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AN OVERVIEW OF LISTENING SKILL THEORIES
Tong Thi Hue
Ho Chi Minh City University of Food Industry
Email:
ABSTRACT
Listening plays an important role in the success of English language learning. The ability to listen
well and effectively contributes to the success of the learners and teachers. To follow these steps in
teaching listening is not easy for some English teachers. The results of many previous researches
about the difficulties in teaching this listening skill has been showed that most teachers and
students had negative attitudes towards listening to English. Taking advantages of teachers‟
attitudes and desires for teaching this skill, the researcher would like to review all steps in teaching
this one with the hope of contributing, helping teachers in applying these steps, theories and having
an insight about how to teach it more effectively. Doing this, some suggestions are also given in
this paper. The researcher hopes to enhance the effectiveness of teaching listening and helps
motivate students in studying English as well
Keywords: listening skill, definitions, process, features, roles of teachers.
1 INTRODUCTION
There have been other researchers who studied about teaching listening skill all over the world and
in Vietnam. Listening plays an important role in communication as it is said that, of the total time
spent on communicating, listening takes up 40-50%; speaking, 25-30%; reading, 11-16%; and
writing, about 9% [Mendelsohn, 1994]. Although the teaching of listening comprehension has long
been ―somewhat neglected and poorly taught aspect of English in many EFL programs
[Mendelsohn, 1994, p. 9], listening is now regarded as much more important in both EFL
classrooms and SLA research. Listening involves an active process of deciphering and
constructing meaning from both verbal and non-verbal messages [Nunan, 1998]. Thus, the label of
passive skill applied to listening is a misnomer. This misunderstanding may stem from the fact that
superficially learners seem to only sit in a language lab quietly, listen to pre-recorded dialogues,
and write the answers to some questions related to the oral stimulus so that listening teaching has
attracted considerable attention. Unfortunately, the teaching of listening skills is still neglected in
the English language teaching process. Listening levels of learners are different from each other,
because listening is affected by crucial factors. The most important factors that should be
emphasized are: the significance of listening, the study of listening teaching theory and use of the
most advanced listening teaching methods. It is now widely accepted that students„ listening ability
must be at the core of teaching practice, and it is the area in which teachers need to concentrate
their own efforts to improve their teaching. This is a significant challenge for English teachers;
however, it is crucial in the development of English language communicative competence.
Awareness of teaching and learning styles of a listening skill may greatly contribute to the success
of language learning. The researchers attempt to discuss the definition of listening, importance of
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listening. Then, she reviews the process of listening comprehension, strategies of listening
comprehension, analysis of listening comprehension problems. Then, teaching methods for
listening comprehension and teaching listening activities will be discussed. Finally, general
principles in teaching listening comprehension are discussed. Findings of this study will be
beneficial to EFL learners to improve their English language listening comprehension ability.
2 LITERATURE REVIEW
Listening comprehension has been defined by various researchers, in which Gary Buck gave a
definition in very clear words. According to Gary Buck [2001, p.31], “listening comprehension is an
active process of constructing meaning and this is done by applying knowledge to the incoming
sound” in which “number of different types of knowledge are involved: both linguistic and non –
linguistic knowledge”. He supposed that “comprehension is affected by a wide range of variables,
and that potentially any characteristic of the speaker, the situation or the listener can affect the
comprehension of the message”. [Gary Buck, 2001, p.31].
There do exist controversies on the nature of listening comprehension. According to Anderson and
Lynch [1988], there are two influential views: traditional view and alternative view. Traditional view
regarded the listener as a tape-recorder and the listener took in and stored aural messages in
much the same way as a tape-recorder. Anderson and Lynch criticized this view as inappropriate
and inadequate. This notion is not a tenable one. Alternative view considered the listener as an
active model builder. This kind of listener could combine the new information with his previous
knowledge and experience to reach full comprehension of what had been heard. Anderson and
Lynch agreed with this view. It emphasized the active interpretation and integration of incoming
information with prior knowledge and experience.
