Listening Skills Quiz: Improve Your Teaching

Study Notes

Reasons for Listening

Listening enhances learners' listening comprehension, enabling them to understand what people are saying in the target language.
Listening improves learners' pronunciation and self-expression, which is beneficial for avoiding miscommunication.
Exposure to diverse listening sources provides learners with opportunities to encounter regional variations.

Kinds of Listening

Intensive listening: Learners listen specifically to work on listening skills and study how English is spoken.
Extensive listening: Learners listen for pleasure and overall understanding, often outside the classroom, in a relaxed and enjoyable way.

Listening Skills

Recognize paralinguistic clues, such as intonation, to understand the mood of speech and its meaning.
Listen for specific information, such as times, platform numbers, etc.
Listen for a more general understanding, such as when listening to a story or interacting in a social conversation.

Principles for Teaching Listening

Encourage students to listen as often and as much as possible to habituate their ears to the rhythms of natural speech.
Help students prepare to listen by providing context and warm-up activities.
Allow for multiple listening opportunities to pick up missed information and highlight language features.
Encourage students to respond to the listening content, not just the language, by drawing out the meaning and exploring their feelings or impressions.
Use different listening tasks for different listening stages, such as straightforward and general tasks for initial listening and more detailed tasks for subsequent listening.
Exploit listening texts to the full by using them for various activities and studies.

Recommended Techniques

Jigsaw listening: Students listen to different tapes about the same topic and assemble all the facts by comparing their notes.
Message-taking: Students listen to a phone message being given while noting down key information.
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Description

Learn about the essential listening skills that should be taught to learners, including recognizing paralinguistic clues, listening for specific information, and listening for a more general understanding. Enhance your listening abilities with these key skills.