Page 75 - Teaching English at Primary Level: From Theory into the Classroom

Developing Listening

meaning of a text and in trying to do so rely on their background knowledge.
Examples of tasks which are based on top-down listening are using context
clues to interpret the main idea or making predictions (Nunan, 2015).
A number of activities in the YLs classroom are aimed at developing
top-down listening strategies. As they watch cartoons, listen to songs and
rhymes, try to follow the teacher’s instructions in experiments and projects,
YLs usually listen for overall meaning. In practice, however, it is hard to dis-
tinguish the two processes and learners often alternate between bottom-up
and top-town processing strategies. For example, in the activity dictogloss,
learners first just listen to a text and later reconstruct it in pairs. They first use
bottom-up strategies as they listen for key words, but as they later discuss
what they have heard in order to reconstruct the meaning of the text, they
also use top-down processing.

Pre-Listening, While-Listening, Post-Listening
There are different ways of making learners engaged in a listening activity.
First of all, we need to organise the listening activity in such a way as to
actively involve the learners. This can be done by preparing different pre-
listening, while-listening and post-listening activities (Nunan, 2015). For exam-
ple, before reading a story aloud to the pupils, we can ask them to make
clever guesses and predict what will happen by giving them pictures of the
main actions and asking them to organise them in the right sequence. While
they listen to the story, they put the actions in the correct order. As a post-
listening activity, we can ask them to work in pairs, mix up the pictures and
try to reconstruct the story.
However, some authors (Field, 2002) argue that the standard format of
three stages is not necessarily the only option. For example, there is a widely
held belief among teachers that before the actual listening activity, it is nec-
essary to spend some time on pre-teaching the key vocabulary. Field (2002)
argues that if we want to recreate a real-life situation in the classroom, it is
not sensible to explain all the unknown words in advance, only some ‘criti-
cal’ words which are indispensable for the comprehension of the text. In this
way, we can also teach the learners an important strategy, i.e. guessing the
meaning of the unknown words from the context. The main objective of the
pre-listening stage is therefore to (p. 243):

1. providesufficientcontexttomatchwhatwouldbeavailableinrealtime;
2. create motivation (such as by asking learners to speculate on what they
will hear).

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