Clark and Clark [1977, pp. 43-44] gave both a narrow and broad definition of listening
comprehension “Comprehension has two common senses. In its narrow sense it denotes the
mental processes by which listeners take in the sounds uttered by a speaker and use them to
construct an interpretation of what they think the speaker intended to convey.... Comprehension in
its broader sense, however, rarely ends here, for listeners normally put the interpretations they
have built to work”.
Listening comprehension process consists of three steps: receiving, attending and understanding in
sequence. The understanding step may be followed by responding and remembering as listeners
may respond immediately or remember the message to respond at a later time. [Wolvin and
Coakly, 1985]. Listening is not a single skill. It includes many different components and is a
complex process involving an interaction between listeners, speakers and spoken texts. Michael
Rost [1991] divided listening into two elements: the component skills and what a listener does.
What a listener does is a list of activities that listeners take to understand messages. The listeners
must take decisions of things such as the kind of situation, important words or units of meaning…
Listening comprehension is of great importance in foreign language learning. “Listening is vital in
the language classroom because it provides input for the learners. Without understanding input at
the right level, any learner simply can‟t begin” [Rost, 1991, p.141]. In order to take part in
communication activities, it is clear that ones must have the ability to absorb the information from
speakers through listening. Since listening is important to understand spoken message, the
teaching of listening cannot be neglected from the teaching of English.
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3 LISTENING PROCESSES
Basing on how the listeners process the input, researchers have classified listening process into
two types: bottom up process and top down process.
Bottom – up processing
Bottom – up process is the text based process. The listeners try to make sense of what they hear
by focusing on the different parts: the vocabulary, the grammar or functional phrases, sounds…
[David Nunan, 1999, p.6]. Bottom – up “is a process of decoding the sounds that one hears in a
linear fashion, from the smallest meaningful units [or phonemes] to complete texts. In other words,
the listeners make use of “his knowledge of words, syntax, and grammar to work on form”. [Rubin,
1994, p.20]
Top – down processing
Top down process is the process in which listeners employ background knowledge or textual
schema to make sense of what they hear. The knowledge may be the general knowledge based on
life experience and previous learning, or the knowledge of language and content used in a
particular situation.
In fact, the two processes can not be separated during listening comprehension. In other words,
listening comprehension is not either top-down or bottom-up processing, but an interactive process
during which listeners use both prior knowledge and linguistic knowledge in understanding.
Anderson and Lynch [1988, p.13] illustrated the relationship between top down and bottom up
processing in comprehension in the below figure
Figure 1: Information sources in comprehension
[Anderson and Lynch, 1988, p.13]
Background knowledge schematic knowledge →→→ C
- factual ↑ ↓
- social M
Procedure knowledge
- how language is used in discourse R
------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ↑----------- ↓----------- E
Knowledge of situation H
- physical setting, participants, etc context →→→ E
Knowledge of co – text ↑ ↓ N
- what has been/ will be said [written] S
------------------------------------------------------------------------------↑------------↓------------ I
Knowledge of the language system O
- semantic ↑ ↓ N
- syntactic
- phonological
Intensive listening and extensive listening
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Rixon [1986] had a different way of classifying listening. He divided listening into two types:
intensive and extensive listening.
Intensive listening is listening for detailed information, for example: listening to the announcement
or listening to the weather forecast. Intensive listening requires listeners to understand the meaning
of each discourse and, ultimately, to understand every sentence and word. Generally, intensive
listening requires listeners to listen to a text several times, or divide the text into paragraphs and
sentences to understand each one. The goal is for students to understand every sentence.
Extensive listening, on the other hand, is listening to natural language for general ideas, not for
particular details. Extensive listening does not require students to understand every sentence, and
every word, instead, students are encouraged to grasp the general meaning of the passage The
listening passage can be long [listening to stories] or short [listening to jokes, poems]. The key
point of listening is to understand the content. The purpose of intensive listening is to build basic
listening skills, while extensive listening is to strengthen and enlarge effectiveness of intensive
listening in order to improve overall listening ability.
4 THE FEATURES OF SPOKEN ENGLISH
In the Results section, summarize the collected data and the analysis performed on those data
relevant to It can be recognized that spoken English has different features from written English.
Being taught to recognize and make use of the features of spoken English in learning listening is
very useful for learners to improve their listening ability. According to Mary Underwood [1989], the
differences happen on sound, stress and intonation, the organization of speech, syntax and
vocabulary, pauses and fillers, and formal and informal language.
