Listening Comprehension Exercises – Skimming and Scanning, By michelle

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Learning to listen is important! Here are some hints and tips to help you succeed
when you face listening comprehension exercises, ie an exercise with questions on
an audio to be answered in a limited amount of time! Time yourself in every step
and keep a record of your marks, so you notice your progress.

First step (Step 1): Reading & Underlining

Read the (title, the instructions and the) questions carefully. The more you read
them, the better and deeper you understand, gradually. Understanding is a
process. Help your brain. Read before the Listening is played but also in the
intervals. You may realize suddenly what something is.

Underline key words in your questions as you read, so at a glance you remember
what it is all about. This also helps you to move on: while you are listening to
answer one question, you can keep in mind the key words of the next just by
glancing at the question to remember the key words. In this way, you know when
to move on. So, when you are doing this, you will underline two kinds of things:
the key words for understanding that sentence and the word(s) you are likely to
hear when the speakers move on.

Underline before and in your first listening. It's easier to remember one or two
important words than a whole sentence. Imagine what you do when you take
notes or when you take down a message on the phone. You won’t remember
whole sentences, but a key word can remind you of all.

Second step (Step 2): First listening - Skimming

Relax and Listen! (You can only do this if you're USED TO hearing the language) If
you are thinking of your fears and/or complexes you cannot listen well. So it is
important you listen to the language every day, so your ear doesn’t block when
you hear English.
To skim a text is to get the basics from it (think of skimmed milk!) - to identify the
type of text, the theme, the context, the participants. We do this the first time we
listen. We don't try to understand all the words. We kind of "step back" and
contemplate the whole picture, to identify the basic (thematic, physical) setting
and where the relevant info is. Try just to do this, visualizing if possible.
Identifying the topic activates our background knowledge -- the mind is clever and
while identifying a theme it activates the areas of our brain where we have stored
vocabulary, information, relevant to that theme.

While skimming, try to notice which words are more stressed and clearly
pronounced, and try to notice the mood speakers are in, if relevant (a bored
person is not going to pronounce clearly, but then, he/she won’t be saying
anything relevant, and when he/she does, you’ll notice they pronounce more
clearly). Key words are very often, and especially in natural connected speech,
pronounced more clearly and with more emphasis! In this first listening, key words
should help you to get the general understanding of what is going on, like when
you listen when there is noise or you half-listen to someone telling you an
anecdote — you needn’t understand it all to understand what happened, you
needn’t understand everything to get the sense of that text. Try to focus in
identifying where the info is. Not what the info is, but where it is, so that in your
second listening you can skip what is irrelevant. This also helps you underline or
write down key words, so that in the second listening you know when to pay more
attention.

During the first listening, especially if you’ve got a time limit, try to answer
questions too. You will see that you are prepared to answer “skimming questions”.
If you can’t answer any questions, it’s OK. Your ear has to get used to the accent,
so it’s normal. You just need to practice more.

Third step (Step 3): Second listening - Scanning

In the second (and third, fourth…) listenings, you should scan for information, so
that you can succeed in answering the questions. Some questions depend on your
general understanding of the text, and those are the ones you have probably
answered in the first listening, actually. Other questions depend on you identifying
which specific information you are required to find. Those are the scanning
questions. Multiple choice questions are often more of the skimming kind. Fill in
the gap questions are more of the scanning type. But multiple choice exercises can
contain some scanning type question, too.

When you scan for specific info, it’s important that you know where the relevant
information is (if your skimming was well done, you’ll know). Actually, very often
we can answer questions on a text without having understood much, and I hope
you will realize this in class and at home, as you practice this technique, as you
learn to listen.

1. If you have questions to answer, look for the answers.

2. If you are just practicing listening or there are some skimming questions,
try to look for main ideas, and then detail for explaining those main points.

Fourth Step (Step 4): Proofread

You have to be quick. Read again the text with your answers, to check. Go over
the questions you didn’t understand, because the text is still fresh and you may
suddenly realize what the answer is! You may even find a logical answer! Then you
usually get 1 minute to copy your answers in the correct space for answers. If
you’re practicing at home, go over everything aloud. Tell yourself what the text
was about.
 By developing their ability to listen well we develop our students' ability
to become more independent learners, as by hearing accurately they are
much more likely to be able to reproduce accurately, refine their
understanding of grammar and develop their own vocabulary.

