Teaching listening: the essentials

explain

If you have followed the first part of this guide, you will be aware of the range of strategies that good listeners deploy in a foreign language to understand what they hear. We use these strategies in our first languages, too, but we need to focus on them explicitly if we are to help our learners be aware of what to do when listening and get the chance to practise each skill in isolation.
Just as we don't try to teach all the grammar and lexis of the language at once, so we can break up skills in order to focus on what's realistically learnable. We also need to recycle the data because once is not usually enough.

Bottom-up skills

What do we need to teach?

Here's a list of bottom-up subskills (adapted from Field 1998):

Discrimination	listeners need to be able to distinguish minimally different words such as fifteen, fifty, six, sex, want, won't, plan, plane etc.
Segmentation	listeners need the ability to identify where one word ends and the next begins in continuous speech. This is particularly difficult in a language like English because of its timing.
Extrapolation	learners need to be able to make logical guesses at the spelling of unknown words. Spelling in English is not the irregular mess it's often accused of being.
Anticipation	learners need to be able to guess what comes next. For example, So I went up to him and ... will normally be followed by something someone said or did. By the same token, It was a really stunning ... can only be followed by a limited number of items (event, film, picture, view etc.) but they will all be things you perceive. Much of this is knowledge of likely collocation but there's more, of course.
Reference	learners need practice in matching references internally in what they hear. For example, in the sentence He opened it and out of the box came ... learners will need to know that the pronoun it refers forward to something that is to come in the sentence (the box) to make meaning clear.
Monitoring for information	learners need to be practised in the skill of listening out for key words in long listening texts and then applying themselves to understanding what is said about them.
Relevance	learners need practice in identifying if and how far points made are relevant to what they need to know.

How do we teach it?

These are all skills that we can practise in isolation and only later put together to give our learners a realistic exercise in real-life listening. Take a look at the list above and think of ways that you might be able to practise each subskill separately. Click here when you have a list of 7 ideas (one for each skill).

Discrimination	Ear training in minimal pairs: The teacher can dictate pairs of closely phonologically related items such as ship, sheep, hit, hat, thing, sing etc. and the learners have either to select which one they hear or write it down. The teacher can dictate sentences only distinguished by a minimal amount such as I can go to the park, I can't go to the park, I would've seen him, I wouldn't've seen him, I like an English breakfast, I'd like an English breakfast etc. For some examples of these types of exercise for elementary learners, see the exercises for learners.
Segmentation	Identifying words in continuous speech The teacher dictates sentences which include contractions, weak forms, elision, assimilation etc. and the learners focus on writing down what they hear. E.g., the teacher dictates, at natural speed, something like I would've been here on Thursday if you'd have asked me earlier. Learners listen with a transcript, paying attention to weakly stressed words and noting how many words are in each sentence. Learners hear a piece of authentic text and try to write it down word for word.
Extrapolation	Working out the spelling of unrecognized words The teacher dictates words in spelling groups (rough, cough, enough; heat, beat, seat; keep, seek, meet etc.) and learners guess (non-randomly) at the spelling. The teacher dictates multi-syllabic words which have predictable spelling patterns to sensitise learners to the spelling, e.g., revolution, education, dentistry, chemistry, musician, mathematician, impossible, improbable, immeasurable etc.
Anticipation	Working out what comes next The teacher plays / dictates half a sentence and the learners complete, or answer multiple choice or multiple answer questions concerning what is/are likely to come next. For example: He rushes up to me and a) relaxes completely b) explains breathlessly c) whispers slowly d) calms me down Or, They collected the parcel from the post office, took it home as quickly as they could and opened it a) excitedly b) later c) after lunch d) when they had time Or, She told me a story which frankly I found a) ridiculous b) believable c) beautiful d) nonsensical Learners select the most likely first half of an utterance, for example, ... that we must not underestimate the importance of prevention. a) It is important ... b) It is not the case ... c) Nobody understands ... d) It will help ...
Reference	Relating pronouns etc., to the items they refer to The teacher pauses a recording after each reference and learners figure out what the reference is and what it refers to. E.g., I left the house, went up to the top of the hill and could see it from there. What does it refer to here? Learners look through a tapescript, identify references and then listen without their notes to identify the references.
Monitoring for information	Learners monitor a long text for key words in a list. Learners are asked to listen only for dates and times etc. Learners listen only for a news story about football. In this, different learners of groups of learners can be given different types of things to listen for and share their findings with other groups / individuals.
Relevance	Learners write summaries of key points heard. Learners are asked to listen and identify four points concerning topic A only, ignoring what is said about topic B. A different group do the opposite. Learners find 4 points about topic A and 2 about topic B.

Top-down skills

It's perfectly arguable, of course, that we don't need to teach these skills because we all use them in our first languages. However, there is evidence, albeit anecdotal, that these skills are not easily transferred because learners are distracted by the difficulties of listening in a foreign language. We have, therefore, to make sure they get some explicit practice in deploying what they know.

