This document summarizes different types of listening and strategies for developing listening skills. It discusses global listening vs selective listening. It also outlines top-down listening vs bottom-up listening and describes an interactive model. Finally, it provides examples of listening exercises for different proficiency levels from novice to advanced and the processing goals for each level.

1. By: Pat Wilcox Peterson
(Reported by: Dinah Jill Galleros)

2. GLOBAL listening SELECTIVE listening
Getting the main point Waiting
of for a
what we are listening to. specific item

3. Listening

4.  Bottom-up
Grammar
• Text-based
Body
Sounds
Language
Meaningful  The listener relies on the
Information
language in the message
Phrases Words

5. Top-down: Prior
knowledge
Prediction
•Listener-based Grammar
•The use of Body
Sounds
background Language
Meaningful
knowledge in Information
understanding the
meaning of the
Phrases Words
message
Experience Context

6. Top-Down listening Bottom-up listening
 Over lunch, your friend  That evening, another
tells you a story about a friend calls to invite you
recent holiday, which to a party at her house
was a disaster. You listen the following Saturday.
with interest and As you’ve never been to
interject at appropriate her house before, she
moments, maybe to gives you directions. You
express surprise or listen carefully and take
sympathy. notes.

7.  Interactive:
Prediction Experience
Grammar
 Combination of the
two previous models
Body
Sounds
Language
Meaningful
Information
 Using of both prior
knowledge and
linguistic knowledge in
Phrases Words
understanding
messages.
Context Prior
knowledge

8. Processing Goals and Exercise Types

9.  Also known as the novice stage
 Undeveloped linguistic categories
 Development of positive attitudes towards is critical
 Can be found in EFL classes for immigrants to English-
speaking countries

10.  Discriminate between intonation contours in
sentences
 Discriminate between phonemes
 Listen for morphological endings
 Recognize syllable patterns, number of syllables and
word phrases
 Be aware of sentence fillers in informal speech
 Select details from the text

11.  Discriminate between emotional reactions
 Get the gist or main idea of the passage
 Recognize the topic

12.  Use speech features to decide if a statement is formal
or informal
 Recognize a familiar word and relate it to a category
 Compare information in memory with incoming
information
 Compare information that you hear with your own
experience

13.  Listening: to increase their vocabulary
 Can retain longer phrases and sentences
 Are ready to practice more discourse level skills

14.  Differentiate between content and function words by
stress pattern
 Find the stress syllable
 Recognize words with reduced vowels or dropped
syllables
 Recognize words as they are linked in the speech
stream
 Recognize pertinent details in the speech stream

15.  Discriminate between registers of speech and tones of
voice
 Listen to identify the speaker of a topic
 Find main ideas or supporting details
 Make inferences

16.  Use word stress to understand the speaker’s intent
 Recognize missing grammar markers in colloquial
speech and reconstruct the message
 Use context and knowledge of the world to build
listening expectations; listen to confirm expectations

17.  Listening: to learn about the content of other language
areas
 Can listen to materials with longer contents
 Vast vocabulary
 More skilled in reading than in listening

18.  Use features of sentence stress and intonation to identify
important intonation for note-taking
 Recognize contractions, reduced forms, and other characteristics
of spoken English that differ from the written form
 Become aware of common performance slips that must be
reinterpreted or ignored
 Become aware of organizational cues in lecture test
 Become aware of lexical and suprasegmental markers for
definitions
 Identify specific forms of information

19.  Use knowledge of the topic to predict the content of
the text
 Use introduction to the lecture to predict its focus and
direction
 Use the lecture transcript to predict the content of the
next section
 Find the main idea of the lecture segment
 Recognize point of view

20.  Use knowledge of phrases and discourse markers to
predict the content in the next segment of lecture
 Make inferences about the text

21.  Vandergrift, L. (2002). Listening: theory and practice in modern foreign
language competence. Center for Languages, Linguistics & Area Studies.
Retrieved from http://www.llas.ac.uk/resources/gpg/67
 http://www.nclrc.org/essentials/listening/stratlisten.htm
 http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/articles/listening-top-down-bottom
 http://www.helsinki.fi/kksc/alms/listen.html