In this article I intend to outline a framework that can be used to design a listening
lesson that will develop your students' listening skills and look at some of the
issues involved.

 The basic framework

 Pre-listening

 While listening

 Post-listening

 Applying the framework to a song

 Some conclusions

The basic framework

The basic framework on which you can construct a listening lesson can be divided
into three main stages.
 Pre-listening, during which we help our students prepare to listen.

 While listening, during which we help to focus their attention on the listening text
and guide the development of their understanding of it.

 Post-listening, during which we help our students integrate what they have learnt
from the text into their existing knowledge.

Pre-listening
There are certain goals that should be achieved before students attempt to listen
to any text. These are motivation, contextualisation, and preparation.

 Motivation
It is enormously important that before listening students are motivated to listen,
so you should try to select a text that they will find interesting and then design
tasks that will arouse your students' interest and curiosity.

 Contextualisation
When we listen in our everyday lives we hear language within its natural
environment, and that environment gives us a huge amount of information about
the linguistic content we are likely to hear. Listening to a tape recording in a
classroom is a very unnatural process. The text has been taken from its original
environment and we need to design tasks that will help students to contextualise
the listening and access their existing knowledge and expectations to help them
understand the text.

 Preparation
To do the task we set students while they listen there could be specific vocabulary
or expressions that students will need. It's vital that we cover this before they
start to listen as we want the challenge within the lesson to be an act of listening
not of understanding what they have to do.

While listening
When we listen to something in our everyday lives we do so for a reason. Students
too need a reason to listen that will focus their attention. For our students to really
develop their listening skills they will need to listen a number of times - three or
four usually works quite well - as I've found that the first time many students
listen to a text they are nervous and have to tune in to accents and the speed at
which the people are speaking.
 Ideally the listening tasks we design for them should guide them through the text
and should be graded so that the first listening task they do is quite easy and
helps them to get a general understanding of the text. Sometimes a single
question at this stage will be enough, not putting the students under too much
pressure.

The second task for the second time students listen should demand a greater and
more detailed understanding of the text. Make sure though that the task doesn't
demand too much of a response. Writing long responses as they listen can be very
demanding and is a separate skill in itself, so keep the tasks to single words,
ticking or some sort of graphical response.

The third listening task could just be a matter of checking their own answers from
the second task or could lead students towards some more subtle interpretations
of the text.

Listening to a foreign language is a very intensive and demanding activity and for
this reason I think it's very important that students should have 'breathing' or
'thinking' space between listenings. I usually get my students to compare their
answers between listenings as this gives them the chance not only to have a break
from the listening, but also to check their understanding with a peer and so
reconsider before listening again.

Post-listening
There are two common forms that post-listening tasks can take. These are
reactions to the content of the text, and analysis of the linguistic features used to
express the content.

 Reaction to the text

Of these two I find that tasks that focus students reaction to the content are most
important. Again this is something that we naturally do in our everyday lives.
Because we listen for a reason, there is generally a following reaction. This could
be discussion as a response to what we've heard - do they agree or disagree or
even believe what they have heard? - or it could be some kind of reuse of the
information they have heard.

 Analysis of language
The second of these two post-listening task types involves focusing students on
linguistic features of the text. This is important in terms of developing their
knowledge of language, but less so in terms of developing students' listening skills.
It could take the form of an analysis of verb forms from a script of the listening
text or vocabulary or collocation work. This is a good time to do form focused work
as the students have already developed an understanding of the text and so will
find dealing with the forms that express those meanings much easier.
 Applying the framework to a song
Here is an example of how you could use this framework to exploit a song:

 Pre-listening
o Students brainstorm kinds of songs
o Students describe one of their favourite songs and what they like about it
o Students predict some word or expressions that might be in a love song

 While listening
o Students listen and decide if the song is happy or sad
o Students listen again and order the lines or verses of the song
o Students listen again to check their answers or read a summary of the song with
errors in and correct them.

 Post-listening
o Focus on content
 Discuss what they liked / didn't like about the song
 Decide whether they would buy it / who they would buy it for
 Write a review of the song for a newspaper or website
 Write another verse for the song
o Focus on form
 Students look at the lyrics from the song and identify the verb forms
 Students find new words in the song and find out what they mean
 Students make notes of common collocations within the song

Conclusion
Within this article I have tried to describe a framework for listening development
that could be applied to any listening text. This isn't the only way to develop our
students listening or to structure a