EN 205 – TEACHING AND ASSESSMENT OF THE MACROSKILLS 1

EN 205
Teaching and Assessment of the
Macroskills

MODULE 2
Listening: Problems, Strategies and
Stages

Marlyn D. Tolosa
Professor

EN 205 – TEACHING AND ASSESSMENT OF THE MACROSKILLS 2

Overview
Welcome to Teaching and Assessment of the Macroskills Module 2 on
Listening: Problems, Strategies and Stages!

This module aims to enlighten you on the common problems in listening,

characteristics of spoken language that may affect listening, listening strategies, and
stages in a listening lesson.

This module was designed to provide learners meaningful opportunities for

guided and independent learning at their own pace and time. Learners will be
enabled to process the contents of the learning material while being an active learner.

Technical Requirements
This distance learning requires the use of the following: Google Classroom
and Google Meet. (if ALL students have the capacity to use Google Meet for
synchronous class)

Content Outline
1. Common Listening Problems
2. Characteristics of Spoken Language That May Affect Listening
3. Listening Strategies
4. Stages in a Listening Lesson

Objectives

After going through this module, you are expected to:

1. Identify the common problems encountered by listeners in the
listening process;
2. Explain the characteristics of spoken language that may affect
listening;
3. Identify the listening strategies and stages in the listening process
which may be utilized to make learners good listeners; and
4. Critique a lesson plan which demonstrates the development of
listening skills.

Preliminary Activity
1. In a scale 1-10, how would rate your listening skill? Why do you say
so?
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2. Is it easy to listen for information? Why?
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Discussion/Instructional Flow
Read carefully the concepts notes below.
Common Listening Problems
1. Speakers speak too fast.
2. Listeners listen word for word.
3. Listeners lack cultural or background knowledge.
4. Speakers use too many unfamiliar words.
5. Listening takes too much effort and concentration.
6. Recordings are not always clear and are difficult to follow.
7. Speakers accents are unfamiliar.
8. Tasks are too difficult.
9. Listeners cannot recognize words they know when they hear them.
Which of these listening problems have you encountered? What did you
do when you experienced it?
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Characteristics of spoken language that may affect listening
1. Usually instantaneous. No chance to listen again.
2. Speech rates vary considerably.
3. Radio monologs: 160 wpm - Conversation: 210 wpm
4. Accents vary from native to non-native.
5. Usually unplanned.
6. Often reflects processes of construction. – e.g., hesitations, fillers,
repeats
7. Has a linear structure. – hierarchical structure for written discourse
8. Often context dependent and personal.
9. May contain many colloquialisms.
10. Characterized by reduced forms and blendings.
11. Stress-timed rather than syllable-timed rhythm.
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Which of these have you experienced? How did it affect listening?
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Listening Strategies

Successful listening may depend on the strategies the listener uses

when listening. Strategies are ways in which a learner approaches and
manages a task. Listeners can be taught effective ways of approaching
and managing their listening. These activities seek to involve listeners
actively in the process of listening.

1. Cognitive strategies: Mental activities related to comprehending

and storing input in working memory or long-term memory for later
retrieval

• Comprehension processes: Associated with the processing of

linguistic and nonlinguistic input
• Storing and memory processes: Associated with the storing of
linguistic and nonlinguistic input in working memory or long-term
memory
• Using and retrieval processes: Associated with accessing memory,
to be readied for output

2. Metacognitive strategies: Those conscious or unconscious mental

activities that perform an executive function in the management of
cognitive strategies

• Assessing the situation: Taking stock of conditions surrounding a

language task by assessing one’s own knowledge, one’s available
internal and external resources, and the constraints of the situation
before engaging in a task
• Monitoring: Determining the effectiveness of one’s own or another’s
performance while engaged in a task
• Self-evaluating: Determining the effectiveness of one’s own or
another’s performance after engaging in the activity
• Self-testing: Testing oneself to determine the effectiveness of one’s
own language use or the lack thereof.

