LYE Network

LISTENING
JOURNAL

A GUIDE FOR DEVELOPING MORE EFFECTIVE

& INDEPENDENT LISTENERS
 PREFACE
Hey!

Thanks for joining our lifelong learning community.

We are very excited to share this LISTENING
JOURNAL WITH YOU!

This Listening Journal is the product of months of

research and years of classroom teaching.

Listening practice is crucial to language learning. The

majority of listening practice that happens in the
classroom is intensive while research suggests that
improvements in listening skills occur with extensive
listening done away from the classroom.

If we want our learners to develop their listening skills,

research suggests that one of the essentials of
language acquisition is exposure. By exposure, we
argue that learners need to be exposed to meaning-
focused input (i.e. listening texts) for at least 20
minutes a day.

This exposure needs to be done within a guided

approach that helps listeners focus on the message,
the strategies used to understand such a message, and
the problematic sounds and words associated with the
message. In short, an approach where meaning is built
from the bottom-up as as well as the top down is
required. A Listening Journal is one of the tools we
have designed and use to serve this need.

We hope you make good use of it and it helps your

learners!

- Leo, Mike, and Andrew

www.learnyourenglish.net
 LYE TEACHER ACCELERATOR PROGRAM

If you are reading this Listening Journal, then you are

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reduce lesson planning by 80%
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work from anywhere

If this sounds like you and you want to learn more,

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 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Step 01 MAKING PREDICTIONS

Step 02 CALIBRATING YOUR EARS

Step 03 LISTENING FOR CONFIRMATION

Step 04 LISTENING FOR DETAILS

Step 05 LISTENING FOR VOCABULARY

Step 06 LISTENING FOR DECODING

Step 07 PERSONALIZING

Bonus REFLECTING ON LISTENING

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STEP 1 - MAKING PREDICTIONS

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 STEP 1 MAKING PREDICTIONS

Before you listen, read the title of the listening.

What questions do you have about this topic?

Based on the title of this talk, what words do I

expect to hear in this listening text?

Read the title carefully - Paying attention to the

keywords (i.e. nouns, adjectives, and verbs). Which
specific details do you think the speaker will
mention. Write down FIVE questions you think will
be answered in this listening?

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STEP 2 - CALIBRATING YOUR EARS

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 STEP 2 CALIBRATING YOUR EARS

When we have a conversation with someone

we know, it is much easier to understand them.
When we watch a show with characters we are
familiar with, we have no problem
understanding them. But what happens when
we listen to someone we have never heard
before? What do you think happens in the first
5 minutes of listening to them? Chances are,
we will not understand them well. For
students, this can be demotivating and can
prevent them from listening and taking risks.

This is why it is important to incorporate a

stage where listeners calibrate their ears. In
listening research this is called
"accommodate" (or 'accommodation'): to
adjust one's speech rate, pronunciation,
vocabulary, and/or grammatical patterns to
resemble those of an interlocutor (Field,
2009).

In most contexts, the listener calibrates and

adjusts to the speaker's words, grammatical
patterns, speed, and clarity of their speech
based on the ability levels of the person, or
people, who are listening to them.

www.learnyourenglish.net
 STEP 2 CALIBRATING YOUR EARS

You are going to click play and ONLY listen to the

first 30 - 60 seconds of the listening. (You can
repeat this process more than once).

Can you understand the speaker easily? Why or

why not? Think about the speaker's age,
nationality, accent, educational background, etc.

You can also consider thee speaker's level of

expertise in the subject matter.

Write your observations here.

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STEP 3 - LISTENING FOR CONFIRMATION

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 STEP 3 LISTENING FOR CONFIRMATION

In the first step of the listening journey, you

used your knowledge of the world and
knowledge of the topic (if any) to prepare
yourself for the listening. You did this by
asking questions that you expect the listening
text will answer. These questions help you
focus your mind in the listening text. Your
brain is simply listening for something that you
have already prepared for. In other words, you
are building meaning before you start
listening. However, this might change as you
start listening.

For this reason, it is important to go back to

the questions you asked and to check your
guesses (or questions) against what was
actually said. This is important because this
confirmation/revision will help you have a
more focused listening experience. Good
listening pedagogy encourages listeners to
build their own hypothesis about the listening
but also ensures that the listener tests these
hypothesis against the evidence being
presented - the listening. A simple way of
doing that is by checking whether the
questions were answered or not - a simple YES
or NO checklist.