What do we need to teach?

As we have seen, top-down skills are mostly to with activating what the learner already knows but there are different types of top-down knowledge:

Knowledge of the world in general: We all have varying amounts of this and the younger and less sophisticated your learners are, the more you may have to teach content as well as language. For example, if learners are told that a listening text is of an interview with a zoo keeper and they know nothing at all about the topic, the information is unlikely to be of much use. If, on the other hand, they know what a zoo keeper does and are acquainted with the topic of zoos, it may be of great use in decoding what they hear.
Knowledge of the structure of texts (generic knowledge): When we are listening to a text, it is very helpful to us to know what the structure and staging of the text is likely to be.
For example, an anecdote is likely to have Orientation (Where, when and to whom did things happen?), followed by a Complication (What was the issue? What went wrong? etc.), a Resolution (How was the problem resolved?) and a Coda (How does the teller feel about what happened?).
On the other hand, if we are being given instructions, the normal staging will be Goal > What we need to reach the goal > What the steps are in reaching the goal.
If the listeners know all this, it is going to be a great help in understanding the content because people will know what to listen for and at what stage.
Cultural knowledge: Simply knowing, for example, that sports coverage comes at the end of a news broadcast (cultural, generic knowledge) or that in the USA the Foreign Minister is called the Secretary of State and in Britain the Finance Minister is called the Chancellor of the Exchequer is a great help in certain circumstances. Equally, of course, knowing that tea time means 4 o'clock (or thereabouts) in Britain may be crucial to understanding a text.

How do we teach it?

Just as you did for bottom-up skills, make a few notes about teaching the various types of top-down skills and then click here for a commentary.

Knowledge of the world	It is not our job, in most situations, to focus on general education but we can make people aware of what they already know and help them to use these data to understand what they hear. We rarely listen to anything entirely 'cold' and without at least knowing the topic of what we are going to hear. In the classroom, we can focus our learners explicitly on this knowledge by, e.g., brainstorming vocabulary they know about the topic, discussing their current views of the topic, exchanging ideas about previous times they have encountered the topic and so on. Additionally, we can activate their knowledge by using visuals, videos and images etc. This, by the way, is sometimes known as schemata (singular schema) activation.
Textual knowledge	Textual or generic knowledge is something we can teach through using model texts and analysing the staging in class. For more on this, see the guide to genre, linked below.
Cultural knowledge	Cultural knowledge is, again, something we don't usually teach explicitly but, given that it is helpful in many situations, we should be careful to provide the minimum background. We should also not forget that there is an argument that learning a language involves learning something of the cultures in which it is used and many learners actually want that knowledge. (However, because English is in the unusual position of being an international, culture-free lingua franca, this argument can be challenged.)

Before you present a listening text to your learners, it is worth focusing briefly on three aspects that are shared by all texts:

Subject matter (the Field)
All texts have a topic and we usually know what the topic is before we even start to listen.
Make sure that learners are aware, by questioning, elicitation, informing etc.
Style (Tenor)
All language is produced by people and for a reason.
Take the time to consider with your learners who is speaking, why they are speaking (what goal do they have in mind?) and what the relationship is between the speaker and the hearer which will determine how organised and how formal the language is likely to be.
The medium (or Mode)
Spoken texts may be pre-recorded, publicly announced, whispered, spoken in small groups or one to one and so on. How the language is delivered is important because it often determines what language is used.

There are a few listening exercises for learners on this site that may be of interest.

Related guides
listening	for the overview guide to what listening is
genre	for the guide to a crucial area
pages for learners	click through to some listening exercises. You can incorporate the materials into your own lessons
inferencing	for some help with how we figure meaning from context and co-text
assessing listening	for the in-service guide to how we may evaluate and measure our learners' listening abilities
teaching vocabulary	for the in-service guide to teaching meaning
essential skills index	for the overview guides to the four main skills
context	for a guide to the essentials of context and co-text

Click here to take two short matching tests.

Reference:
Field, J, 1998, Skills and strategies: towards a new methodology for listening, ELT Journal Volume 52/2 April 1998 Oxford: Oxford University Press
Other references you may find helpful:
Anderson, A & Lynch, T, 1988, Listening, Oxford: Oxford University Press
Brown, G, 1990, Listening to Spoken English, Harlow: Longman
Buck, G, 2001, Assessing Listening, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Field, J, 2009, Listening in the Language Classroom, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Lynch, T, 2009, Teaching Second Language Listening, Oxford: Oxford University Press
Rost, M, 1990, Listening in Language Learning, Harlow: Longman
Rost, M, 2002, Teaching and Researching Listening, Pearson
Underwood, M, 1989, Teaching Listening, Harlow: Longman
Ur, P, 1984, Teaching Listening Comprehension, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
White, G, 1998, Listening, Oxford: Oxford University Press
Wilson, JJ & Wilson, JJ, 2008, How to Teach Listening (1st Ed.), Harlow: Pearson Longman