Teaching listening in young learner classes. Strategies and stages.

Listening is a receptive skill which involves understanding an oral input.

Reasons for listening:

- listening for general information

- listening for specific information

- listening for enjoyment

- listening for curiosity

- listening for pronunciation practice

Objects of teaching = Listening subskills:

- listening for gist: Get the main idea of what is being said without focusing on specific details;

- listening for specific information

- extensive listening – for a long period – for pleasure

- listening for detailed understanding: e.g. directions – listening intensively to understand all information

- listening for implications

Listening can be:

1) formal / informal

2) face to face / via channel

3) one sided / multisided (conversation)

What is necessary for listening:

· Predicting – anticipatory mechanisms – to predict what is going to come next on the level of a word, sentence, text; ability to contextualize the information

· Linguistic knowledge: deals with recognition of sound, intonation, stress, grammar, lexis, knowledge of formal / informal styles

· Cognition: short-term memory and long term ability of coding-decoding information

· Paralinguistic features – gestures, body language, noise, music, environment clues

· Personal motivation

There are 3 stages of teaching listening:

1) pre-listening: to prepare pupils for listening, to activate their previous experience and knowledge. Exercises guide pupils to the meaning, ask them to predict and get ready: Read smth additional before listening; Discuss the subject; Describe the pictures; Answer the questions (not more than 3); Matching (to predict the content) + grammar or vocabulary exercises

2) while listening: to develop the skill of accessing meaning from spoken language. Activities aimed at listening for gist, for specific information, to restore missing information: putting pictures in order, completing tables/charts/grids/sentences, drawing a picture, doing some actions/movements, note-taking, labeling, gap-filling, true-false, multiple choice, spotting mistakes

3) post listening: to check pupils’ understanding: putting pictures in order, matching them to the text, true-false, extending the list of ideas, extending notes to full responses, identifying relations between speakers, decision-making, role plays, simulations, dictation, writing compositions/letters/essays, answering questions, summary.

Listening skills are always integrated with other skills.