UNIVERSIDAD CATLICA DE LA SANTSIMA CONCEPCIN

FACULTAD DE EDUCACIN
ENGLISH PEDAGOGY PROGRAMME
________________________________________________________
ENGLISH TEACHING METHODOLOGY

Listening Skill Teaching

Names: Tamar Muoz Vizcarra.

Alison Vidal Sagredo.
Teacher: Roxanna Correa Prez.

Concepcin 31st August, 2015

Abstract
In this article, is going to be presented information about the Listening Skill, ideas
from many authors and activities. This article is about characteristics related to the
listening skill; one of the most important skills in terms of communication. From the
beginning, people hear before start talking, that is what makes listening the first
language skill of being developed. English as a Foreign Language Class needs a
complete involvement into the learning process, especially on Listening. In Chilean
Education, students do not have the suitable practice for developing the listening skill
properly. It has many factors that make listening process inefficient. On one side, the
most important inconvenient is that students are not aware of the importance of
listening at the moment of communicating ideas to English speakers; therefore,
inside the classroom with their partners. On the other side, conditions inside the
classroom are not the proper ones for learning and acquiring a foreign language. We
are conscious that the process of learning a new language requires a complete
involvement of the student, the teacher and also of the environment. If it is not proper
for learning, what can we as teacher or future teacher expect from our students?

Nation & Newton (2009) define Listening as

the Natural precursor to

Speaking.Listening does not have an structure and does not need instructions. It
makes reference to the natural condition of human beings according to the process
of Learning, listening promotes speaking through repetition. Nation & Newton (200)
also add that Listening skill is the first stage of language development in a persons
first language. It is because as natural, people learn to listen before developing the
other language skills.
Students at school receive input of listening almost all the class from the teacher; in
addition, students are not aware about the big effort they do when they develop their
listening skill. Listeners involve themselves into the process of listening when they
interpret what they hear. Students came up with the background knowledge and
linguistic knowledge to understand the aural text. The process of listening require a
sender, a message and a receiver. Receivers must cope with the senders message
(vocabulary and structure). In foreign language listening, it is also more complex
because the listener has not a complete control of the language.
Based on the Communicative approach; method that according to Larsen-Freeman
(2000) refers to Communicative Language Teaching aims broadly to apply the
theoretical perspective of the communicative approach by making communicative
competence

the

goal

of

language

teaching

and

by

interdependence of language and communication (p.121),

acknowledging

the

it is important that

teachers help students to become effective listeners, modeling listening strategies

and providing listening activities in authentic situations. Students should be able to
use listening strategies to increase the comprehension of aural input, identifying
relevant and non- relevant information.

Brown (2000) establishes that people who learn a new language need a complete
involvement psychologically, intellectually, emotionally to respond in an appropriate

way to the language that they are learning. In other words, it involves all the abilities
of a person in an integral manner to learn the language.
Listening is crucial for communication in a world with a variety of languages around
it. Demirel (2004) states that Listening is the most challenging skill to be taught for
language teachers. It needs a large quantity of strategies to involve students into the
process of learning. Listening provides input for language learners and it helps to
know the chunks of language e.g. structures of sentences, vocabulary and
pronunciation. However, Demirel also states that it has not received the importance it
needs. If people, in this case students, are not able to improve listening skills, they
will not be able to communicate, because we first listen before speaking. At schools,
students are not fully involved into a listening environment which promotes practice.
We experimented it by ourselves when we were in high school. Based on
McCaughey (2015) ideas, listening activities in a class take no more than 24
minutes. It is not enough in a EFL (English as a Foreing Language) classroom to
bring students a complete knowledge or learning, even if; he does not establish an
appropriate lack of time to make students learn efficiently. Teachers need to adapt
activities to promote a real context for EFL learners.

According to McCaughey (2015) students are not completely interested in the

process of listening; they do not practice when they are alone or by their own. But we
strongly believe that it is possible to catch their attention. Also, we have to focus on
the steps of the listening activities that teachers prepare. McCaughey also explains
that there are three steps that teachers should use to perform a listening activity,
and those are Pre-listening, While-listening and Post-listening.

