Listening

(see also Lectures)

Listening Skills and Strategies
Listening, like all four language skills, can be broken down into skills and strategies.

Skills, like abilities, can refer to the following:


 * following conversations (pairs or group discussion)
 * understanding main ideas
 * understanding details
 * understanding how details relate to main ideas
 * understanding relationships e.g. cause/effect
 * making notes e.g. in lectures (could also be a strategy)
 * understanding faster speech
 * understanding a variety of accents
 * interpreting or inferring meaning e.g. recognising sarcasm, bias, etc
 * understanding and responding to unexpected statements and/or questions
 * ability to understand illocutionary forces (e.g., invitations, offers, suggestions, and so forth)

Strategies are ways to achieve or help with the above; a common way to consider them is from top down: the idea of this is that 'down' refers to the level of detail or micro elements of a spoken text. In general the list below goes from macro to micro or top, down.


 * predicting what will happen in a text
 * thinking about your purpose for listening
 * considering the type of 'text' and what you know about what type of information and functions will occur
 * linking information to background knowledge
 * visualising or linking to experiences
 * paying attention to discourse markers (key phrases/signposting) that highlight the role of information preceding or following
 * thinking about why and how
 * thinking about what, who, when, where
 * paying attention to emphasised/prominent words
 * guessing grammar and functional words
 * paraphrasing what is said, perhaps simplifying it
 * making notes (to help you concentrate, to help you remember, etc)

Some terminology to consider when thinking about listening difficulties
Top-down approaches to listening - many (or even most) of the strategies above are linked to top-down approaches to meaning building; examples include using knowledge of text type, background knowledge, and in some ways is comparable to gist reading i.e. focussing on the general idea by linking the language you do recognise to the text, context, background knowledge.

Bottom-up approaches to listening - this is often linked to process listening i.e. focus on decoding and building up an ability to more efficiently and effectively link form and meaning; for example, features of connected speech like liaison, instrusion, and elision can make it hard for listeners to identify the individual words in an utterance (e.g. wha didzhu weet = what did you eat).

Listening by level
It is very easy in the age of the internet to find anything in any language to listen to. However, it can be harder finding things tailored for particular levels. One approach can be to listen to exam tasks from English level tests such as FCE and CAE.

The ELLLO website has audios tailored for particular levels.

Bottom-up decoding activities
Underlying the aims of most practice is to improve automaticity and reduce the amount of time you need to think - which in listening results in processing lag. Some common advice for such practice is to work on decoding short utterances often e.g. through dictation type activities like transcribing or doing gap fills. Shadow reading can also be helpful to improve awareness of the link between written form and spoken pronunciation across utterances.

Resources for a variety of listening genres
Genre tends to refer to types or modes of communication with socially-agreed-upon conventions Thus, we could say that listening to documentaries, chat shows, and soaps would give practice of very different genres. For example, a chat show is a type of interview with the social convention expected that one person will mostly ask questions while another or others will mostly answer. The best place to find a variety of genres is TV. Watching TV can be an extremely valuable practice of many of the skills listed above with patterns and cues present that can heavily influence the difficulty of performing the skills. For example, in chat shows we would expect faster speech than in a documentary where information needs to be presented clearly.

If you are studying at a UK university you should have access to https://learningonscreen.ac.uk/ondemand/ which enables you to watch or record UK television programmes. Many of the programmes have transcripts that you can follow.

There are practice activities for several genres at the BBC site here https://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org/skills/listening/upper-intermediate-b2

Try some practice exercises focussed on academic style contexts at http://www.uefap.net/listening

Some suggestions for note-taking https://www.port.ac.uk/student-life/help-and-advice/study-skills/research-reading-referencing-and-citation/helpful-abbreviations-for-speedy-note-taking

Presentations, Lectures, Podcasts (see also Lectures)
BBC Worldservice

In a slightly similar vein to BBC Worldservice, podcasts on academic sites and blogs can be a nice alternative to lectures, although some podcasts are effectively lectures. Other podcasts can be discussions and interviews. University of Chicago have many contemporary topics with an academic perspective.

https://bigthink.com/ and https://www.ted.com/talks are two popular locations for topics for the educated listener and often have closed captions and/or transcripts.

the Economist, a UK news and current affairs style publication (not necessarily about economics) has a youtube channel.

For a more science focus, the Naked Scientists has podcasts on a variety of accessible science topics. Covering more subject areas, there are many introductory level video presentations through OER Commons.

BBC's podcast section allows you to choose genres/categories of radio content e.g. Radio 4 news. If you want to try the BBC a little more tailored for language learners, try the https://www.bbc.co.uk/learningenglish/english/features/news-report page for news stories including questions.

You can access many radio stations all over the world via http://radio.garden/