Listening skill refers to the process of receiving messages through our ears. It is given a less priority in a language classroom although, it is one of the most important language skills. There can be challenge for every language teacher while teaching listening skill in the classroom.
According to the Galvin (1985) the students have to learn listening skills for the following reasons:-
- to exchange information
- to engage in social rituals
- to exert control
- to share feelings
- to enjoy with yourself
- to acquire knowledge
Types of Listening
According to Doff (1995):-
a) Casual Listening
b) Focused listening
According to Harmer (2008)
a) Extensive Listening
- It takes place in free environment
- The learners may listen at home, in public places, cinemas and other places.
- There is no pressure for the listener
b) Intensive Listening
- It takes place in formal environment
- Intensive listening refers to the detail listening for particular purpose.
- It usually takes place in the classroom, meeting or seminars.
Principle of Teaching Listening
The guidelines which should be taken in mind while teaching listening skill in the classroom are known as principles of listening. According to the linguistic Harmer (2008) some principles are given below:-
- Encourage students to listen as much as possible.
- Help students prepare to listen
- Listening once may not be enough
- Encourage students to respond to the content of a listening
- Different listening stages demand different listening task
- Good teacher exploit listening text to the full
Listening Sub-skills
- Recognizing phonological features of speech.
- Understanding explicitly stated ideas and information.
- Identifying the main points or important information in discourse.
- Understanding relationship between the text and utterances through cohesive device.
- Understanding relationship between the syntactic and morphological characteristics of spoken language.
- Understanding relationship between the parts of text recognizing discourse markers.
- Understanding the communicative functions and the value of utterances with and without explicit markers.
- Understanding attitudinal meaning in spoken text and utterances.
- Understanding conceptual meaning in spoken text and utterances.
- Distinguishing the main ideas from supporting details.
- Making notes from spoken text.
- Transferring and transforming information in speech to diagrammatic display.
Stages or Techniques of Teaching listening skills
Teaching listening seem boring but the teacher has to teach the listening skills interestingly and effectively if teacher has good knowledge of sub-skills, purpose, processes and authenticity of listening skill.
Pre-Listening activity
The activities that takes place before actual listening teaching are pre-listening activities. The teacher can conduct the following activities in this stage while teaching listening:-
- Prepare the students to listen.
- Motivate the students to listen.
- Discuss to the topic.
- Give background information of the topic.
- Provide key vocabulary items
- Guess the topic
- Introduce the main theme.
- Predict about the topic.
- Write questions about the topic
While Listening Activity
The activities during the listening teaching, mentioned as below:-
- Fill in the blanks
- Match the followings
- Writing notes
- Directions
- Multiple choice item
- Ordering the items
- True or false items
- Completing tables, chart and pictures
- Short questions answer
Post listening activity
These activities that conduct after while listening stage.
- Share similar experiences
- Summarize the writing
- Reporting writing
- Pair/group discussion on the topic
- Writing exercises
- Speaking on the topic
- Retelling about the topic
Thank you !!