Teaching Listening

Design for Teaching Listening Activity As technology advances and trade and exchanges between countries increase, it is becoming more and more important to understand spoken English in many situations such as face-to-face, on the telephone, in business meetings, lectures, speeches, television, and so on. Only when you know what people saying after listening, you can communicate.There are two major purposes in listening. The first one is social reasons, like when we talk to our friends or others to set up social relationships. The second is more difficult, and need more emphasis in the language classroom, especially at intermediate and advanced levels.Here are some principles for teaching listening. The first one is to focus on process. They have to hear what is being said, they have to pay attention, and construct a meaningful message in their mind. The second one is to combine listening with other skills. Listening is not an isolated skill. For example, when a conversation occur, if your partner ask some question, you should answer, so you should develop listening and speaking skills. Most of the time in real life listening occurs together with writing, like taking notes while listening. The third one is to focus on the comprehension of meaning. It is a big problem that people don’t understand what they have listen. The forth one is to grade difficulty level appropriately. It is useless to develop listening skill with some certain material, like some issue too difficult or too easy.Now here are some activities which is designed based on the principles for teaching listening to English as foreign language teaching.Pre-listening activities is the first stage, which is to make students affective, thematically and linguistically prepared for the listening task. On one hand, before teaching students listening, make sure that most of even all students pay attention to what teacher said. Then the teacher need to take three things into consideration, how to motivate students by making the topic relevant and interesting, what knowledge is already known and how can that knowledge be activated for new knowledge to bebuild upon? What language support. On the other hand, good listeners are good predictors. Teacher can try efforts to help students become better predictors while become better listeners. There are all kinds of measures that can be used to encourage students to predict the content of what they are going to hear. Students can be asked to predict what the passages are talking about before they listen if there is a picture with the listening materials. If there is no picture, maybe teacher can find or draw a picture that fits the text. Visual aids can attract student s’attention and make them have a deeper comprehension. If there have any questions in the materials, teachers should ask them to read these questions at first so that student can find answer easier.While-listening activities is the second stage, it is the most important and difficult for teacher to control. There are many different kinds of tasks for students to do when they listen to a passage. Teachers should require students to dabble in various pattern of manifestation of listening, including no specific responses, listen and tick, listen and sequence, listen and act, listen and draw, listen and fill, listen and take notes.No specific responses is the most relax task to both student and teachers. It is obvious that students will be nervous if teachers give them any tasks when listen to a passage, students can work well with some listening tasks such as stories, other materials that are interesting, humorous, or dramatic, because students are likely to pay attention and try to understand in order to enjoy it. We teachers can take measures to make students take interest in listening.Listen and tick, which is easy or difficult base on what the teachers ask students to do with the materials. If all the students need to do is tick items as they hear them, the task will be much easier. So these activities can boost students ’confident. For example, if there are some words like bag, pencil, box, and you tick a word that you have hear.Listen and sequence is not a difficult task. Because these tasks just write numbers, you don’t have to write some words. So that students can normally complete this type of task even they do not understand every word they hear. This help build up their confidence. For example, here are some pictures which are obvious that showstudents the meaning of swimming, running, talking, jumping, riding, then you have to make the following things with number 1-5 according the radio.Listen and act is an interesting part that students are more prefer to play. This task concentrates on learning language by listening and responding physically to commands or directions. There are a number of variations of how this can be carried out in a classroom. If you are a green hand, or your students are not familiar with these activities, it is easy to start with simple commands such as ‘stand up’, ‘sit down’‘open your book’, ‘close your book’, ‘s tamp your foot’, ‘touch your head’, etc. At intermediate levels, the commands can become more complex. For example, ‘act like a dog’, ‘act like a cat’, ‘act like a monkey’, ‘act like an elephant’, ‘pretend you are