Techniques for improving listening skills FOR gifted students at Foreign Language Specializing School - College of Foreign Languages - VIETNAM National University, HANOI

PART ONE : INTRODUCTION
1. RATIONALE OF THE STUDY
It can not be denied that English is the international medium in the fields of science,
technology, culture ,education , economy and so on . It is also considered a means to
promote mutual understanding and cooperation between Vietnam and other countries . It is
widely seen as the key language toll in the integrating process in the world . With the rapid
development and expansion of informational technologies , there needs to be a common
language for people of all countries to exchange information with each other and it is English
that is used as a means of international communication. Therefore, there has been an
explosion in the need of teaching and learning English all over the world.
In Vietnam in recent years the number of people who wish to know and master
English has become more and more increasing, especially since Vietnam adopted an open-
door policy , teaching and learning English have been paid much attention to. English has
been part of the general education . It becomes a compulsory subject at high schools in most
towns and cities through out the country. Moreover , each city or province there is a
specializing school for gifted students at several subjects such as maths , literature , physics,
chemistry and foreign languages especially English. Among these schools is the Foreign
Language Specializing School, College of Foreign Languages, Vietnam National University.
However, the teaching and learning process in FLSS seems to still focus too much on
grammar, structures and vocabularies. Our students are very good at doing exercises of
written forms, these forms of exercises mostly concern grammar , reading or writing
comprehension. The consequence is that students have much difficulty in listening.
Listening skill seems to be the most difficult to our students. We all know that in
order to learn a foreign language successfully, students should be helped to develop four
skills : listening , speaking , reading and writing. These four skills are closely interrelated to
one another and they all necessary. Of the four skills, listening is regarded as a prerequisite
to understand what is being said and to pick up the general idea of what is being discussed.
In our professional and personal life there will be situations where we will hear and have to
absorb a lot of details, facts and figures and then extract some points from
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them. In our private life we may wish to listen to talks in English about subjects we are

interested in and wish to consolidate what we have learnt in order to progress to other and
more difficult areas. Thus , it is possible to give students the chance to practise what they
have learnt in the way listening to spoken English. To listen successfully to spoken English
language need be able to work out what speakers mean when they use particular words in
particular ways on particular occasion and not to simply understand the words themselves.
As I am one of the teachers of English of this school. I would like to do something
with the hope of improving listening skill for our students and as a result, the thesis title goes
as :
“Techniques for improving listening skills of gifted students of Foreign Language
Specializing School, College of Foreign Languages, Hanoi National University.”
2. AIMS OF THE STUDY
The purpose of this study is to investigate the difficulties in listening which the
students at FLSS encounter so that some effective techniques can be given to help them
improve this skill.
These are the specific aims :
- investigating the students’ attitudes at FLSS towards listening
- finding out the difficulties encountered by the students
- suggesting techniques with the hope of helping the students improve the ability of
listening
3. SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY
This study may provide insights into the process of learning listening comprehension
skill for the students. It may play a crucial role in enhancing listening skill to the students at
FLSS, CFL, HNU.
4. SCOPE OF THE STUDY
Though the study focuses on techniques to improve listening skill for gifted students at
FLSS, CFL, HNU, due to the limitation of page numbers of the minor thesis, the researcher
can only conduct a survey on the students of 10
th
and 11
th

form to identify listening problems
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experienced by the students, after that suggest some techniques to help them better in
learning listening.
5. METHOD OF THE STUDY
In order to achieve the aims mentioned above, quantitative method is used and the
following tasks have to be done:
- doing a survey on the learning listening to English from 200 students of 10
th
and 11
th
form at FLSS ( except for students of 12
th
form as there are no listening lessons for 12
th
form
students )
- collecting data for the analysis
- assessing the difficulties
- evaluating the best techniques that are most suitable
6. DESIGN OF THE SDTUDY
This minor thesis consists of three parts:
Part one, “INTRODUCTION”, presents the rationale, the aims , the method, subject and
design of the study. It expresses the reason why the author decided to choose this study and
the methods for the fulfillment of the study.
Part two, “DEVELOPMENT”, is divided into three chapters :
- Chapter one presents the concepts relevant to the research topic such as different point
of views of listening comprehension skill, the importance, classification of listening,
difficulties in learning listening and three stages of listening session .
- Chapter two deals with analyses on general learning situation at FLSS, learning

