Listening

Novice listeners often have a long way to go before they can enjoy the ability and agility of the expert listener. What problems do they experience and how can we nudge them in the right direction?

Students’ transcriptions of listening texts are a rich source of information, revealing the listening processes each individual has used to understand what has been said. In this workshop, we’ll look at various examples of ‘mishearings’ and identify possible causes. Finally, we’ll exchange ideas on how such insights could help us develop students’ listening skills.

In this session we’ll be trying out several listening activities. They all serve to help raise our awareness to the listening processes we employ and, simultaneously, demonstrate ways we can make the fruits of listening activities available for classroom inspection and reflection.

In this talk, we’ll see how the evidence of the ears can be influenced and thus is not as stable as we suppose. Having said that, an expert listener successfully employs a range of processes in order to understand what’s being said, but, obviously, it’s not so easy for the non-expert listener.

At the beginning of the workshop, participants will do a paused transcription activity to bring the listening processes employed by expert listeners to a level of consciousness. Expert listeners usually understand what they hear with a seemingly high degree of automaticity and lack of effort.

Findings of research into the processing of spoken language point to the constructive nature of listening. In this talk, we’ll look at how L1 listening comprehension is influenced by various elements and compare this to the L2 listening endeavour. We’ll also exchange ideas on how we could possibly exploit this information when teaching listening to adults.