tying your shoes’, ‘pretend you are eating a watermelon’.Like listen and act, listen and draw is also a funny part for students. The students are drawing pictures, diagrams, etc. on paper. For example, the teachers ask students to draw a picture about a dog fight with a cat, a pig is eating food, or draw a clown with two blue eyes, brown ears, a red nose, yellow mouth and pink face through different color pen in picture. Of course, related vocabulary would need to be pre-taught if the students do not know them.Listen and fill is a very common part. And you are probably very familiar with. Teachers ask student to fill in the blanks with the words they hear, of course, teachers can read by themselves or open a radio. And what teachers need to do is to decide which words take out and replace with blanks. Teachers also can decide to focus on different types of words, for example, here is a sentence, ‘John go to school by bus everyday.’‘bus’ is absent, what students need to do is write ‘bus’.Listen and take notes is requiring the listener to take notes while listening. Students need to listen to the passage carefully and fill in the information with key words under appropriate headings. For example, the teachers can provide a chart of a person, age, place, action, etc. Learners complete the chart after listening to the radio. This type of activity integrates listening with other skills, especially writing.There are many options for while-listening activities. The above list is by no means complete. By providing a variety of types of tasks, students learn to listen for avariety of purpose which better prepares them for listening in the real world outside the classroom.The post-listening activities is the third stage, teachers can determine how well the students have understood what they listened to form this stage. Now let’s look at some types of post-listening activities.Multiple-choice comprehension question is the most typical type of post-listening task. The teachers need to decide how to balance their teaching in preparing the students for traditional multiple-choice tests and preparing them for using English in the real world.Answering questions is so common in this stage. Students should ask question after listening a material. Teachers will know that whether students understand listening tests or not by the answer are true or not.Dictogloss is a type of activity in which the teacher reads out a passage in normal speed for two or three times and students are to note down the words they could catch as they listen as much as possible. Then they discuss their understanding of the overall meaning with their classmates. Then they work together to reconstruct the passage together after which they are giving to the original text for a comparison. This activity not only can students discover the reasons for their listening difficulties, but also can strengthen their team spirit.There are many opportunities to integrate listening with the practice of other language skill, especially at the post-listening stage. Such as role play, debate, discussion, etc.This paper show us many kinds of activities based on the principles for teaching listening to English as foreign language teaching. We believe that a better understanding of the listening process will help us to design better activities for our students. In a word, developing the students' oral English ability is not an easy thing. Rome was not built in a day, which need each teacher feet on the ground to be realized. We have to continuously improve teaching methods, and create better conditions for students. To provide opportunities for them to practice, students will get an improvement in the application of spoken English.。

Unit 9 Teaching ListeningAims of the unit:1. Why is listening so difficult for students?2. What do we listen to in everyday life?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?I. The importance of teaching listening1. Listening is one of the four basic skills of a language.2. Why does listening seem so difficult for Chinese students?Task 1: In your English learning experiences, did you find listening more difficult than the other three skills? Can you think of any reasons whylistening is often considered to be more difficult?Conclusion:In Foreign language learning, both listening and reading are receptive skills, but listening can be more difficult that reading because:l Different speakers produce the same sounds in different ways. (different dialects and accents, stresses, rhythms, intonations, mispronunciations)l The speed of the input of spoken material can not be controlled;l Spoken material is often heard only once. And the listener cannot pause the speaker to work out the meaning.l Background noise.l Memory and recurrence.3. What do we listen to in everyday life?As we know, listen is very important in daily communication. There is a great variety of situations where we need to listen to English. As a matter of fact, Chinese students have few chances to be exposed in listening.Task 3: Below is a list of situations where Chinese people may need to listen to English. Choose eight situations that you think are the most frequent.II. Characteristics of the listening processThe listening situations in TASK 3 can also be divided asl Formal or informal:l Rehearsed or