MCcaughtey, K (2015) said, in the Pre-listening teachers have to prepare students,

explain what they are going to do, and how the activities are going to be. It is
necessary to explain clearly what teachers really want them to learn from the given
activity. These activities have various purposes, including pre-teaching or activating
vocabulary, predicting content, generating interest and checking understanding of
task.
Secondly, While-listening it is the most important part of the task; nevertheless, at
the same time, it is shorter than the others. We could say that here we can find the
activity itself; it is the time to show the activity to the students, and become aware of
how they are been involved into the topic. Students can check their predictions and
their comprehension. Also in this part, they listen for specific information.
Finally, Post-listening teachers can notice if their goals have been acquired, through
some speaking or asking short questions. Teacher should make sure if the activity
was successful enough or not, if students understood what they listened to. It is
important that teachers plan the activity in a good way, because if it is long, it is
possible that students would forget what they have heard and the listening activity
may not succeed.

McCaughey (2015) said that there are many tips to involve listening task in students
life. For example, commands are very easy task, teachers can play a game in
which students can act as a teacher, he/she should give instructions, and it is a
simple way to notice if students are listening correctly. It is very important to give
some time to students to process all the information; however, it is imperative to
have clear ideas about what the main topic is going to be about, and why they are
going to do this kind of activities. The students need to know about why he or she

will do this activity, which is going to be the purpose, and also how this is going to be
useful for real life tasks.

According to

Harmer (2001), there exist two

kind of performances for

teaching/learning called extensive and intensive listening. On the one hand,

extensive listening is the most of the time when students practice listening outside
the classroom, in this case; it has similar characteristics with extensive reading.
Students do listen to things for pleasure, they do not listen as a compulsory activity
outside the classroom; nonetheless, the teacher encourage students to chose what
they want to listen. Examples of it are songs, stories or movies. Those strategies
help students to become aware of their learning, for instance; students know that
ordinary things they do would be helpful for them in order to learn more and to
develop the listening skill. Actually, there are many authors who have recorded their
books, it is also a strategy to practice extensive listening that can help student to
learn. In this process students learn vocabulary and they improve their general
ideas. On the other hand, Intensive listening is a skill where the student puts
attention on the language form. The main aim is to make student aware of how
words sound, the structure and how the lexical choices can change or affect the
meaning. Intensive Listening activities take place inside the classroom, for it has to
be practiced in a context and environment of language use where students can
transfer the topics and associate those with real life listening situations.

Gagn (1997) describes the term strategy as specific methods for approaching a
problem or a task. At the same time, Gargn adds that those strategies varies from

one day to another and it also depends on the moment. Strategies are the steps to
solve a problem (it is a task in language teaching,).

To continue with the process of learning Listening, according to Brown (2007) it is

necessary to help students to develop effective listening strategies. There are two
main strategies for developing listening. These are; Top down and Bottom up that
Brown (2007) establishes:
-

Top - down strategies are listener based. It is the way students use their previous
knowledge for listening to the meaning of a message. Students associate situations,
context, phrases, words and sentences with what they hear. In addition, it implies

predicting, summarizing and putting attention to the main idea.

Bottom - up strategies are text based. Students hear every sound, word, phrase,
sentence and grammatical component for creating a meaning. Bottom up strategies
include listening for specific details, recognizing cognates and recognizing wordorder patterns.

Chilean

Context:

EFL

Learning

Listening

Skill

According to our experience as students, there are teachers that believe that
teaching in small groups is easier and it takes less time to students to learn. In
contrast, we experimented almost all the time large group EFL classes in Chilean

Educational system . The main challenges for teaching language in a large group
classroom are:
-

Focus on one student: For teachers, it is difficult to know the different needs that
students have. Teachers cannot bring special attention to one student when they
have 40 in the classroom. They need to keep going into the process of learning

without stopping.
Distractions inside the classroom: In a classroom with 40 students talking and
chatting at the same time, the noise made is bigger in comparison with a class with
15 students because teacher can control it easily. In Chilean classroom, a bigger

effort has to be done to focus students on the taks and in the process of learning.
Checking understanding: Teachers cannot check easily if students are learning or

not what he/she is teaching. Checking is general, no individual for every student.
-Dynamism: Teachers cannot plan activities that involve complete movements. It
means that they cannot perform energetic activities.
Harmer (2001) explains how to provide good activities to a big group of students. We
know that in Chile, almost all the classrooms are compounded by more than 40
students. In addition, Harmer (2001) recommend to find tasks that call students
attention, based on the context (it is one of the most important factor in a process of
learning). There are some barriers that affect the process of learning listening.
Commonly, the most important barrier that interferes in an effective listening is that
students do not pay attention at what the other person is saying, because they just
reply instead of listening carefully.