requirements, teachers and teaching methods, materials as well as material assessments. Also
in this chapter there is a focus on data collection, findings and discussion.
- Chapter three emphasizes the implication of the study in which certain techniques for
improving listening skills to the students at FLSS are suggested.
Part three, “CONCLUSION”, summarizes the key issues in the study, points out the
limitations and provides some suggestions for the further study
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PART TWO : DEVELOPMENT
CHAPTER ONE: LITERATURE REVIEW
1.1. INTRODUCTION
To provide a theoretical background to the study, this chapter is devoted to the
reexamination of concepts most relevant to the thesis’s topic. Firstly come the different
points of view about listening comprehension. Secondly the importance and classification of
listening comprehension are discussed. Thirdly the potential problems in learning listening
are also referred to. Finally there is a discussion of three stages of the listening session.
1.2. LISTENING COMPREHENSION
1.2.1 Traditional point of view.
There are some traditional views that listening is considered a passive language skill
along side the reading skill. It means that learners are almost passive in practising listening
activities in the classroom. Learners just hear what they are to listen without paying
sufficient attention in the discourse such as the background knowledge of the speakers as
well as their intentions, attitude , implication and other shades of meaning etc. The learners
mainly hear the message, they only try to elicit the meaning from the individual syntactic
and semantic components of the utterance and the manner in which it is spoken. This leads
to the result that it is hard for the learners to communicate. Having this attitude, the teacher
often conducts the lesson as “tested” listening comprehension rather than teaching it. The
method of testing the comprehension of the learners is based on the ability to remember the
utterance, which they have just heard. Obviously, this method is not effective as the ability to
remember the utterance does not mean that the listener can understand the message. Just like
a child who is good at remembering songs and poems, but he does not know what they are

about. In fact the learners are not provided enough information about what they are going to
hear before the tape plays and they cope with a wide range of problems while they are
listening and the result is that they can not get any listening experience from the teacher.
1.2.2. Present point of view.
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For the past few years some present studies on listening comprehension have to come
to another view in which the role of the listeners is thought to be active, but not passive any
more. Listening is really a receptive skill along side reading skill.
According to Littlewood (1981), listening demands active involvement from the hearer. In
order to construct the message that the speaker intends , the hearer must actively contribute
knowledge from both linguistic and nonlinguistic sources. Only by applying the knowledge
of the language , can the hearer divide the continuous stream of sound into meaningful units
and only by comparing these units with the shared knowledge between himself and the
speaker , can the hearer interpret their meaning. The nature of listening comprehension
means that the hearer should be encouraged to engage in an active process of listening for
meanings, using not only the linguistic cues but also has nonlinguistic knowledge.
From the point of view of Broughton (1978). Listening is divided into intensive and
extensive listening. Extensive listening is related to the freer, more general listening to
natural English, not necessarily under the direct guidance of the teacher whereas intensive
listening is much more concerned with just one or two specific points.
Mary Underwood (1989) divides the aural process into 3 stages and Clark (1977)
divides it into 4 stages but generally they have the same idea. There are two levels activities
of the aural process. The two levels of this activity are recognition and selection. The first
level is that the structure and the relationship between syntax and phonology of the language
are recognized. At the first stage , the sounds go into a sensory store called the “ echoic
memory”. “ Echoic memory” is just the short term memory because there is continuous
arrival of new information before the listener has opportunity to deal with it. That is why
there is the following stage which is called “selection”. In this stage, the listener selects what
he finds most interesting or important or comprehensible in the utterance. At this point,
words or groups of words are checked and compared with information already held in the