non-rehearsed;l The listener can or cannot interact with the speakerAccording to Ur(1996), listening process has following characteristics:Spontaneity: We often listen to people speaking spontaneously andinformally without rehearsing what they are going to say ahead of time.Context: The context of listening is usually known in real life. The situation usually helps us predict what we are going to hear.Visual clues: While listening, the speakers’facial expressions, gestures and other body language will provide us visual clues which can help us understand and predict what we hear.Listener’s response: Most of the listening allows the listener to responds the speaker, whether they understand or not.Speaker’s adjustment: The speaker can adjust the way of speaking according to the listener’s reactions.III. Objective and Principles for teaching listening1. Objective of teaching Listeningl Learn how to listenl Learn to pick up the most important informationl Learn to become a skillful listenerl Like listeningl Like imitatingl Like participating in communicative activities2. Teaching principles1) Focus on process：In listening, people must do many things to process information they are receiving. They have to hear what is being said, they have to pay attention to catch as much information as possible so as to construct a meaningful message in their mind by relating what they hear to what they already know..2) Combine listening with other skills. Listening and speaking skills are closely related. Both of them belong to the oral skill. They need interaction so that to help communication.3) Focus on comprehension of meaning. Understand the meaningis more important to memorize every work people hear.4) Grade difficulty level appropriately. There are a large number of factors that affect the difficulty level of listening tasks, but they fall into three main categories according to Anderson and Lynch:l type of language used;l task or purpose in listening;l context in which the listening occurs.Task 5: Suppose you are teaching a lower intermediate class of middle school students. You want to give them some listening practice. The following listening materials are available. Which texts would you choose? In what order would you use them? Give your reasons. (See P.85/141)3. Principles for selecting and using listening activitiesOxford summarizes the following principles for selecting and using L2 listening activities. (see P.141)IV. Listening activities1. Teaching modelsBottom-up model: In the bottom-up model, listening comprehension is believed to start with sound and meaning recognitions. In other words, ‘we use information in the speech itself to try to comprehend the meaning’.Top-down model: In this model, listening for gist and making use of the contextual clues and background knowledge to construct meaning are emphasized. In other words, listening comprehension involves ‘knowledge that a listener brings to a text, sometimes called ‘inside the head’ information, as opposed to the information that is available within the text itself.’Three teaching stages:l Pre-listening, during which teachers help the students prepare to listen.l While-listening, during which the focus of students’ attentionis led to the listening text and the teachers can guide the students and help them understand it.l Post-listening, during which students are offered with opportunities to integrate what they learned from the text into their existing knowledge and communicate with others using the information in the listening text.2. Activities1) Pre-listening activitiesa. Look at some pictures before listening to the passage.b. Read the listening comprehension questions before listening.c. Set the scene for the students before listening.d. Listen for the gist of the passage.e. Listen for specific information2.While-listening activitiesa. Listen and tick: List some objects. Then ask students to listen and tick.b. Listen and sequence: Listen and number; listen and matchc. Listen and act: “Simon says…”, listen and point.d. Listen and draw: listen and color.e. Listen and fillf. Listen and find outg. Listen and guess3.Post-listening activitiesa. True of falseb. Multiple choice questionsc. Answering questionsd. Note-taking and gap-fillinge. Complete the dialogue…V. Notes in teaching listening1. Let students listen to authentic English: songs, rhymes, dialogues, short passages with normal speed and natural pronunciation and intonation2. Let students be active in listening.3. Always give students a purpose for listening.。

