Teaching listening is a very important skill that we have to teach it appropriately. In this case, we should teach listening in real-life situation, so children will learn in the best way. Therefore, we are going to take into account some features connected to real-life situations.
We have to know some characteristics when we are going to design listening text. The most common kind of spoken discourse is informal speech, the listening texts should present some features of improvise spontaneous speech. The good interaction between the speaker and the listener is essential. Both parts can usually each other and there is interaction between them. For this reason, we could improvise some listening texts, using videos is also a useful way to overcome the problem of lack of visual environment that audio recording present. Finally, we have to take into account the single listening and as we have seen in real-life situations, the listener listens to the discourse just time. For this reason, it is necessary that the discourse has enough repetitions and redundancy, so pupils could understand better and get the necessary information.
If we are going to create listening task, we should know what types of expectation we want. It is useful if learners know the topic or something related to the text. We should explain some aspects of the listening. Listeners should respond in an intermittent way during the listening, since these intermittent answers are natural in real-life conversations. Sometimes, there is not enough repetition and redundancy.
We have to know the learners´ problems, for this reason I am going to describe some of these problems in listening. One of them is trying to understand every single word, this promoting comprehension. But not always it is not necessary knowing all words. Another feature is the fast natural speech, this means that informal speech is usually fast and sometimes unclear. For this reason, we should repeat some things when children need it. The tiredness is other problem when they do listening. Therefore, we have to avoid very long listening and we can also stop several times the recording or listening text. Finally, learners sometimes feel overload, because of there is too much information and they cannot cope with the task.
We can focus listening in different ways; these ways are “casual” listening and “focused” listening. We can find the casual listening when we do it without a particular aim and it is not necessary concentrate on it much. On the other hand, if we have an aim, we are going to concentrate more and this is the case of “focused” listening. Focused listening is the type of listening that we usually do in the classroom. There is another kind of listening, a listening task focuses children´s attention and help them to listen. For this reason, we can use guiding questions, since these questions are also aimed at focusing children´s attention and helping them to understand what kinds of things they are going to listen.
As I said before, listening is difficult for children, therefore, as teacher we have to facilitate the listening for them. The repetition is necessary, because if you do not understand something when you listen, if you listen again, you could understand more things. Besides, listening requires hard concentration. Young children have short attention span. Because of this, we have to pay attention on it and help children doing according to their level. If children listen to a dialogue, teacher can help them in different ways. Teacher can present some questions and also vocabulary about the dialogue; students are provided with guiding questions before listening to the dialogue; and students can listen to the dialogue twice.
As teachers, we should encourage children to use listening strategies; we can fin predicting and guessing meaning as examples of listening strategies. In the case of predicting, pupils should guess what they are going to listen to. They can make some predictions about the general topic or specific details. On the other hand, if we talk about guessing meaning from the text, the meaning of unknown vocabulary can be worked out by the children if they pay attention to the context.
In listening activities, there are three stages: Pre-listening (it means what we do before listening to motivate and contextualize students); While-listening (activities of this stage are carried out during the listening); and Post-listening (these activities are done after listening).
Listening has different purposes, these are: to calm students down when they are noisy; to stimulate them when they are bored; to improve pronunciation, intonation, vocabulary, etc; to encourage children to interact with others; to reinforce concepts that we have previously seen in other subjects; and to improve concentration span and memory. There are many types of listening activities: Listen and repeat, listen and discriminate, listen and perform activities, listen and draw and colour, etc.
To sum up, listening skill is essential for everyone, because we start listening when we are young. Besides, for the future it is indispensable to create a good base to develop pronunciation, learn vocabulary, learn to listen properly, etc. We have to provide to children some tools to do listening in an appropriate way.
