Nature of listening and factors that affect listening (06 / 03 hrs)
- What is listening? Ability to identify and understand what others are saying, involves understanding a speaker’s accent/pronunciation/grammar/ vocabulary and grasping the meaning.
- Factors that affect listening:
- Get the students to discuss and write a list in small groups.
- Whole class discussion. Use the following factors in the discussion:
Listening passage is heard only once, content usually not well organized, cannot be listened to at a slower speed (message on radio, on tape), difficult to recognize individual words in the stream of speech, may contain colloquial words and expression and redundant utterances: repetitions, false starts, rephrasing, self-corrections, elaborations, meaningless utterances (e.g. I mean. you know…), no body language and facial expressions, etc
Extract specific information –selective listening (06 / 03 hrs)
- Purpose: not to look for global/general meaning, but to be able to find necessary information. Students listen for names/dates/certain facts and events/ location/situation/context etc.
- Types of tasks:
- Listen to news. In the work sheet tick the category to which the news items you hear fall into.
- Listen to announcements e.g. Airline arrivals and departures. Fill in the flight numbers, destinations, gate numbers, departure times etc.
Listening for the main idea and specific details (06 / 03 hrs)
- Types of activities
- Listen and take notes under given headings
- Listen and answer comprehension check questions
- Text types: Interviews, speeches
Understanding planned monologues (06 / 03 hrs)
- In planned monologues the language is carefully structured. Provide the students with a task sheet to be completed while listening.
- Types of activities: weather reports, news readings
Understanding unplanned monologues (06 / 03 hrs)
- In unplanned monologues which are usually crated on the spot in response to an initial question there is a lot of pauses, redundancy and fragmentary utterances.
- Types of tasks:
- identify the meaningless speech, list them, and compare with others
- Comprehension questions