Strategy In Teaching Listening

Language learning depends on listening. Listening provides the aural input that serves as the basis for language acquisition and enables learners to interact in spoken communication. Effective language instructors show students how they can adjust their listening behavior to deal with a variety of situations, types of input, and listening purposes. They help students develop a set of listening strategies and match appropriate strategies to each listening situation.

Listening Strategies

Listening strategies are techniques or activities that contribute directly to the comprehension and recall of listening input. Listening strategies can be classified by how the listener processes the input.
Top-down strategies are listener based; 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

Strategic listeners also use metacognitive strategies to plan, monitor, and evaluate their listening.

• They plan by deciding which listening strategies will serve best in a particular situation.
• They monitor their comprehension and the effectiveness of the selected strategies.
• They evaluate by determining whether they have achieved their listening comprehension goals and whether the combination of listening strategies selected was an effective one.

Listening for Meaning

To extract meaning from a listening text, students need to follow four basic steps:

• Figure out the purpose for listening. Activate background knowledge of the topic in order to predict or anticipate content and identify appropriate listening strategies.
• Attend to the parts of the listening input that are relevant to the identified purpose and ignore the rest. This selectivity enables students to focus on specific items in the input and reduces the amount of information they have to hold in short-term memory in order to recognize it.
• Select top-down and bottom-up strategies that are appropriate to the listening task and use them flexibly and interactively. Students' comprehension improves and their confidence increases when they use top-down and bottom-up strategies simultaneously to construct meaning.
• Check comprehension while listening and when the listening task is over. Monitoring comprehension helps students detect inconsistencies and comprehension failures, directing them to use alternate strategies.

INSIGHTS:

The above-mentioned strategies are essential in teaching listening especially for educators. As a teacher It is very vital to know how important effective listening to our students is. I also believe that it is only after listening students learn. In a classroom setting, teacher's most of the time is the one who talk and discuss the lesson and it is the students role to listen and learn from what the teacher is relaying to them.

But, it is inevitable that there are students who has difficulties in their listening skill and has problem in understanding every words uttered by the teacher. And that is also the reason why a teacher should know what is the intellectual level of the student specially in their listening ability. As being mentioned in the first paragraph it is only in listening students can acquire language ability.

The Top down strategy involves the activation of the background or prior knowledge of the students for them to develop series of expectations from what they are hearing or listening. The Bottom-up strategy are text based, where students listen for the sound, words and grammar and creates meaning from it. The Metacognitive strategy is commonly used by strategic listeners where they do planning, monitoring and do self-evaluation if they had really understood what they have listened. And the Listening for Meaning is the strategy where listeners extract meaning from the listening text. By , activating their background knowledge, relies on the message, chooses between top down and bottom up strategies or even uses the combination of the three strategies. Listening for meaning is simply done using the involvement of all the strategies.

In teaching listening it is very helpful to the students side if the teacher would know what strategy to use as based on their level of understanding. As a teacher it is our responsibility to use every possible resources in the process of teaching especially in developing the listening skill or ability of the students . As it is our duty and responsibility of taking this profession.