Strategies
for Developing Listening Skills
Effective
language instructors show students how they can adjust their listening behavior
to deal with a variety of situations, types of input, and listening purposes.
They help students develop a set of listening strategies and match appropriate
strategies to each listening situation.
Listening
Strategies
Listening
strategies are techniques or activities that contribute directly to the
comprehension and recall of listening input. Listening strategies can be
classified by how the listener processes the input.
v Top-down
strategies are listener based; the listener taps into background knowledge of
the topic, the situation or context, the type of text, and the language. This
background knowledge activates a set of expectations that help the listener to
interpret what is heard and anticipate what will come next. Top-down strategies
include :
a) listening
for the main idea
b) predicting
c) drawing
inferences
d) summarizing
v Bottom-up
strategies are text based; the listener relies on the language in the message,
that is, the combination of sounds, words, and grammar that creates meaning.
Bottom-up strategies include :
a) listening
for specific details
b) recognizing
cognates
c) recognizing
word-order patterns
Listening
for Meaning
To extract meaning from
a listening text, students need to follow four basic steps:
a)
Figure out the purpose for listening.
Activate background knowledge of the topic in order to predict or anticipate
content and identify appropriate listening strategies.
b)
Attend to the parts of the listening input
that are relevant to the identified purpose and ignore the rest. This
selectivity enables students to focus on specific items in the input and
reduces the amount of information they have to hold in short-term memory in
order to recognize it.
c)
Select top-down and bottom-up strategies
that are appropriate to the listening task and use them flexibly and
interactively. Students' comprehension improves and their confidence increases
when they use top-down and bottom-up strategies simultaneously to construct
meaning.
d)
Check comprehension while listening and
when the listening task is over. Monitoring comprehension helps students detect
inconsistencies and comprehension failures, directing them to use alternate
strategies.