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 STEP 3 LISTENING FOR CONFIRMATION

You are going to listen to the whole listening text.

As you listen, remember the questions you asked
(or the expectations and guesses you made).

How many of your questions were answered?

Which ones? Were some of your predictions
correct? Write your answers below.

Which of your questions were not answered? Why?

Find the answers to those questions on the

internet. Write your reflections below.

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STEP 4 - LISTENING FOR DETAILS

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 STEP 4 LISTENING FOR DETAILS

Now, the questions you asked in STEP 3 can be

used to guide your next step in the listening
journey - Listening for Details.

When you listen for details, you are basically

listening for specific information that answers
the question you asked in STEP 1 - Making
Predictions.

The details you will listen to will depend on

the types of questions you asked. For example,
a WHY question usually focuses on a reasons
for something. So, you should listen for words
such as "the reason for this is...", "..because..". A
WHO question often refers to a person, so you
should be listening for a name.

What is important at this stage is that you use

the questions you asked to guide your
listening and write down answers to your
questions.

Also, you can write down other details that you

consider important to remember about the
listening text. These can give you a more
detailed picture of what the listening was
about.

www.learnyourenglish.net
 STEP 4 LISTENING FOR DETAILS

You are going to listen to the listening text again.

This time, you will focus on the details. Look back
at the questions you asked in STEP 1. Write down
the answers to your questions below.

As you listened, you probably noticed that there

were other important details that were not
connected to the questions you asked. Listen
again and this time write down other details that
you think are important to remember about this
listening text.

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STEP 5 - LISTENING FOR VOCABULARY

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 STEP 5 LISTENING FOR VOCABULARY

Any language learner is now aware that

listening is really important for
communication. In this day and age, we are
bombarded with tremendous amounts of
language input via listening - we listen to
podcasts, YouTube videos, music, audio
messages, Instagram messages, to name a few.

This input plays a very important role in

second language acquisition in general and
the development of speaking skills. As
language teachers, it is our goal to think of
how we can help our students learn from this
input both inside and outside the classroom.
This is why it is important to give students a
chance to listen for vocabulary.

When guiding your students to do this, make

sure you encourage them to listen for lexical
phrases and expressions - rather than
individual words - for example, instead of
listening for the word "account" encourage
them to listen for "take into account". Also,
equally important, is the ability to ask your
students to guess the meaning of unknown
words from context clues. This is important
because you are training them to become more
autonomous and develop agency in their
learning.

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 STEP 5 LISTENING FOR VOCABULARY

As you listened to the talk/episode, what words

were new to you? Were there any expressions or
phrases that you learned?

When writing down the new words, make sure to

include:

1. the word/phrase/expression
2. The meaning
3. An example with the word from the episode
4. A dictionary example
5. Your personal example with the word
6. A collocation (word that goes together)

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STEP 6 - LISTENING FOR DECODING

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 STEP 6 LISTENING FOR DECODING

Have you ever had the experience of singing

along to a song you like only to find out later
that you got the words wrong? I used to think
Jimmy Hendrix, in 'Purple Haze', sang "Excuse
me while I kiss this guy." In reality, what he was
really saying was "excuse me while I kiss the
sky".

These funny 'mondegreens' - misinterpretation

of a word or phrase giving it a new meaning -
are fairly common in any language. However,
this has very important implications for the
language classroom.
STEP 6 - LISTENING FOR DECODING
When we listen, there are two processes at
play: meaning building (or top down) and
decoding (or bottom up). ELT has emphasized
the former at the expense of the latter.
Students spend a lot of time activating their
knowledge of the topic, making predictions,
and answering comprehension questions.
Though there's nothing wrong with that, it
simply does not help learners get the whole
picture of what is involved in listening and
there is little to almost no training with the
most challenging one, decoding.

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 STEP 6 LISTENING FOR DECODING

Decoding involves a series of small processes

which include:

identifying the sounds of a word;

figuring out where a word begins and end;
using sentence stress to understand what is
being said; and
recognizing chunks of language.

