Teaching LISTENING SKILLS

Listening belongs to receptive skills and the teaching process is very close to teaching reading.

The aim of listening is to understand an audiotext. Therefore, the aim of teaching listening is to teach learners to understand the ideas and take these ideas into work. 

 

Listening for pleasure (e.g. audiobooks, long interviews, watching movies) is called extensive listening, listening for  developing listening skills in foreign language is called intensive listening. 

 

There are three types of listening:

Listening for gist is aimed at understanding the main idea of an audiotext (e.g. Listen to the recording and say whether you the author has negative or positive attitude towards the problem). It checks nearly 25% of understanding.

 

Listening for specific information is aimed at finding some special information in an audiotext (50% understanding).

Detailed listening has a focus on deeper understanding of an audiotext and implies 100% understanding.


NOTE!
When checking understanding you should focus on MEANING , which frequently implies paraphrasing (the same as you do when working with printed texts).