Considerations When Planning Listening Tasks

Listening skills mirror the active reading skills students employ with printed text. It is helpful to take a process view to listening comprehension as well. Listeners engaged in the complex task of taking in information should cultivate cognitive, affective, and social strategies to process and understand the spoken word.

Listening Strategies

• Cognitive strategies

  • attention to details to demonstrate comprehension

  • use background knowledge

  • guessing words from context

• Metacognitive strategies

  • self check for understanding

  • set purpose and/or goal for task

• Socio-affective strategies

  • communicate with teachers, classmates, and native speakers

  • development of self-confidence and motivation.

  • check answers in groups

  • seek additional practice opportunities

Skills required for active listening in academic contexts

• distinguishing between pertinent and less important information;

• identifying purpose of lecture and following its topic;

• distinguishing between discourse units (main idea, supporting idea, generalization, example)

• recognizing signals for important information, shift in topic or structure (repetition, emphasis, change of rate and/or tone of speech)

• identifying and paying attention to keywords;

• developing and individual method of note-taking; and

• articulating questions about the topic

Use of texts

• Learners need to experience a variety of speakers, topics, purposes, genres, and styles to become effective listeners. Whether long or short, formal or informal, or featuring one or several speakers, listening texts should represent the types of spoken language that students can expect to hear in the real world.

Listening Activities

• intensive listening

  • transcription;

  • different types of dictations;

  • cloze

  • dictogloss

  • sentence completion; and

  • error correction

• selective listening

  • following directions and instructions;

  • taking notes

  • answering specific questions about amounts, dates, time, facts, and so forth;

  • predicting what will be said next after the recording has been stopped; and

  • listing the sequence of steps, events, or topics mentioned in the text

• interactive listening

  • interviews;

  • discussions;

  • partial dialogues, in which students listen to a speaker and respond;

  • information-gap activities, in which students exchange information to fulfill the task; and

  • jigsaw listening, in which groups of students listen to different parts of the message and then reconstruct the whole together.

• extensive listening

  • summarizing;

  • rating content as more or less interesting;

  • using visual organizers

  • filling out listening logs, in which students record their listening goals and strategies for each text; and

  • practicing flood listening, in which students listen to several recordings on self-selected topics.

• responsive listening

  • problem-solving tasks;

  • sharing and responding to personal experiences;

  • evaluative tasks, or making judgments about the truth, probability, and so forth;

  • paused listening, or responding to short parts of the text by making connections to personal experiences, world events, and so forth; and

  • interpretive listening, or making inferences and deductions

• autonomous listening

  • any listening activity that is student directed and done outside of the classroom.