ListeningTeaching Goals 教学目标1. Target language 目标语言a. 词汇Thailand, Tibet, Laos, canyons, floods, valleysb. 重点句子The lakes shone like glass in the moonlight.2. Ability goals能力目标Students can grasp the main idea of the passage and get to know what the author saw and heard.Students can pick out the key words in each paragraph.3. Learning ability goals 学能目标Help the students learn how to grasp the main idea during listening through picking out the key words.Teaching important points 教学重点Listen to the two parts about the journey down the Mekong, and get the main idea and choose the correct answers.Teaching difficult points 教学难点Work together with partners and describe what the characters see.Teaching methods 教学方法Listening and discussingTeaching aid 用具准备A recorderTeaching procedures & ways教学过程Step I RevisionAsk some students to talk about which subjects they will take.T: Good Morning / afternoon!Ss: Good morning, Sir / Madam!T: First I’d like to check your homework. I’ll ask you one question: what will you take when you go on a trip?S1:I’ll take a tent, a water bottle, a raincoat and a map. So I can make camp at any place. The raincoat will protect me from rain.T: What about you, Liu Jing?S2: I decide to take a map, a radio, a raincoat and a flashlight. With a map I’ll know where I am and in which direction I should go. The radio will give the latest news and weather report.T: I think so.Step II ListeningStudents are asked to read the sentences and then listen to the tape only once to choose the right sentences telling the main idea of the dialogue they hear on the tape.T: Good, our homework check is over. Today let’s go on with the trip down the Mekong River with Wang Wei. Please open your books at Page 23. Before listening to the tape, please read the sentences fast and as usual try to predict what the listening is about.. Then tick the right sentence. Let’s start.Students can check their answers with their partners.T:Now, we can see a passage in Ex 3. Please look through the passage and find out the listening points. One moment later, I’ll play the tape for the second time. Please listen carefully and pay attention to the important points. You may make notes while listening. Notes-making is helpful for you to remember the important points.After listening twice, check the answers and explain some difficult listening points if necessary.T: What else would you expect Wang Kun and the girl to talk about? Get into pairs and continue the dialogue between them. Use the expressions in the box of Ex 4 to end your conversation.Step III ExplanationsT: Do you have any problem?Ss: No.T: OK. I’d like to introduce a sentence to you. “The lakes shone like glass in the moonlight.” This is a common literary device, the simile. A simile is a comparison between two things using“like or “as”. In the sentence the lakes are compared to glass. The reader can imagine a ca lm, silver-colored lake that resembles glass in a mirror. It is a vivid image using the sense of sight. For example, coal is like black gold.Step IV Asking more questionsT: Now, let’s listen to the tape for the third time. Please check your answers again and I’ll ask you more questions on the passage.T: Who stopped to look at them?S1: Children dressed in long wool coats.T: How did they know they were very high in the mountain?S2: Because they cycled through clouds.T: What joke did Wang Wei play on his cousins?S3: He said his cousins were not strong enough to finish the journey.T: When was the best time to be traveling in Laos?S4: Autumn.T: Is Laos a large country?S5: No. It has the smallest population among the countries in Southeast Asia.Step V ListeningT: Let’s go with another listening on Page 55 in workbook. Look at Part 2 in the listening. Please listen to the tape and tick the words you hear on the tape.Let the students check their answers with each other after listening the first.T: Now look at Part Three. There are five questions. You should form the habit of going through the questions and answers to get the important listening points. Yes? Please listen. I’ll play the tape twice.Check the answers together.T: Now, in groups make a list of adjectives to describe the countryside in Laos.Minutes later ask students to tell out their answers.Step VI AssignmentsT: Boys and girls, today we have listened to two parts of Wang Kun’s journal. I do hope you can listen to the materials again after class so that you can get very familiar with them. Besides,please LISTENING TASK and READING TASK in workbook on page58 as your homework after class. Now class is over. See you.Ss: See you tomorrow, sir / madam.。

Teaching Plan一：Class Description---Students who are not English majors in university and most of these students have difficulty in listening二：Teaching Aims---Students will learn how to listen and improve their listening skill.三：Teaching Important PointsThe conversations, sentences and news with the difficult words and latest news.四：Teaching Difficult PointsHow to grasp the main points of the conversations, sentences and news and how to find the correct answer.五：Teaching MethodsPPP---presentation, practice, production六：Teaching AidsA projectors and a computer七：Teaching Procedures1:Step 1Pre- listening, during which period teachers help the students to prepare to listen and students listen for the gist(下载一段慢速VOA听力，学生听完复述主要内容)2：Step 2While-listening, during which period the focus of students' attention o\is led to the listening text and the teacher can guide the students and help them understanding it.Students listen and fill.(下载一段六级听力真题中的新闻，发试卷让学生做，做完老师检查正确率并讲解)3：Step 3Past-listening, during which period students are offered with opportunities to integrate what they learned from the text into their existing knowledge and communicate with others using the information in the listening text.About post-listening activities, we choose note-taking and gap-filling.First the students listen to a fairly long text.The students take notes while they are listening...Page152八：Teachers' Reflection and Suggestions九：Homework1:To practice listening more2:Finish the exercises in the workbook。