Teaching Listening

Listening and speaking are the language Skills that are used most frequently. It has been estimated that students spend almost half their communication time listening. In our classroom, students listen more than they read or write. But in real life, listening is used 40 %, speaking only 30%. (slide N 3)

why do we listen to others?. there are many purposes for listening, some of which are: listening for sounds, for meaning, for comprehension, for a specific idea, and for pleasure.

Listening involves a sender, a message, and a receiver (the listener). It also involves a canal and a code. When someone says something, it goes first to the ear, then to the brain to analyze it. then the brain sends another message to the mouth to answer. Listening to someone else and trying to make out what s/he says becomes difficult when s/he speaks a second or foreign language.

Listening strategies refer to the way the listener tries to understand the message. there are actually two strategies: Top-down strategies and Bottom-up strategies. Top-down strategies start from the generral to the specific. The listener taps into background knowledge of the topic, the situation or context, the type of text, and the language. This background knowledge activates a set of expectations that help the listener to interpret what is heard and anticipate what will come next. Top-down strategies include
* listening for the main idea
* predicting
* drawing inferences
* summarizing

Bottom-up strategies are text based; the listener relies on the language in the message, that is, the combination of sounds, words, and grammar that creates meaning. Bottom-up strategies include:
* listening for specific details
* recognizing cognates
* recognizing word-order patterns

Some exercises for top-down processing are the following: use key words to construct background ideas; understand roles in a situation; isolate details from important ideas and understand intention in conversation. For bottom-up processing, we can use the following exercises. recognize word boudries (where a word ends and the other begins); distinguish key words; recognize word order in a sentence and interpret stress and intonation.

The class was not only theory, Mrs Detzel Deborah introduced us to some exercises especiallythe ones on Indonesian vocabulary and the story. we aslo raised the question about whether teachers test the listening ability or the students memory.