[ELTWeekly Volume 8, Issue 4 | January 27, 2016 | ISSN 0975-3036]
Our discussion so far has dealt with one perspective on listening, namely, listening as comprehension. Everything we have discussed has been based on the assumption that the role of listening in a language program is to help develop learners’ abilities to understand things they listen to.
This approach to teaching of listening is based on the following assumptions:
- Listening serves the goal of extracting meaning from messages.
- To do this, learners have to be taught how to use both bottom-up and top-down processes to understand messages.
- The language of utterances – the precise words, syntax, and expressions – used by speakers are temporary carriers of meaning. Once meaning is identified, there is no further need to attend to the form of messages unless problems in understanding occurred.
- Teaching listening strategies can help make learners more effective listeners.
Tasks employed in classroom materials enable listeners to recognize and act on the general, specific, or implied meaning of utterances. These tasks include sequencing, true-false comprehension, picture identification, summarizing, and dicto comp as well as activities designed to develop effective listening strategies