The metacognitive strategies train the language learner to cope with the
demands of listening. It is quite evident that metacognitive strategies make
their learning more effective, hence, they are able to maximize the information
received and thus this can be used to improve their listening skills. Wenden
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(1998) argues that learners who use their metacognitive abilities seem to have
the following advantages over the others:

➢ Learners become more strategic.

➢ Progress in learning is faster with improved quality and speed of their
cognitive development.
➢ They are confident in their abilities to learn and hence can provide
accurate assessments of why they are successful learners.
➢ They think clearly about inaccuracies when failure occurs during an
activity.
➢ Their tactics match the learning task and adjustments are made to
reflect changing circumstances.
➢ They perceive themselves as continual learners and can successfully
cope with new situations.

Goh (1997, 1998) shows how the metacognitive activities of planning,

monitoring, and evaluating can be applied to the teaching of listening:

Metacognitive strategies for self-regulation in learner listening (Goh 1997,

1998)

Planning

This is a strategy for determining learning objectives and deciding the

means by which the objectives can be achieved.

General listening development

• Identify learning objectives for listening development.

• Determine ways to achieve these objectives.
• Set realistic short-term and long-term goals.
• Seek opportunities for listening practice.

Specific listening task

• Preview main ideas before listening.

• Rehearse language (e.g., pronunciation) necessary for the task.
• Decide in advance which aspects of the text to concentrate on.

Monitoring

This is a strategy for checking on the progress in the course of learning or

carrying out a learning task.

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General listening development

• Consider progress against a set of predetermined criteria.

• Determine how close it is to achieving short-term or long-term goals.
• Check and see if the same mistakes are still being made.

Specific listening task

• Check understanding during listening.

• Check the appropriateness and the accuracy of what is understood
and compare it with new information.
• Identify the source of difficulty.

Evaluating

This is a strategy for determining the success of the outcome of an attempt

to learn or complete a learning task.

General listening development

• Assess listening progress against a set of predetermined criteria.

• Assess the effectiveness of learning and practice strategies.
• Assess the appropriateness of learning goals and objectives set.

Specific listening task

• Check the appropriateness and the accuracy of what has been

understood.
• Determine the effectiveness of strategies used in the task.
• Assess overall comprehension of the text.

Steps in guided metacognitive sequence in a listening lesson from

Goh and Yusnita (2006)

Step 1 Pre-listening activity

In pairs, students predict the possible words and phrases that they
might hear. They write down their predictions. They may write some words
in their first language.

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Step 2 First listen

As they are listening to the text, students underline or circle those

words or phrases (including first-language equivalents) that they have
predicted correctly. They also write down new information they hear.

Step 3 Pair process-based discussion

In pairs, students compare what they have understood so far and

explain how they arrived at the understanding. They identify the parts
that caused confusion and disagreement and make a note of the parts of
the text that will require special attention in the second listen.

Step 4 Second listen

Students listen to those parts that have caused confusion or

disagreement areas and make notes of any new information they hear.

Step 5 Whole-class process-based discussion

The teacher leads a discussion to confirm comprehension before

discussing with students the strategies that they reported using.

3. Top-down strategies are listener based; the listener relies on the

background or prior knowledge and experience to build the meaning of
a listening text using the information provided by sounds and words.
To arrive at the meaning of a text, the listener draws on her knowledge
of the context, topic, speakers, situation and the world, matching it to
the aural input.
• Top-down strategies are for:
➢ listening for the main idea, gist, topic and setting of the text
➢ predicting
➢ guessing
➢ drawing inference
➢ summarizing
➢ listening for specific information
➢ sequencing the information

4. Bottom-up strategies are text based where the listeners use linguistic
knowledge to understand information. It helps students recognize
lexical and pronunciation features to understand the text. Here the
listener relies on the language in the message, that is, the combination
of sounds, words, and grammar to arrive at the final message. Meaning
is extracted from the message. The goal is to identify topics and
propositions. Because of their direct focus on language forms at the word

