Listen!
My leaners often tell me that they want to “improve their listening”. Listening absolutely is a critical skill in language learning and is often regarded as the foundation upon which other language abilities are built. But “improving listening” is a bit vague.
In this post we’re going to take a look at 5 different types of listening activity. But before we do, it’s important to realise that listening isn’t in fact a unitary skill. Instead, it’s an ability comprised of numerous sub-skills, not all of which we need as language learners and users all the time.
When learners say that want to improve listening they often describe a goal which involves processing the incoming speech signal like a kind of robot. Every word must be recognised in real time, with no delays or gaps in understanding. You might develop these machine-like auditory processing abilities at some point… but it’s going to take a while. For the average learner in their 2nd or 3rd year of attending a weekly language class it’s going to take even longer.
It’s also worth thinking about how you listen and process speech in your first language. Do you really always attend completely to everything that’s being said in all contexts by everyone? Do you go to the train station and stand with your head tilted to the rafters listening out for every single platform announcement or do you just listen out for information about your train to Carmarthen? If a foreign visitor to your city asks for directions, do you get them to repeat every word you didn’t understand or do you just give them directions to the restaurant they’re looking for.
“Improving listening” is just too mammoth a task and the ideal learners are often striving towards doesn’t reflects how people use language in the world. Your language teacher doesn’t treat listening as a single skill either. Instead, they’ll be compartmentalising listening into different functions. Here are some examples of types of listening activities and the skills they help to foster.
Listening for the Main Idea (Getting the Gist)
Objective: Grasp the central theme or purpose of the conversation.
Technique: Listen out for keywords, tone, and contextual information.
Example: Understanding that a news report discusses climate change without catching every detail.
Listening for Meaning (Comprehension Tasks)
Objective: Understand specific information or details.
Technique: Focus on key points and facts. These tasks typically work by giving learners some comprehension questions after they have listened to some audio. These comprehension questions could be multiple choice, true or false or gap fill exercises.
Example: Extracting key facts about a historical event from a radio broadcast.
Listening for Detail (Discrimination Tasks)
Objective: Identify specific elements, such as points of grammar or names, dates, or numbers.
Technique: Pay attention to specific cues and listen out for particular words.
Example 1: Noticing the birthdate and landmark years in the life of a famous author during a biography excerpt.
Example 2: Listening out for all forms of the perfect tense in a news broadcast.
Top-Down Listening (prediction tasks)
Objective: Start with the big picture (context, purpose), then fill in details.
Technique: Get learners to predict the words or points of grammar that they might hear in an upcoming recording.
Example: You’re a tutor who’s been working with your Swedish B2-level learners on the topic of politics and elections in Sweden. You tell your class that you are going to play a news item explaining how a new law is voted upon in the Swedish Parliament. Ask your learners to predict the words that might appear, and which forms of the passive voice will be used. Make a list with your class they can refer to when listening.
Bottom-Up Listening (“ear-training”)
Approach: Focus on individual phrases and sentences before putting these in the context of a full listening activity.
Technique: Train learners to segment and process the incoming speech stream by training them on individual phrases and sentences produced at a natural pace before exposing them to the same sentences in the context of an audio from some authentic material.
Example: You’re preparing your A2-level English class to watch a video of people being interviewed about their opinions on public transport in London. First you read a list of phrases and sentences that appear in the video, being careful not to use slow learner-directed speech. Instead, you read the sentences in your natural speaking voice and include connected speech processes. You then ask your learners to dictate the sentences and count the number of words/syllables. Once you have trained the learners on these sentences, you then play the video clip with the same sentences produced in context by native speakers.
