Active Listening: Challenges & Understanding

• Listening is an active, interactional process where a listener receives speech sounds and attempts to assign meaning to spoken words.
• The listener tries to comprehend the intended message to effectively respond to oral communication.

Challenges in Listening

• Difficulty recalling information.
• Trouble processing unfamiliar accents or intonations.
• Understanding the literal words, but not the implied intent.
• Losing track of the message while focusing on understanding.
• Lack of contextual or visual cues.
• Difficulty forming mental representations from heard words.
• Stress from needing to respond quickly.

Background

• Listening having been a neglected language skill for generations.
• Listening comprehension was traditionally viewed as a passive activity.
• Listening is now recognized as an active process where meaning is constructed.
• Listeners attempt to understand facts and feelings, attending to the speaker's words, delivery, and the context.

Knowledge Needed for Listening

• Ability to understand the speaker's intended message through:
  • Command of language components like phonology, lexicon, syntax, and semantics.
  • Socio-cultural competence.
  • Strategic competence.
  • Discourse competence.

Characteristics of the Listening Process

• Spontaneity inherent in spoken language.
• Understanding context and utilizing visual cues.
• Listener's active response.
• Speaker's adjustment to the listener.

Types of Listening

• Selective listening involves listening for a specific piece of information.
• Global listening aims to grasp the overall gist.
• Intensive listening focuses on precise information and detail.
• Transactional listening serves to obtain new information.
• Interactional listening maintains social relationships.
• Critical listening is used in academic contexts.
• Recreational listening provides relaxation and entertainment.

Top-Down vs. Bottom-Up Listening

• Top-down processing uses expectations and context (Hedge, 2000).
• Bottom-up processing uses linguistic knowledge to decode acoustic signals into phonemes, words, phrases and sentences.

Principles of Teaching Listening

• Focus on the process and meaning comprehension.
• Grade difficulty appropriately.
• Use authentic materials and real-life activities.
• Combine listening with other skills.
• Important to incorporate pre-, while-, and post-listening activities.

Pre-Listening Activities

• Purpose is to prepare students for listening with background information and knowledge activation.
• Teachers can present background information which is followed by discussion and answering questions.
• Students might look at related pictures.
• Instructions for the while-listening activity
• Students review relevant texts that are followed by written exercises.

While-Listening Activities

• To help learners listen for meaning and focus on the act of listening itself.
• Activities include demonstrating understanding through physical response and transferring information.
• Filling in gaps/blanks to develop sequencing skills..
• Detecting mistakes to improve information search abilities.
• Ticking off items for matching.

Post-Listening Activities

• Allows learners to reflect on and use the language as the listening passage provides.
• Activities include:
  • Multiple choice questions or True/False questions for jigsaw listening.
  • Problem-solving activities to inspire writing letters, emails and other messages.
  • Summarizing to develop debate, interview, role-play and simulation skills.

Final Thoughts

• Don't expect learners to remember more than a native speaker.
• Test understanding rather than memory, emphasize functional listening, and focus less on memory and detail recall.
• Think more about the process than the product even when wrong answers are more interesting.