The sounds
In English, there are sounds which are unknown or unusual for foreign learners, as a result they
may fail to catch such sounds or to distinguish from similar sounds. In other cases, listeners may
find that sounds are distorted, elided or lost altogether. It is also a frequent fact that listeners with
only little listening experience fail to connect the sounds they hear with words they have seen and
recognized in written form, which makes them confused and discouraged when listening. It will be
of much help for the students to learn this knowledge in continuous speech so that they can
associate what they hear with the language they already know in written form [Mary Underwood,
1989, p. 9].
The stress and intonation
Stress is widely used in spoken English, which aims to carry the main information speakers wish to
convey and emphasize. Obviously, words in spoken continuous speech are often not given the
same stress as they receive when they are said in isolation. Students need to be explained and
shown stressed words as well as unstressed words which helps them avoid the feeling that
comprehension is impossible as they fail to hear all words clearly. [Mary Underwood, 1989, p. 10]
The organization of speech
Speaking is a creative process, in which speakers are almost in the position of formulating what
they are saying. Therefore, there is no certain way of knowing how a speaker‟s speech will be
organized. However, there are some “markers” which listeners can use to convey what speakers
are saying. For example, to show agreement, speakers often use phrases like: “Yes, it is”, “Mm” …
or to show disagreement, speakers may use “Yes, but…” or “Well, er…” In addition, certain
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expressions are very useful for conveying information or keeping up with spoken texts. For
instance, when there are events or examples in a time sequence, time words such as: “first,
second, third, next, last…” are usually used. In other case, when speakers make comparisons or
contrasts, they often use “but, however, in contrast…” When students develop the skill of
recognizing those “markers”, they will find it easier to follow “the flow of information”. [Mary
Underwood, 1989, p. 11]
The syntax and vocabulary of speech
In Teaching the Spoken Language, Brown and Yule identify a number of differences between spoken
discourse and written discourse [as cited in Teaching Listening, Mary Underwood, 1989, p. 12]
Most speakers of English produce spoken language which is simpler than written language in terms
of syntax. Instead of using subordinate clauses as in written form, speakers tend to use separate
sentences. When subordinate clauses are used, they are generally linked by simple conjunctions
such as: “and, but, then” more than relative words.
Speakers often use incomplete sentences
The vocabulary of spoken discourse is usually “much less specific” than that in written discourse.
For instance, speakers usually use “it / somebody/ they/ you” to refer to people in general, which
can be understood by relating them to the immediate context in which they are used.
Interactive expressions in spoken language like: “Well / Oh, Uhuh”
Information is “packed very much densely” in spoken language than in written discourse.
It can be very helpful for students to know such characteristics of spoken language. Being aware of
such information, they can apply them into their listening to get better result. [Mary Underwood,
1989, p. 12].
Pauses and fillers
Pauses occur in speech to give listeners time to think about what has been just said and to relate it
to what has gone before. Long gaps in speech are often filled with sounds/ expressions such as
“Er…/and er….” to avoid silences. Being explained these facts helps students recognize them and
know that they are not part of the essential message. [Mary Underwood, 1989, p. 13].
Formal and informal language
There is often a distinction between the language spoken in “formal” and “informal” situations.
Many language learners have limited experience of English language in informal situation as in
their lessons; they tend to use formal language. Consequently, they may have difficulties in
understanding informal spoken discourse. [Mary Underwood, 1989, p. 14].
5 PROCEDURE OF LISTENING LESSONS
Along with teaching and explaining the features of spoken language to the learners, designing
listening lessons contributes greatly to the success of teaching listening. In order to help learners
get most from a listening lesson, a lesson plan of listening is usually divided into three stages:
things learners do before listening, things learners during listening, things learners after listening. In
other words, procedure of a listening lesson consists of three stages: pre – listening, while –
listening and post listening.
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Pre – listening stage
Pre – listening stage is the stage that prepares students for listening tasks. This stage asks students
to get to think about the topic they are going to listen. In other words, this stage helps students “focus
their minds on the topics” by narrowing down the things that the students expect to hear and
activating relevant knowledge and already known language [Mary Underwood, 1989, p.31].
