakers i.e. speed of delivery or accent
 Recognizing speaker’s intention
 Identifying mood/ attitude of the speaker
 Recognizing spoken cues about things- such as when to take a turn at
speaking or change a topic
 Predicting what the speaker will say next
A combination of the sub- skills are used simultaneously when a listener processes
spoken language. The sub skills required for comprehension depend upon the kind
of text one is listening to and the purpose or reason for listening. In addition, listeners
will use strategies for coping with what they may have missed or understood.

1.4.3 Processes in Listening Comprehension

Comprehension of a heard discourse involves two kinds of processes very much
like reading. One process involves looking at the component parts of the incoming
message itself and decoding sounds, words, clauses and the syntax in sentences.
This process is called Bottom Up, for it looks at the parts of the message itself.
When we use the Bottom-Up Process we use the micro-skills and:
 Scan the input for familiar lexical items
 Segment the stream of speech into its constituent parts
 Use phonological cues (sounds, stress and intonation) to identify the information
focus in an utterance
 Use grammatical cues to organize the input into constituents (sense groups)
When we use Top-Down Processes we use the macro-skills and:
 Use background knowledge to comprehend the message
 Identify an interaction as belonging to a particular event i.e. storytelling, joking,
praying, complaining, arguing etc.
 Assign places, persons or things to categories
 Infer cause and effect relationships
 Anticipate outcomes
 Infer the topic of discourse
 Infer the sequence between events
 Infer the missing details

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In addition to these Richards mentions the ‘functional dimension’ based on purpose Taching Listening-I
and context. Brown and Yule (1983) too, distinguish between interactional and
transactional functions of utterances.
In brief we can say that successful listening involves:
 Segmenting the stream of speech into meaningful units (words and phrases)
 Recognizing word classes (grammatical units)
 Relating the incoming message to one’s own background knowledge
 Identifying the rhetorical and functional intent of an utterance or parts of an
aural text
 Interpreting rhythm, stress and intonation to identify information focus and
emotional and attitudinal tone
 Extracting the gist from an aural text
 Using our background knowledge and knowledge of the world to get the drift
of the utterance.
 Predicting what the speaker might say next.
Check your progress 3
1. What are the different kinds of listening you would like to practise in your
classroom?
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2. Mention the different factors that influence listening?
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3. Which approach to teaching listening would you like to use in your classroom?
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Listening Comprehension 4. In what ways does a listener try to comprehend the meaning of something that
and Speaking
he or she is listening to?
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1.5 LET US SUM UP

Though the most basic and essential skill in language learning, listening has been
neglected due to various reasons in the classroom, the most important being the
teacher’s belief that it need not be taught formally. The time consumed in conducting
listening tasks and the difficulty in assessing the extent of the learner’s progress has
been an inhibiting factor. The teacher today, is aware of the need for listening and
makes a conscious effort to practise the skill in the classroom.
Listening is one of the basic skills in language acquisition and learning. Thus a teacher
of English needs to be familiar with the sub skills, processes and kinds of listening.
The teacher also should be apprised of the different approaches to teaching listening
so that she may develop focused tasks for listening.