long term memory and the meaning is extracted from them (Mary Underwood, Teaching
Listening, p.2). When the meaning is grasped , the actual words of the spoken discourse are
generally forgotten and only the meaning is retained. Therefore, the listener usually
remember the meaning rather than the exact words spoken when he has to recall what have
been heard. The basis of listening comprehension is the ability to recognize and select the
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specific details in the discourse. It, of course, needs a certain time for the learners to become
used to listening and process some familiar utterances more automatically.
Aderson and Lynch ( Listening ,1995, Oxford University Press) have another point of
view. They consider the listener as active model builder. They say that in order to listen
successfully we have to construct our own “coherent interpretation” of any spoken message.
Both parts of this term are important. First , it needs to be coherent both with what we
believe has just been said and with what we already know about the speaker, the context, and
the word in general. Second, it is an interpretation, in the sense that it is our version of what
the speaker meant, as far as we are able to assess that meaning. The two authors use the term
“ mental modal” to refer to the listener’s “ coherent interpretation” . This emphasizes the
active and personal nature of successful listening. The mental model that we build as a
representation of a spoken message is the result of our combining the new information in
what we just heard with our previous knowledge and experience.
In short, in order to be successful in listening, we should remember that : “ Listening
comprehension is not a skill which can be mastered once and for all and then ignored while
other skills are developed. There must be regular practice with increasingly difficult
material."(Rivers Wilga , M.(1986) Teaching Foreign Language Skill., The University of
Chicago Press, p. 157).
1.3. THE IMPORTANCE OF LISTENING
It is now widely accepted that oral communication can not take place without
listening and listening plays a central and possibly predominant part in the whole process of
language learning. Listening, speaking, reading and writing are the four skills of parts of that
“indivisible range called communication”. They are interrelated and interdependent .
According to Pearson Ian. (1981), The Functional Notional Approach in Language Teaching,

p. 80 , listening is tied to the essential cognitive elements of comprehension and
understanding. In order to take part in oral communication, clearly, the first thing anyone
must have is the ability to absorb the pieces of information from the speaker by listening.
When nobody listens to a speaker or when a listener fails to understand the message,
communication is considered unsuccessful. Moreover , listening is an important way of
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acquiring the language , a good way of picking up vocabulary and structures. Teaching
listening to spoken language is ,therefore, of primary importance .
“ Teaching the comprehension of spoken language is therefore of primary importance if the
communication aim is to be achieved.” ( Wilga.M.Rivers, Teaching Foreign Language
Skills, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago & London, 1968, p. 135.)
1.3.1. Mother – tongue listening
It is assumed that people can listen in their mother-tongue with little or no effort.
From very young, we can understand at least the gist of what is heard. This is resulted by a
number of factors including our exposure to the large amount of language and to the great
number of different speakers over the years and our acquired knowledge of the context, the
speakers, the topic and so on. However , there are a lot of problems that sometimes we meet
when listening in our mother tongue. Particular accents can cause problems. For instance, in
Vietnam the accents of the three zones (the North, the Middle and the South) are quite
different. Someone from the North may find it difficult to understand a speaker from the
Middle or the North. Further more , sometimes bad conditions created by bad situations also
hinder our comprehension. For example, it may be hard for listener to follow and understand
what a quiet speaker is conveying when everything around him is noisy. In spite of these
minor problems, we can not deny that we generally listen and comprehend the speech in our
native language with ease.
1.3.2. Listening as the final goal of learning a language
According to Donoghue (1975), listening occupies the basic portion in the context of
the language arts and progress in reading, speaking and writing is directly governed by
listening ability. It is the most important of the four arts since nearly half of the adult
working day and more than half of the child’s classroom activity time is spent in listening.

Apart from communication interaction, much of the enjoyment in second or foreign
language use comes from listening activities like watching films and plays or watching T.V
or listening to the radio, songs or talks by the speakers. In class the students learn a lot from
their teacher, to tape or records or to each other. Moreover , the students can gain a lot of
experiences of listening to a wide variety of samples of spoken English. It also helps the
students know different varieties of language such as standard or regional, formal or
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informal language, and different text types like conversation, narrative or informative types.
The result is that there is an increase in the amount of language contact through
communication. Further more , students ,day by day ,can train their listening skill and they
can flexibly listen to everything. Students are trained to listen for the main ideas , for
specific information or to react to instruction. Therefore , listening is regarded to be among
the most important educational goals. It has a great influence on value formation and it
increases an individual’s level of vocational skills and it results in great emotional response
changes in attitude and it provides students a stimulus for other activities such as discussion,
reading and writing, which are the main language skills.
1.3.3. Listening as a means of acquiring a language
“ Listening to spoken English is an important way of acquiring the language of “
picking up” structures and vocabularies” (Adrian Doff, 1995. P :199 ). It is obvious that
developing the ability to understand the spoken foreign language is a long continuous
process and listening is a skill that must be taught and that does not happen automatically. If
students learn to listen effectively, they are able to understand, to interpret, to evaluate and to
response to what they hear. So it is very important for students to develop the ability to
understand spoken English. In daily life they can watch English programs on T.V, listen to
the radio or have direct conversations with native speakers. Thus the more frequent we are
exposed to the language, the faster and easier we can acquire it.
1.4. CLASSIFICATION OF LISTENING
1.4.1. Real - life listening
1.4.1.1. Kinds of real - life listening
Many learners of English will ,sooner or later, find themselves in a variety of situation