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 and sentence levels, bottom-up exercises are particularly beneficial for lower
level students who need to expand their language repertoire. As they become
more aware of linguistic features of the input, the speed and accuracy of
perceiving and processing aural input will increase.
• Bottom-up strategies are to:
➢ concentrate on specific details while listening
➢ recognize word-order patterns
➢ distinguish individual sounds, word boundaries, and
stressed syllables
➢ identify thought groups
➢ listen for intonation patterns in utterances
➢ identify grammatical forms and functions
➢ recognize contractions and connected speech
➢ recognize linking words
Which of these strategies have you already employed? Discuss the result
after using it.
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Stages in a Listening Lesson

The three phases of the listening process are: prelistening, while listening
and after listening.

1. Pre-listening, during which we help our students prepare to listen.

2. While listening, during which we help to focus their attention on the
listening text and guide the development of their understanding of it.
3. Post-listening, during which we help our students integrate what they
have learned from the text into their existing knowledge.

Pre-listening
During the pre-listening phase, teachers need to recognize that all
students bring different backgrounds to the listening experience. Beliefs,
attitudes and biases of the listeners will affect the understanding of the
message. In addition to being aware of these factors, teachers should show
students how their backgrounds affect the messages they receive.
Before listening, students need assistance to activate what they already
know about the ideas they are going to hear. Simply being told the topic is
not enough. Pre-listening activities are required to establish what is already

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known about the topic, to build necessary background, and to set purposes
for listening.
There are several strategies that students and their teachers can use to
prepare for a listening experience. They can:
1. Activate existing knowledge
Students should be encouraged to ask the question: What do I already
know about this topic? From this teachers and students can determine what
information they need in order to get the most from the message. Students
can brainstorm, discuss, read, view films or photos, and write and share
journal entries.
2. Build prior knowledge
Teachers can provide the appropriate background information
including information about the speaker, topic of the presentation, purpose
of the presentation and the concepts and vocabulary that are likely to be
embedded in the presentation. Teachers may rely upon the oral interpretation
to convey the meanings of unfamiliar words, leaving the discussion of these
words until after the presentation. At this stage, teachers need to point out
the role that oral punctuation, body language and tone play in an oral
presentation.
3. Review standards for listening
Teachers should stress the importance of the audience’s role in a
listening situation. There is an interactive relationship between audience and
speaker, each affecting the other. Teachers can outline the following
considerations to students:
➢ Students have to be physically prepared for listening.
➢ Students need to be attentive.
➢ Listen to others as you would have them listen to you.
4. Establish purpose
Teachers should encourage students to ask: “Why am I listening?”
“What is my purpose?” Students should be encouraged to articulate their
purpose.
Before a speaker’s presentation, teachers can also have students
formulate questions that they predict will be answered during the
presentation. If the questions are not answered, students may pose the
questions to the speaker. Students should as well be encouraged to jot down
questions during listening.

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5. Use a Listening Guide

A guide may provide an overview of the presentation, its main ideas,

questions to be answered while listening, a summary of the
presentation.

In pre-listening, there are certain goals that should be achieved before

students attempt to listen to any text. These are motivation,
contextualization, 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.

✓ Contextualization
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 contextualize 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 Stage

While listening tasks are what students are asked to do during listening
time. The listening tasks should be enjoyable and meaningful to the students.
It should be simple and easy to handle. It should provide opportunities for
students to succeed.

Students need to understand the implications of rate in the listening

process. They have to be encouraged to use the “rate gap” to actively process
the message.

