Teaching listening

words and their meanings; 5. Translate and exemplify, if words with abstract
meaning; 6. Use word formation rules; 7. Teach vocabulary in chunks; 8. Relate words to contexts in real life; 9. Provide different contexts; 10. Prepare for possible misunderstanding or confusion.
Demonstrate to the class next weeevision of Teaching Vocabulary
1. What are some of the assumptions about vocabulary learning?
2. What does knowing a word involve? 3. How can we present new vocabulary
because of earlier problems.
9.1.2 Reasons for difficulty in listening
Listening is often neglected in language teaching due to lack of teaching materials, lack of equipment in some schools, and lack of real-life situations where learners need to understand spoken English.
aware of the difference between active and passive vocabulary, and then treat them differently.

6. English-English explanations are not the best. There are many other more effective ways.
7. An English-English dictionary is very helpful. 8. It is more effective when words of related
English Language Teaching Methodology
Unit 8 Teaching Vocabulary
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Outline
Presentation(G7): vocabulary teaching
A brief revision of Unit 8 Unit 9 Teaching Listening
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8.3 How can we present new vocabulary items?
1. Provide a visual or physical demonstration; 2. Provide a verbal context to demonstrate meaning; 3. Use synonyms or antonyms; 4. Use lexical sets or hyponyms to show relations of
meaning are taught and learned together. 9. Studying vocabulary in language contexts are
more effective. 10. Forgetting is inevitable. But if words are
Demonstrate to the class next week. For Group 7.

• Among the four skills, foreign language learners often complain that listening is the most difficult to acquire.
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Reasons why listening is often
neglected in language teaching
3. What are the characteristics of the listening process?
4. What are the principles of teaching listening?
5. What are the common activities in
teaching listening?
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8.1 Why does listening seem so difficult?
• It is becoming more and more necessary to understand spoken English in many situations, e.g. face-to-face conversations, telephone calls, business meetings, lectures, speeches, television, etc.
• e.g.
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• Telephone conversations about business; • Lessons or lectures given in English; • Instructions in English; • Watching movies in English; • Dealing with tourists; • Interviews with foreign-enterprises; • Socializing with foreigners; • Listening to English songs; •-

Features Affecting Listening Input
Brown & Yule(1983b) suggests that there are four clusters of factors which can affect the difficulty of listening tasks: 1. the speaker --- how many there are, how quickly they speak, what types of accent they have 2. the listener --- the role of the listener (whether a participant or eavesdropper, the level of response required, the individual interest in the subject) 3. the content --- grammar, vocabulary, information structure, background knowledge assumed 4. support --- whether there are pictures, diagrams or other visual aids to support the text
3. What makes listening difficult?
• • • • • • • Clustering; Redundancy; Reduced forms; Colloquial language; Rate of delivery; Stress, rhythm, and intonation; Interaction;