where they need or want to listen to English being used in real – life for a range of purposes.
However, they feel a big gap between listening activities in the classroom and actual
situations. This is because in listening materials learners listen to dialogues , conversations
which are very grammatical and controlled in many ways. The speakers often speak at
perfectly controlled speed, with perfect voice tone , accent and correct grammar. Whereas, in
real – life conversations learners encounter various people speaking with different accent,
speed and voice tone without paying attention to grammar.
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According to Adrian (1995), there are two ways which people often listen in real – life. They
are “ casual” listening and “ focused” listening
- “ Casual” listening : In daily life we sometimes listen with no particular purpose and often
without much concentration . This kind of listening is called ‘casual” listening. For example,
a lot of students have the habit of listening to the radio while studying or the television set is
on while we are doing something else. The typical feature is that we do not listen closely and
intentionally, therefore we may not remember much of what we hear or there may be nothing
in our mind.
- “Focused” listening : When we listen for a particular purpose to get the information we
need, it is called “focus” listening. In this case we often listen with much attention, but we do
not listen to everything we hear with equal concentration. For instance, we want to know the
answer to a question, we will ask and expect to hear a relevant response. This leads to our
“listening out” for certain key phrases or words. When we ask a question like: “ Where are
you going to be?”, we then listen out for the expectation of the place. If the answer is, for
example; “I don’t know, I haven’t decided yet, it depends on what job I get, but I expect I
shall end up in Boston.” – then we shall wait for and note the last two words. If, however,
the same answer is the response to the question: “Are you definitely going to Boston?” –
then the last two words of the answer are virtually redundant, and will pay more attention to
the first part. If we listen to the news, it is from a desire to know what is happening in the
world, and we shall expect to hear about certain subjects of current interest in a certain kind
of language. Even when listening to entertainment such as plays, jokes or songs ,we have a
definite purpose (enjoyment), we want to know what is coming next, and we expect it to

cohere with what went before. There is an association between listener expectation and
purpose and his comprehension. If the listener expects and needs are intentional ,his
listening is likely accurately perceived and understood than that which is unexpected,
irrelevant or helpful.
1.4.1.2. Characteristics of real - life listening
According to Penny Ur , there is a distinct difference between the auditory effect of a
piece of spoken prose and that of informal conversation. The former is characterized by a
fairly even pace, volume and pitch. Spontaneous conversation, on the other hand, is jerky,
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has frequent pauses and overlaps, goes intermittently faster and slower, louder and softer,
higher and lower. Hesitation, interruptions, exclamations, emotional reactions of surprise,
irritation or amusement, which are all liable to occur in natural dialogue, are bound to cause
an uneven and constantly changing rhythm of speech. Even if only one person is speaking
for a relatively long period, the fact that he has not thought out carefully what he has to say
beforehand, and has not necessarily chosen the best words, means that he has to rely heavily
on vocal emphasis to make his meaning clear. And vocal emphasis does not just mean saying
a particular word or phrase louder. It means also gabbling quickly through what is less
important and slowing down over the main point, or pausing for effect before or after a vital
phrase, or raising the pitch of voice to stress one thing and then lowering it to play something
else. The overall effect of all this is perhaps more dramatic and interesting than that of
formal speech, but this does not mean that it is ,all in all, more comprehensible or easier to
listen to.
To summarize, we may say that most of our real-life listening activity is characterized by the
following features:
- We listen for a purpose and with certain expectations.
- We made an immediate response to what we hear.
- We see the person we are listening to.
- There are some visual or environmental clues as to the meaning of what is heard.
- Stretches of heard discourse come in short chunks.
- Most heard discourse is spontaneous and therefore differs from formal spoken prose in

