Types of Classroom Listening Performance

There are hundreds of possible techniques available for teaching listening skills, but it will be helpful for you to think in terms of several listening performance.
Sometimes these types of performance are embedded in a broader technique or task, and sometimes they are themselves the sum total of the activity of a technique. The types Brown (2007) mentions are:

 Learners simply listen to the surface structure of an utterance for the purpose of repeating it back to you. It requires little meaningful processing. It involves a minor aspect of an interactive, communicative purpose. The role of the listener is merely a tape recorder (Nunan, 1991).

 Focused on components: phonemes, words, intonation, discourse markers, etc. It requires bottom-up skills (processing proceed from sounds to words to grammatical relationships to lexical meanings, etc., to a final message) Examples: Students listen for cues in choral/individual drills. Teacher repeats a word/sentence several times to imprint it in the students mind. Students listen and notice a specific element, such as intonation, stress, contraction, a grammatical structure, etc.
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Tasks for assessing intensive listening:

Distinguishing phonemic pairs (grass-glass; leave-live) Distinguishing morphological pairs (miss-missed) Distinguishing stress patterns (I can go; I cant go) Phrase recognition (I come from Taiwan; I am Taiwanese) Repetition (student repeats a word)

Students task is to process the teacher talk/audio immediately and to fashion an appropriate reply.

Tasks for assessing responsive listening:

Asking questions (How are you today? What did you do last night?) Giving commands (Take a sheet of paper and pencil.) Seeking clarification (What was the word you said?) Checking comprehension (How many people were in the elevator when the power went out?)

 Students scan the material selectively (usually in longer stretches of discourse) for certain information. Students need to be able to find important information in a field of potentially distracting information.

Type of material used:

Speeches Media broadcasts Stories and anecdotes Long conversations

You can ask students to listen for: Peoples names Dates Certain facts or events Location, situation, context, etc. Main ideas or conclusion Tasks for assessing selective listening: Listening cloze (Ss fill in the blanks) Verbal information transfer (Ss give multiple choice verbal response) Picture-cued information transfer (Ss chose a picture) Chart completion (Ss fill in a grid) Sentence repetition (Ss repeat stimulus sentence)

It aims to develop a top-down (concerned of the activation of schemata, with global understanding)

Type of material used:

Speeches Media broadcasts Stories and anecdotes Long conversations It may require the student to invoke other interactive skills (e.g., note taking and/or discussion)

Tasks for assessing selective listening: Dictation (Ss listen (usually 3 times) and write a paragraph Dialogue (Ss hear diologue multiple choice comprehension questions) Lecture (Ss take notes, summarize, list main points, etc.) Interpretive tasks (Ss hear a poem interpret meaning) Stories narrative (Ss retell the story)

 It can include all five types as the learner participates in discussions, debates, conversations, role plays and other pair or group work.
It must be integrated with speaking (and perhaps other) skills in the authentic give and take of communication interchange.

 Buck, G. (2001) Assessing Listening. Cambridge Language Assessment. Cambridge University Press. Brown, D. (2007) Teaching by Principles. An Interactive Approach to Language Pedagogy. Pearson. . San Francisco State University.