1.6 ANSWERS
Check Your Progress 1
1. Why is it important to develop the skill of listening?
Listening is the foundation of literacy and aids the acquisition of the child’s
language. Listening vocabulary is the first vocabulary of any child. A child acquires
the vocabulary she listens around her. Listening is basic to language learning as
a large part of communication is oral / aural. In daily life too we need the skills
of listening for living, study, travel and work.
2. In what way does listening contribute to an individual’s linguistic competence?
Listening helps a person to acquire a language. It also helps to develop a
person’s spoken competence which gets enriched with new grammatical
structures when a speaker uses expressions that are new to the listener.
Listening exposes a person to the contextual vocabulary of the situation and
helps the listener to acquire new vocabulary, new sound patterns and enables
the person to derive meaning using other indicators like stress, tone, expression
and body language of the speaker.
3. What are the difficulties in teaching listening?
Students feel insecure doing listening activities as they find it to be difficult as
they are not sure whether they are making progress as there is no concrete
evidence to prove that.
Much of listening happens in real time and one has to catch the meaning of
what is said and give an appropriate response.
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 As far as the teacher is concerned it is a difficult skill to teach and it being an Taching Listening-I
internal encounter it is not possible to assess listening comprehension. The
outcome of listening is not tangible like writing or speaking. Often after a lot of
listening practice there is no perceptible improvement which is frustrating for
the teacher. If properly conducted listening activities take up a lot of time and
teacher feel that they could do something else in its place.
4. What are the different ways parents and teachers model good listening behaviour
which will encourage children to listen?
They can listen actively by putting aside whatever they were doing, make eye
contact and show that they are listening by nodding or asking questions. They
may summarise what the child said to show that they are listening and to confirm
whether they have understood well. They should not interrupt the child when
he or she is speaking.
Check your progress 2
1. Explain the decoding process in a few sentences.
The decoding process involves the translating of sounds (acoustic input) or
segmenting the flow of sounds that the listener receives into standard forms of
language (words, phrases or sentences). The listener uses clues like pronunciation
and inflection. This kind of decoding happens at the level of phoneme, syllable,
word and chunk level. Intonation and stress also help the listener to identify the
chunks of language. Paying attention to the grammar and intonation the listener
can predict what the speaker will say next. Decoding involves identifying sounds,
discriminating between sound, noticing reduced forms, stressed syllables and
the intonation pattern of the speaker’s utterance.
2. What are the different ways a listener negotiates the meaning of what is being
said?
In addition to the decoding process a listener uses other clues to understand
the import of what is being said. For this the learner uses his/her knowledge of
the world, the speaker, the topic and what has been said so far. He or she also
uses non-linguistic features like expressions, gestures, objects present at the
situation to understand the real meaning behind the utterance. The listener also
sifts the important information from the unimportant ones and use logical thinking
to arrive at his or her conclusions.
Check your progress 3
1. What are the different kinds of listening you would like to practise in your
classroom?
 Attentive listening to help the students understand the information and
details accurately as in directions and instructions.
 Responsive listening to develop their skills in oral interaction with others.
 Selective listening to help them to focus on one portion of the listening text
while assessing their own work or confirming what they understood is
correct.
 Appreciative listening to develop their creativity and their aesthetic sense.
 Creative listening by presenting problems to which they would find solutions
and learn problem-solving. 21
Listening Comprehension  Lastly critical listening to teach them not to take anything they hear at its
and Speaking
face value.
2. Mention the different factors that influence listening?
Apart from the knowledge of the language and linguistic competency there are
other factors that influence listening.
The factors may be the physical condition of the listener which affects listening.
Physical conditions of the classroom which may come in the way of effective
listening, like the temperature of the room or external noise or mannerisms of
the teacher.
Sometimes the students’ mental frame, mood, attitude or lack of interest may
come in the way of listening well. If the topic is unfamiliar, the student may take
time to understand. And last, but not the least if the language of the listening text
is difficult and is not aligned to the students’ listening vocabulary, understanding
may be affected.
9. Which approach to teaching listening would you like to use in your classroom?
Sometimes the direct approach to help them focus on one idea and to understand
their own listening behaviour. I would also like to integrate listening with other
skills in the activities to encourage oral participation, collaboration and
association. Largely, I would use the eclectic approach to make the students
into conscious and active listeners.
10. In what ways does a listener try to comprehend the meaning of something that
he or she is listening to?
A listener uses both the bottom-up and top –down process of listening. The
bottom up process involves decoding and using perception skills using sound,
word order, pause, stress and intonation as a guide. The top-down process
involves other non-linguistic clues like an understanding of the context and the
speaker, knowledge of the topic and using the body language to infer the purpose
of the speaker’s speech. The listener also uses logical thinking and prediction
skills to guess what the speaker will say next or why the speaker is saying
something.

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