the amount of redundancy, noise and colloquialisms, and in its auditory character.
Sometimes particular situations may lack one or more of these characteristics. for example,
when watching television we are not normally expected to respond, when listening to a
lecture we may have to hear uninterrupted speech for a very long time indeed- but it is very
rare that none of them is present at all. We seldom listen to stretches of “ disembodied”
discourse of any length.
1.4.2. Class-room listening
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According to Rixon (1986) and Hubbard, R and others (1984), there are three kinds
of listening in classroom, they are: intensive listening and extensive listening.
1.4.2.1.Intensive listening
Intensive listening is the careful, focused listening to a short passage for detailed
information or for full comprehension. For example, listening to the announcement ,
listening to the instructions or listening to the weather forecast. There may be much concrete
information for this kind of listening and learners often find it difficult to get full
comprehension in the first listening. This helps learners develop their listening skill or
knowledge of the language in their effort to do exercises or other activities. The passage
should be short so that learners have chances to get to grip with the content, , have several
tries at difficult parts and to be fitted within the time allowed of a lesson. Learners also feel it
easy, interesting and encouraging when they listen to a short passage . Therefore, they often
listen with a great concentration and stretching effort.
1.4.2.2. Extensive listening
Extensive listening is free and general listening to natural language for general
ideas, not for particular details. The listening passages for extensive listening can be long
(stories) or short ( jokes, poems). The language that is used in this type of listening is often
within the students’ current ability so that students find it pleasing and interesting when they
are listening. Students feel satisfied as they can understand the passage well. They are not
asked to do any language work and they can do their listening freely without any pressure.
Moreover the topics are various and entertaining, it ,therefore, motivates students to develop
their listening skill as well as exposes them to valuable extra contact with spoken language.

1.5. POTENTIAL PROBLEMS IN LEARNING LISTENING
It is undeniable that listening is considered to be the most difficult among the four
skills. Numerous learners have difficulties with different aspects of listening comprehension.
Some have trouble with factual or literal comprehension. Others have trouble with
interpretation. Others have trouble with critical listening. Still others have problems with
evaluational listening. The followings are some potential problems that should be paid
attention to in order to help listeners feel self-confident to overcome them.
1.5.1. Inability to control over the speed of the speaker
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In learning English, the greatest difficulty in listening comprehension is that learners
are not able to control the speed of the speaker. Learners often feel that the utterances
disappear before they can sort them out or they can get the message.
“They are so busy working out the meaning of one part of what they hear that they miss
the next part. Or they simply ignore a whole chunk because they fail to sort it all out quickly
enough.”( Mary Underwood, Teaching Listening, Longman, 1989, p.16). One of the reasons
for this is that learners can not keep up with the speed and they often try to understand
everything they hear. When they fail in sorting out the meaning of one part, the following
will be missed. This can lead to the ignorance of the whole chunk of discourse. Obviously
they fail to listen.
1.5.2. Inability to get things repeated
Another problem is that the listener is not always in the position to ask the speaker to
repeat his utterance . This is the case when learners join in conversation outside the
classroom. Repetition can not be asked for when listening to the radio or watching television.
Even in classroom, when listening to lectures, learners can not frequently order the lecturers
to repeat the utterance as many times as they wish. When doing listening work in listening
lessons, it is the teacher, not the learners, who decides to stop or to replay the record and in
many situations, the teacher does not replay the exact parts that the listeners wish to listen
again. Therefore, the teacher can not judge if the learners can fully understand what they
have heard. This problem can be solved only when learners are given the opportunity to
control their own machines and proceed in whatever way they wish.

1.5.3. Inability to concentrate
It is a major problem if learners lack concentration in listening work. This can be
caused by a number of things such as : the bad quality of machines, the poor quality of
listening materials. Other reason for loss of concentration is that the topic is not interesting
or not familiar and learners find it difficult to understand. Sometimes, listeners easily lose
their concentration, as they feel tired of making a great effort to hear word by word. The
break in attention, even very short, can seriously impair the comprehension of the whole
process of listening. Concentration of the listener is considered vitally important in a
successful listening lesson.
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1.5.4. Problems in hearing the sounds
“ As a young teacher it took me some time to realize that my students actually did not
perceive certain English sounds with any accuracy because these did not exist in their own
language.” (Penny Ur , Teaching Listening Comprehension, Cambridge University Press,
P.11). The fact is that there are a lot of sound that do not exist in Vietnamese such as : the
sound /
θ
/ as in “ think”. A native Vietnamese speaker may very often therefore not notice as
the first that it occurs in English. Even more difficulties is caused when the new sound does
not exist in the native language. For example: / I / (as in “pit” ) and / I: / (as in “peep”) or
“ship” and “sheep” or “fit” and “feet”. Thus learners have difficulty in perceiving this
difference as significant to meaning in English and it takes a considerable amount of practice
before they get used to distinguishing between them. Sometimes learners find consonant-
clusters particularly difficult to cope with. They may get the consonants in the wrong order
(hearing “part” for “past”), or omit one of the sounds (“crips” for “crisps”) , or hear a vowel
that is not in fact pronounced (“littel” for “little”). Another reason why sounds may be
misheard is that the learner is not used to the stress and intonation patterns of English and the
way these influence both the realization of certain phonemes and the meaning of the
utterance. The number of homophones and homonyms in English is small, while the number
of words which can be confused or misunderstood by accurate perception is relatively large.

