Listen – The Gist is in the Detail

Chris Ożóg, IH Chiang Mai

Today’s talk condensed

1. Some background on listening

2. Simple ideas to add to listening lessons

Listening: the learner’s experience?

Two questions to kick things off:

1. Do any of your learners find listening in class difficult?

2. What kinds of things do they say about their listening skills?

Type your answers into the chat box.

What some learners here

Watch the excerpt from the following clip and answer

these questions:

1. What is the relationship between the people?

Probably a couple

2. Is the conversation a happy or difficult one?

Starts well and becomes difficult

3. What is the conversation about?

We really have no idea, but it’s probably

happened before

A teacher comments

“…too accurate. It's so depressing when you have been studying English as a

foreign language for more than 10 years and you try to watch a movie without

subs, and you get this. Only random words, isolated, not enough to know what

the conversation is about, trying to guess what's happening based on the

actors' expressions and voices, and feeling miserable because you're in a

teachers training course, so you're supposed to know, right? Heck, you even

have classes in English! Why can you understand your teachers perfectly, but

not an actual native speaker?!

And when I say depressing, I don't mean the washed-down meaning, I mean

depressing. As in "Gosh, 10 years of my life and I don't understand a thing,

and I'm supposed to teach this stuff? Maybe I'm just not cut out for this. Maybe

I should learn fishing, save a lot and buy myself a boat. What am I going to do

with my life?"

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vt4Dfa4fOEY&google_comment_id=z13fd51gltvnjt14n04cf1wwstmierzhifw

Filling in from context – a puzzle

@Victoria Boobyer, ELTPics

Interaction

Context Co-text Top-down Processing

Interpretation of meaning

So how do we understand when we listen?

Bottom-up processing (decoding

Receptive or passive skills?

Or the what-on-earth-do-listening-and-reading-have-in-

common-anyway problem

@Jeffrey Doonan, ELTPics @Sandy Millen, ELTPics

Aspects of Listening

Here’s some points about listening that make it very different from

reading:

• Speech disappears immediately

• Body language, lip-reading, situation

• Unscripted, spontaneous speech

o Fillers, pauses, diversions, interaction, cooperation, false starts, breakdowns, repair,

spoken discourse markers, imprecise language

o The lack of complete grammatical sentences

• Words are not separated – continuous stream of speech

• Sound changes occur due to the nature of speech

o elision, assimilation, catenation

• Citation forms are largely irrelevant

• Language is not the same as written language (Steven Pinker talk -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-B_ONJIEcE)

Typical classroom procedures

Pre-listening

• Set context

• Pre-teach lexis

While listening

• Listen for gist

• Listen for detail

• Peer check

• Confirm answers

Post-listening

• Related speaking or writing task

• Language work from the text

• Put text away, move on, go home

@Linda Pospisilova, ELTPics

A typical coursebook listening sequence

Does this match

with the previous

description of a

lesson procedure?

Materials do not fully

support teachers in

helping learners listen

better as they focus on

comprehension

exercises and not so

much decoding

Cunningham, S. and Moor, P. Cutting Edge Intermediate . 2001. Longmann

An updated set of procedures?

Pre-listening

• Set context

• Encourage prediction

• Play the first few lines to ‘prime’ or ‘normalise’ or ‘tune in’

While listening

• Gist/detail/specific information

• Monitor very closely for what is causing difficulties

• Ask learners what they had difficulties with

• Help them see that getting Qs wrong is an opportunity to improve

• Use this as diagnostic

Remedial Listening Work

• Work on areas of difficulty

• Play short sections again

• Use audio for short dictations

• Focus on connected speech and other aspects of decoding

• Use the tapescript to encourage noticing

• Perhaps do some drilling

Post-listening

• A productive task

• A reflective task

• Language work

Some remedial activities

1. Transcribing a section of difficulty

2. Counting the number of words

3. Degrees of simplification

4. Noticing in the text

5. Write what you hear and build up

6. Focus on interactional elements

Transcribing a section of difficulty

1. Exactly as it says on the tin

2. Monitor and find out which parts of

the listening text caused the most

problems

3. Cue the audio and play it again (no

more than 10 seconds)

4. Learners write everything they hear

and try to write exactly what is said

5. Peer check to help

6. Repeat as necessary

7. Show tapescript / board answer

8. Raise learners’ awareness of why

this was difficult

@Sandymillin, ELTPics

Counting the number of words

1. Play or read a section of

the audio again

2. Learners must count the

number of words they hear

3. Peer check

4. Play/read again

5. Peer check

6. Repeat as necessary

7. Reveal answer and

discuss difficulties,

highlighting connected

speech

@AlexandraGuzik, ELTPics

Degrees of simplification

1. Choose a section of the text with

some dense connected speech

2. Model it and learners write what they

hear (in phonemics if they know)

3. Repeat, but gradually give a fuller

version, e.g. (from page 175)

/wɒstaɪm/

/wɒsətaɪm/

/wɒtsətaɪm/

/wɒtsðətaɪm/

/wɒtɪzðətaɪm/

4. Discuss the sound changes and

implications for listening

Noticing in the text

Notice the typical listening

procedure and then exercise

3, which focuses on an

element of decoding.

We can add exercises like this

to our lessons with very little

preparation and through using

the tapescript. Focus on

stress, linking, assimilation,

elision and so forth.

Face2Face Pre-intermediate

Write what you hear and build up

A different lesson idea to try

1. Tell the learners they are going to

listen to you or an audio track and

let them know the topic

2. Learners predict words/themes they

might here

3. Listen to first part of the text and

learners write down any words they

here

4. Compare in groups and guess what

was said, make inferences, etc. Try

to build up meaning

5. Repeat with later parts of the text

@Sandymillin, ELTPics

Reflects typical listening processes in real-life interaction,

with learners drawing on both top-down and bottom up

elements to build meaning as they go.

Focus on spoken discourse elements

A. What was that, that, um, thing you watched last night then?

B. Oh, it’s a new show, police drama sorta thing…

A. Ah y’mean like CSI?

B. … yeah, actually, quite like that, yeah, but it’s set somewhere

else I think. But like you’ve got CSIs all over the place now, so like

I’m not totally sure, now that I think about it.

@aClilToClimb, ELTPics

Note the points in

red in the

conversation – why

do you think I’ve

highlighted them?

Aspects of Listening

• Unscripted, spontaneous speech

o Fillers, pauses, diversions, interaction, cooperation, false starts, breakdowns, repair,

spoken discourse markers, imprecise language

o The lack of complete grammatical sentences

• Words are not separated – continuous stream of speech

• Sound changes occur due to the nature of speech

o elision, assimilation, catenation

• Citation forms are largely irrelevant

• Language is not the same as written language (Steven Pinker talk -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-B_ONJIEcE)

A. What was that, that, um, thing you watched last night then?

B. Oh, it’s a new show, police drama sorta thing…

A. Ah y’mean like CSI?

B. … yeah, actually, quite like that, yeah, but it’s set somewhere

else I think. But like you’ve got CSIs all over the place now, so like

I’m not totally sure, now that I think about it.

In Sum

Adding some elements to listening lessons

1. Comprehension but…

2. … add an element of decoding

3. Make listening exercises diagnostic

4. Help with difficult areas of the text by breaking them down

5. And keep going as you are because…

6. … helping learners get the gist, might all be in the detail

Thank you for listening!

Listen – The Gist is in the Detail

Chris Ożóg, IH Chiang Mai

E-mail: ozog.chris@gmail.com

Facebook: Chris Ozog

Twitter: @chrisozog

Blog: www.eltreflection.wordpress.com