According to Paula Rebolledo (Educarchilecl. 2015) Chilean context inside the

classroom is different along the country, we have experimented during our learning
process that teachers have to do a very big effort to transform a task into an
interesting topic that students are familiar with. As a simple example about context,

we could express that

if students from the north of Chile are not familiar with

customs such as La minga, we cannot expect to have a significative learning

because it is a custom from the South of Chile, to be more precise it is an activity
where people moved a house from one place to another. Why cannot you talk about
this? Maybe they would not be very interested in this specific activity, because they
are not part of this tradition.

Activities to encourage students into the process of learning Listening as a

Foreign language.

Here there are some examples of activities that can be put into practice someday in
the classroom.

Activity N1 Team spelling contests, 7th grade, unit 4 Sports.

Surgenor (2010) said, the classroom is going to be divided into groups of six
students. Team A, B,C,D,E. Teacher is going to provide a quantity of words (related
to sports), she or he going to spell every word. Each group has to guess the word,
and they are going to win an extra bonus to the next English quiz.
This could be an effective activity, but this is only going to take a few minutes, so we
should create another activity to add to the class. Also, using the same topic.

Activity N2 Teacher (student) Says.

Based on Ambard, P.D & Ambard, L.K. (2004) model, the Teacher is going to divide
the classroom in groups of five students. Each group should create some commands
and mimed it, in front of the class (imitating a teacher). Every group should guess the
opposite command. It is a perfect way how we can practice listening and speaking.
In contrast;

we cannot focus on pronunciation, because we want that students

acquired listening skill.

This activity must be monitored by the teacher, taking care of the vocabulary used by
the students. It is a very simple activity; nonetheless, it could catch the attention of
the students, because they always want to see their partner dramatize.

References

Ambard, P.D & Ambard, L.K. (2004). Activities for Generating Enthusiasm in the
Foreign Language Classroom. USA , Colorado: United States Air Force
Academy.Taken from: http://iteslj.org/Lessons/Ambard-Enthusiasm.html
Brown, H. (2000) Principles of Language Learning and Teaching. Fourth
Edition.White Plains, NY: Pearson Education, Inc.
http://www.cuc.edu.ve/upc/PNFT/INGLES/Principles_of_Language_Learning_and_T
eaching.pdf
Brown, H. (2007). Teaching Listening. In Teaching by Principles: An Interactive
Approach to Language Pedagogy. White Plans: Pearson Longman.
Demirel, . 2004. Yabanc1 dil retimi: Dil pasaportu, dil biyografisi, dil dosyas1
[Teaching modern foreign languages: Language passport, language biography,
language dossier]. 2nd ed. Ankara, Turkey: Pegem A Publishing. As cited in Forum
magazine Teaching Listening Skills to Young Learners through Listen and Do
Songs
Educarchilecl.

(2015).

Educarchilecl.

Retrieved

30

September,

2015,

from

http://www.educarchile.cl/ech/pro/app/detalle?id=224360

Harmer, J.(2001). The Practice of English Language Teaching. (3rd ed.). England
Larsen - Freeman , D. (2000). Techniques and Principles in Language Teaching. p121. (2nd
ed.) Oxford University Press. NY

MCcaughtey, K (2015) Practical Tips for Increasing Listening Practice Time.Ukraine.

Taken from
http://americanenglish.state.gov/resources/english-teaching-forum-volume-53number-1#child-1887
Nation, P. ; Newton, J. (2009). Teaching ESL/EFL Listening and Speaking. p. 37-57
Routledge. New York.

Surgenor, P.(2010). Teaching Toolkit: Large & Small Group Teaching. Taken from:
http://www.ucd.ie/t4cms/UCDTLT0021.pdf

http://www.educarchile.cl/ech/pro/app/detalle?id=224360