It is ,therefore, essential for the learner to achieve familiarity with the common phonemes of
the target language as soon as possible if he is an efficient listener. If he learns to pronounce
the sounds accurately himself, it will be much easier for him to hear them correctly when
said by someone else.
1.5.5. Problems in understanding different accents
Many foreign-language learners who are used to the accent of their own teacher are
surprised and dismayed when they find they have difficulty understanding someone else.
Some of them try to get over this at first by claiming that the second speaker’s accent is
somehow inferior or wrong. But strictly speaking there is rarely such a thing as a “wrong”
accent, there are simply accent that are more or less difficult to understand- that is, broadly
speaking, ones that are more or less removed from the original variety learned. What we can
do is to try to give learners a reasonable familiarity with the two most useful English accents
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- that is to say the British and American standard varieties- and then perhaps let them have a
taste of some others simply to open their eyes to the possibilities and give them some
practice in coping with them. Learners who have some experience in listening to and
understand a number of different accents are more likely to be able to cope successfully with
further than those who have only heard one or two and learners should try their best to get
used to different accent by listening to authentic material as much as possible.
1.5.6. Problems in vocabulary limitation
When listening, there are words or phrases that are not known to the listeners. This
causes the listeners a lot in getting the message of the passage and this may interrupt the
listeners’ concentration or thinking. The listeners have to try to follow the speaker and
sometimes they have to guess the meaning of a word or phrase depending the context. The
listeners have to pay attention to the new words, as a result they miss chances of listening to
the following part of the speech. Teachers, therefore, should help the learners to know that
there is not equal importance for every word and there is no need for learners to understand
all the new words when listening. Sometimes listeners understand only a part of what a
speaker means but they are generally able to continue with the interaction and to respond to
it.

1.6. THREE STAGES OF THE LISTENING SESSION
There are often three main stages in the teaching of a listening text. They are : pre-
listening stage , while-listening stage and post-listening stage. Each stage has its own aims
and activities.
1.6.1. Pre-listening stage
1.6.1.1. The definition and purposes of pre-listening stage
It is true that learners will find it extremely difficult to do a listening lesson when they
have no idea of what they are going to hear. Even if the sounds or the words which they hear
are familiar, they may still be unable to understand because they lack certain kinds of
knowledge of the topic, setting or the relationship between the speakers. Thus the
listeners’expectation and purposes should be taken into account. These make listeners feel as
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in real-life listening situation in their native language. Teachers can help their students to
arouse their expectations and see the purpose before a listening lesson. This kind of work is
described as “pre-listening activities”.
“ It would seem a good idea when presenting a listening passage in class to give students
some information about the content, situation and speakers before they actually start
listening.”(Penny Ur, 1992, P.4)
Another idea about pre-listening stage is said as following:
“ Pre-listening work can be done in a variety of ways and often occurs quite naturally when
listening forms part of an integrated skills course. When planning lessons, time must be
allocated for pre-listening activities and these activities should not be rushed.” ( Mary
Underwood, Teaching Listening, Longman 1989, P.31).
1.6.1.2. Types of pre-listening activities
Pre-listening work can be done in various ways and consists of several types of
activities. Therefore, teachers should select the most effective activities for each situation
and teachers need to find the most suitable way to provide considerable pre-listening support
for their students in order to help them to get the purposes that a listening lesson requires.
- The teacher introducing the listening topic, giving background information.
- The students reading something relevant