When planning lessons, time must be allocated for pre – listening activities and the activities should
not be rushed Pre – listening work can be done in a variety ways. Some of the activities are clearly
preparation for listening, while the others might be the setting – up of the while – listening activity.
However, all different activities in pre listening stage provide students‟ opportunities to gain some
knowledge that will help them to follow the listening text. In addition, in this pre – listening stage,
students are likely to use the words which they will shortly hear in the text. This will assist them
when they come to match what they hear with their store of knowledge. Moreover, students can
increase the sense of realism thanks to being provided information about when, where, by whom
and to whom the words were spoken. And obviously, the fact that all the students understand what
they have to do before you start to play the listening text is of much importance to the students‟
success in listening.
Pre – listening work can consist of a whole range of activities, including:
– The teacher giving background
– The students reading something relevant
– The students looking at pictures
– Discussion of the topic/ situation
– A question and answer session
– Written exercise
– Following the instructions for the while – listening activity
– Consideration of how the while – listening activity will be done
[Mary Underwood, 1989, p. 31]
While – listening stage
While – listening stage is the stage in which students are asked to do tasks during the time that
they are listening to the texts. While- listening stage helps students listen better, more accurately
through a list of designed comprehension tasks. As Rixon [1986] pointed out that the purposes of
while listening stage is to challenge and guide students to handle the information and the message
from the listening text. However, to reach that goal, while – listening activities should be interesting,
so that students feel they want to listen and carry out the activities. Moreover, they should be things
which most people can do. They must vary at different levels and in different cases. Some while –
listening activities are successful with groups of varying levels of ability. Exercises which require
students to check, tick, draw, circle… make good while listening activities and should not be
rejected because of their simple structure.
In addition, the topics and the content of the listening texts plus the students‟ interest decide the
success of while – listening activities. Therefore, choosing appropriate materials for while –
listening stage is of great importance to the improvement of learners.
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Mary Underwood [1989, pp 49 -50] recommended various while – listening activities:
– Marking / checking items in pictures
– Multiple – choice questions
– Putting pictures in order
– Text - completion
– True / false exercise
– Making models/ arranging items in patterns
– Completing grids
Post – listening stage
Post – listening stage is the stage in which all the work related to a particular listening text are done
after listening is completed. Some post listening activities are extensions of the work done at the
pre – listening and while – listening stage and some relate only loosely to the listening itself [Mary
Underwood, 1989, p. 74].
Some common forms of post – listening activities are the answering of multiple choice questions or
open questions based on the spoken text. Post – listening activities aim at checking whether the
students have understood what they need to understand and whether they have completed
whatever while – listening task has been set successfully. There is a number of ways to reach this
purpose: by the teacher giving the answers orally, by pairs checking each other‟s answers, by the
teacher showing the answers on the blackboard, by group discussion …Another purpose of post –
listening stage is to reflect on why some students have failed to understand or missed part of the
message. At this stage, discussions are often employed, and then the teachers have opportunities
to draw attention to specific parts of the listening text and focus on the forms, functions, lexis,
stress and intonation which have caused problems for the listeners. This stage also aims at
expanding the topics and the language of the listening texts. This can help students gain some
certain knowledge on the topics they have listened to, which widen their background and
languages abilities for further. Here is the list of post listening activities offered by Mary Underwood
[1989, pp. 82-83]
Role – play
Summarizing
Establishing the mood/ attitude/ behavior of the speaker
Written work
Form/ chart completion
Matching with a reading text
6 ROLES OF TEACHERS IN LISTENING LESSONS
English listening is very helpful to all students to deepen or to improve their language skill. To have
effective listening lessons, the role of teachers is very crucial. Ma ry Underwood [1989, pp. 21- 22]
supposed that in listening classes, a teacher needs to be imaginative and creative in developing
their teaching methods to develop good atmosphere and make English lessons more exiting. In this
way, the listening teacher has to be able to create interesting materials for the students in the
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process of teaching and they have to know how to apply them. The influence of the materials and
the methods of the English teacher in teaching listening is really vital, because students will be
more interested in their study. The competence of the teacher in teaching listening will also
influence the success of students.