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Effective listeners:

➢ Connect – make connections with people, places, situations, and

ideas they know
➢ Find meaning – determine what the speaker is saying about people,
places and ideas
➢ Question – pay attention to those words and ideas that are unclear
➢ Make and confirm predictions – try to determine what will be said
next
➢ Make inferences – determine speaker’s intent by listening between
the line; infer what the speaker does not actually say.
➢ Reflect and evaluate – respond to what has been heard and pass
judgment

In doing while-listening activities, it is important to remember the following:

➢ Allow students to listen to the text two or three times as a whole
before going to intensive listening.
➢ Encourage student to focus on global meaning first and don't pose
questions that ask them for details after the first listen.
➢ Encourage students to make assumptions after the first listen and
verify them after the second listen.
➢ Focus your questions and attention at this stage on the segments of
the texts that are accessible to the students in terms of vocabulary
and structures. Always remember that students don't need to "get"
everything in the text.

Post-listening

This is usually at the end of a lesson. These are off-shoots or extension

of the work done at the pre- and while listening stage. At this stage the
students have time to think, reflect, discuss and to write.

Students need to act upon what they have heard to clarify meaning and
extend their thinking. Well-planned post-listening activities are just as
important as those before and during. Some examples follow:

➢ To begin with students can questions of themselves and the speaker

to clarify their understanding and confirm their assumptions.
➢ Students should talk about what the speaker said, question
statements of opinion, amplify certain remarks, and identify parallel
incidents from life and literature.
➢ Students can summarize a speaker’s presentation orally, in writing,
or as an outline. They could use time lines, flow charts, ladders
circles, diagrams, webs or maps.
➢ Students can review their notes and add information that they did
not have an opportunity to record during the speech.
➢ Students can analyze and evaluate critically what they have heard.

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 ➢ Students can be given opportunities to engage in activities that build
on and develop concepts acquired during an oral presentation. These
may include writing, reading, art and drama.

One-way Listening Tasks (Transactional)

It involves listening and responding through different ways to achieve

outcomes. They do not have to interact with the speaker while listening. It is
mainly concerned with obtaining information and knowledge.

Task Response
Restoration Include omitted words or phrases
Reconstruction Create original message with words
heard or noted down
Sorting Sequence, rank, categorize items
Evaluation Identify inconsistencies and
contradictions

Task Response
Matching Match information from listening to
pictures or written texts
Jigsaw Create a whole from different parts.

Two-way Listening Tasks (Interactional)

The listener has to interact with the speaker by asking questions,

offering information and expressing opinions.

Task Response
Creative dictation Dictate to each other to complete
text
Description Sequence/reproduce/complete
Simulation Listen and express opinion in
simulated situations
presentation Listen and respond to formal and
informal presentations

Applying listening activities to a song

Here is an example of how you could use listening activities to a song:

1. Pre-listening

➢ Students brainstorm kinds of songs

➢ Students describe one of their favourite songs and what they like
about it
➢ Students predict some word or expressions that might be in a
love song

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 2. While listening

➢ Students listen and decide if the song is happy or sad

➢ Students listen again and order the lines or verses of the song
➢ Students listen again to check their answers or read a summary
of the song with errors in and correct them.

3. Post-listening
a. 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
b. 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

Recall listening task which you had in any of your classes. Are these
stages in the listening lesson observed? Discuss the result after using it.
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Post Activity
1. Interview 10 individuals and validate the listening problems encountered
by listeners.
Interviewee Responses
1
2
3
4
5

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 6
7
8
9
10

Evaluation
1. Search for a lesson plan which develops listening skills of students.
Critique the listening strategies and stages of the listening lesson used
against the ones discussed in this topic. Explain your answer.

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References

Wolvin, A., & Coakley, C. G. (1996). Listening (5th ed.). Boston, MA:
McGraw-Hill.

Richards, J. (15 January 2016). Listening strategies. Cambridge University Press. Retrieved
from https://www.cambridge.org/elt/blog/2016/01/15/teaching-listening-5-listening-
strategies/

Peachey, N. (n.d). A framework for planning a listening lesson. British Council. Retrieved
from https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/a-framework-planning-a-listening-
skills-lesson

https://saylordotorg.github.io/text_stand-up-speak-out-the-practice-and-ethics-of-public-
speaking/s07-00-the-importance-of-listening.html

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