In this section of the listening journal,

students are encouraged to move away from
only relying on their meaning building (top-
down) processes to using and
S T E P 6 - L I S T E N I N G F O R D E C O
practicing decoding skills. Good listeners do D I N G
make use of both processes to paint the whole
picture of what they are listening to.

We truly believe (and research supports this)

that this decoding practice will prepare
students to cope with the real world of
utterances spoken at rapid speed, words and
sounds joining together, disappearing sounds,
missing syllables, whole chunks of language
being omitted, weak sounds, etc.

www.learnyourenglish.net
 STEP 6 LISTENING FOR DECODING

Now, go back and choose a 40 –60 second piece of

the listening text and write down everything you
hear. This means you will need to listen to this
piece of the listening (at least) more than 3
times.

Try really hard to write down everything – even if

you think the words you wrote down are wrong.
The important thing is to try to push yourself to
hear the sounds in detail.

A good suggestion is to choose a section of the

listening that you found the most interesting
/surprising. (Some listening texts come with a
script. You can compare what you wrote to the
transcript to see how much you really understood)

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STEP 7 - PERSONALIZING

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 STEP 7 PERSONALIZING

If we want our students to become better and

proficient listeners, they will also need - apart
from exposure to tremendous amounts of
listening input - to express their views and
ideas using the knowledge gained throughout
the listening experience.

This last section of the Listening Journal

places the learners' lives at the heart of the
listening (and educational) process. Drawing
on ideas from educational psychology and
experts, such as Maria Montessori and Carl
Rogers, this stage aims to engage learners as
'real people' with a 'real voice' by allowing
them to emotionally and personally connect to
the listening text they were exposed to.

A fundamental motivation behind the

development of this Listening Journal has
been to depart from a teacher-
dominant/centered approach, and to place
instead meaning-focused and personally
relevant practice and interaction between the
listener and the listening text at the centre of
the process. This stage makes language
learning (and listening) personally
meaningful.

www.learnyourenglish.net
 STEP 7 PERSONALIZATION

Now that you have listened to the podcast/video a

few times, it’s time to make this personal. If you
were to describe this video/podcast to a friend,
what would you say about it?

What was it about?

What were the most interesting and surprising
parts?
What did you learn from it?

Can you use any of the information from this

video/episode in your daily life? How?

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BONUS - REFLECTING ON LISTENING

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 BONUS REFLECTING ON LISTENING

This Listening Journal aims at providing an

opportunity for learners to be exposed to
authentic listening both intensively and
extensively. We have seen that during the
extensive section, learners are asked to choose
a listening text of their own liking and are then
asked to prepare for the listening by following
a series of guided activities.

From an intensive perspective, learners move

away from a general and overall message
towards the micro - that is, decoding sounds
and words to help them train their listening
STEP 6 - LISTENING FOR DECODING
abilities.

Finally, this bonus section provides learners

with a sense of agency in that they are asked
to reflect on their listening experience by
describing their own progress and struggles.
In addition, they are also encouraged to
consider areas for improvement, which can be
used as a goal for their next listening
experience.

www.learnyourenglish.net
 BONUS REFLECTIING ON LISTENING

Write a short paragraph reflecting on your

listening experience. How well did you do? What
do you need to do to improve? What goals do you
have for your next listening experience?
Keep this very short.

Self-Assessment
Comment on the following:

The speed of the listening text was OK

The vocabulary was easy to understand
The pronunciation was clear.
This listening helped me with my listening
skills
I feel that my listening skills are improving

www.learnyourenglish.net
 REFERENCES

Field, J. (1998). Skills and strategies: Towards

a new methodology for listening. English
Language Teaching Journal, 52 (2), 110-118

Field, J. (2009). Listening in the Language

Classroom. Cambridge University Press.

Rost, M. (2002). Teaching and Researching

Listening. Harlow: Pearson Education.

Vandergrift, L. (2004). Listening to learn or

learning to listen? Annual Review of Applied
Linguistics 24, 3-25.

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If you are looking for extensive listening practice for your
students, then you should definitely check out our podcast
for language learners - The Cult of Learning.
This is a podcast for learners of language. The episodes
discuss tools, strategies, and ideas for learning how to learn
and provides great opportunities for effective listening
practice.
You can subscribe via your favourite 'podcast player'.

All episodes can also be found on our website:

learnyourenglish.net/podcast

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