Teacher should have a set of exercises, tasks or other activities for the students in their classes. It
is really beneficial and positive experience to try various classroom activities because successful
materials of the subject matter depend on the use of teaching method.
An overview of common difficulties in teaching listening comprehension
As mentioned above, to master a language, it is necessary for learners to develop all aspects of a
language equally and it is necessary for teachers to teach all aspects effectively. However, the
teaching of listening is not really as effective and successful as the teaching of other parts. In her
research in Da Nang University, Ton Nu Xuan Huong [2007] found out that there are three main
factors leading to this fact. Firstly, the teaching of listening can be a hard work due to learner
element. Learners with their limitations in terms of language ability and listening experience may
make the teaching of listening less successful. Secondly, lacking of teaching facilities and
equipment, to some extent, prevents the teaching of listening from reaching the best results.
Thirdly, and most importantly, it is the inefficiency in teaching methodology when teachers conduct
their lessons should be responsible. The effectiveness of listening lessons depends greatly on the
ways teachers plan their teaching in class. This thesis focused on investigating the teachers‟
methodology and activities in listening classes to find out the problems that the teachers have to
face when teaching listening comprehension.
7 SUGGESTIONS
When students need to use their prior knowledge to interpret the text and to create plausible
expectations of what they are about to hear, they will activate knowledge-based processing. On the
other hand, they also need to decode the linguistic input rapidly and accurately and to map the
input against these expectations to confirm consistencies and to refute implausible interpretations
which are referred to as text-based processing. It is acknowledged that listening strategies should
be integrated explicitly and treated pedagogically to improve listening ability.
Students can make use of analogy to predict and interpret language with past similar experiences.
They have a range of schemata knowledge about particular people, places, situations and text-
types which they can call up and use as points of comparison with what is currently being heard
and experienced. Prediction is an important process in English listening. EFL learners use their
perception of the key features of context and their knowledge of the world to limit the range of
possible utterances they are about to hear. This ability helps students to process the message for
deviations from what was expected, reducing their memory load in order to monitor the incoming
message more efficiently. At the beginning stage, it is the teachers„task to guide students to
gradually develop how to predict from the known information of the text. Visual support and
transcript are two important sources of support to students. In the form of pictures, graphs,
diagrams, maps, etc., the visual support can help students to predict incoming listening materials
easily by supplying cultural information. It can provide support by reinforcing the aural message
and training them to listen to some difficult specific information. To some students, what is heard is
kind of ―sound or ―noise instead of meaningful information and they are very reluctant to pay
attention to the overall message but understand every single word. For these reasons a transcript
is valuable for it allows students to go back after the initial attempt so that they can check to make
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sure they can hear and understand everything, increasing their interest and confidence in further
listening.
Students are capable of observing their own cognitive processes in their listening and also
verbalizing their theories about learning to listen in English. The listening notes by students and
pre-listening and post-listening discussions are very helpful in this sense. These activities are very
useful by involving students in thinking, not just about the content of listening, but more importantly,
about the process of listening. By doing so, they can have chances to share with one another„s
thoughts and strategies so that they can improve their own listening ability. More importantly, they
will be aware of what leads to their success and failure and then work out their own effective
strategies in listening
8 CONCLUSIVE REMARKS
In this overview, the relevant literature which is needed to form the theoretical framework for the
present study is presented.
First of all, prominent definitions of listening, listening skill and listening strategies were given
according to some leading researchers. Then the nature of listening comprehension and listening
process were introduced. This paper also mentioned about procedures of listening lessons with
three very necessary stages: pre, while, post listening stage. In addition, roles of teachers in
listening lessons were discussed as they are vital factors to the success of the lessons. Next, an
overview of common difficulties that teachers meet in teaching listening was presented and taken
into consideration. Lastly, if the methods are achieved, all students will be taught in a manner they
prefer, which leads students to comfortable, eager, willing and cooperative attitudes to learn and
then successful instructors with “nice” teaching methods will be responded with good feedbacks
from students
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[4] Gary Buck, [2001]. What Practitioners says about Listening: Research Implications for the
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[5] Michael Rost, [1991]. Teaching and Researching Listening. London, UK: Longman.
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