- The students looking at pictures ,reading through the questions if asked
- The students discussing the topic situation
- The students following the instruction for the while-listening activity
- The students considering how the while-listening activity will be done
Each of the above activities will help the students focus on the main points of the listening
passage. But it is very important to remember that the amount of pre-listening activities may
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vary according to each class, the level of difficulty of the material and the students’ language
ability.
1.6.1.3. Factors affecting the choice of pre-listening activities
The choice of pre-listening activities depends on a number of factors :
- The time available
- The material available
- The interest of the class
- The interest of the teacher
- The place where the work is being carried out
- The nature and the content of the listening text itself
It is very necessary for the teacher to consider all the factors which are mentioned above
when choosing an activity as each factor contributes an important part to the result of a
listening lesson.. However, the last item on the list, the nature of the listening text, is very
important when choosing pre-listening activities
1.6.2.While-listening stage
1.6.2.1. the purpose of while-listening activities
The While- listening stage involves activities that students are asked to do during the
time that they are listening to the text. The purpose of while-listening activities is to help
learners develop the skill of eliciting messages from spoken language.
There are ,of course, other reasons why students need to listen to the language they are
studying. The main thing is that to learn to recognize how it sounds ( the pronunciation of
words, the stress, the rhythm, the intonation that they can use what they hear as a model for
their own speech).

When developing the skills of listening for comprehension, while-listening activities
must be chosen carefully. They must vary at different levels and in different cases. We do
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not test whether or not the listener has understood and producing “right/ wrong” answer will
soon discourage the enthusiasm of the learners. To help non-native listeners to improve their
listening, teacher must have listening activities which give practice in prediction, matching
and interpretation.
“Good while-listening activities help learners find their way through the listening text and
build upon the expectations raised by pre-listening activities.” ( Underwwood, Teaching
Listening, 1990, P. 46)
1.6.2.2. Characteristics of while-listening activities
1.6.2.2.1. Interest
While-listening activities should be interesting, so that students feel they want to listen
and carry out the activities. Part of interest can stem from the topic and the content of what is
said and the listening text should be chosen with the interest of the students in mind.
Many learners enjoy material with a “local” flavor rather more than texts setting in some
remote context. For this reason, even quite mundane topics should be given some local
relevance when possible in order to make them more familiar and motivating.
Another kind of interest is generated by activities which are in themselves interesting and
satisfying to do. Most learners enjoy trying to complete puzzle or solve problems and this
fact can be exploited in the design of the activities. It is important, however, that this kind of
activity is not too long and laborious and does not involve doing the same kind of thing over
and over again. For example, for most learners, three small crossword puzzles on different
occasions are far more satisfying to do than one every large one which occupies a lot of time
on just one occasion.
1.6.2.2.2. Levels of difficulty
While-listening activities should be things most people can do. Failure here very
rapidly leads to demotivation, and activities with potential “sticking point” , where students
are likely to get into difficulties, should be used very sparingly in the early stages. In time, of
course, it will be necessary to include activities which present potential “ sticking point”, so

that students learn not to be put off and persevere in spite of the problems.
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According to Mary Underwood, the level of difficulty of a while-listening activity can be
adjusted by giving support. Some while-listening activities are successful with groups of
varying levels of ability and provide a challenge for the more advanced students but not
discouraging those who only gain little success.
1.6.2.2.3. Factors affecting the choice of while-listening activities
In addition to the factors which apply equally to while-listening activities, other points
need to be considered when selecting while-listening activities. They include:
- The possibilities for varying the level of difficulty if required.
- The inconvenience of carrying out activities which require individuals to give their
responses orally in the classroom. This kind of work is best done in a language
laboratory. Classroom while-listening activities generally have to be limited to those
which can be done without the need for each student to respond by speaking.
- Whether the work is to be done by the students with the teacher present or whether it is
to be done as private study, either in the classroom or at home. This will influence the
teacher’s choice of activity as he may want to give his students different work according
to their levels of ability, to provide additional instructions , or to select activities which
generate little or no marking.
1.6.3. Post-listening stage
1.6.3.1. Definition and purpose of post-listening activities
Post-listening activities are the activities which are done after the listening is
completed. Some post-listening activities are extensions of the work done at the pre-listening
and while-listening stages and some relate only loosely to the listening text itself.
The purposes of post-listening activities are :
- to check whether the learners have understood what they need to or not.
- to see why some students have missed parts of the message or fail to understand the
message.
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