A handy guide to the skills students need to practice to become better listeners.

Listening in a foreign language is a complex process. Students have to be able to

understand the main idea of what is said as well as specific details. They may
need to check any predictions they have made, and understand the speakers
meaning, emotions and opinions. They may have to infer relationships between
speakers, or identify the context in which the speakers are operating. Students
may well have to use several of these skills in the course of a single listening
activity.

Here are some of the main skills covered in the Listening lesson plans on this
site, together with a brief description of what each skill involves.

Listening for the main idea - students listen to identify the overall ideas
expressed in the whole recording.

Listening for details students listen for groups of words and phrases at
sentence level.

Listening for specific information students listen for particular information at

word level.

Predicting students try to guess key information contained in the recording

before they listen.

Inferring meaning students listen to identify the difference between what the
speaker says and what they actually mean.

Identifying emotion students listen to identify the mood of certain speakers.

Listening for opinions students listen to identify the attitude of certain

speakers.

Inferring relationships students listen to identify who the people are in the
recording and what the relationship is between them.

Recognizing context students listen to aural and contextual clues to identify

where the conversation takes place, who is speaking, etc.