Educacion

Teaching listening

Teaching listening skills is one of the most difficult tasks for any ESL teacher. This is because successful listening skills are acquired over time andwith lots of practice. It's frustrating for students because there are no rules as in grammar teaching. Speaking and writing also have very specific exercises that can lead toimproved skills. This is not to say that there are not ways of improving listening skills, however they are difficult to quantify.
There are two distinct processes involved inlistening comprehension. Listeners use 'top-down' processes when they use their prior knowledge to understand the meaning of a message. Prior knowledge can be a knowledge of thesubject, the listening context, the type of text, culture or other information stored in long term memory as schemata (typical sequences or common situations around which to organizethe world's knowledge ). Listeners use words of content and context clues to formulate hypotheses in an exploratory manner. On the other hand, listeners also use 'bottom-up'processes when using linguistic knowledge to understand the meaning of a message. They build the meaning of low level sounds to words to grammatical relationships to lexical meaningsto reach the final message.
Understanding hearing is an interactive process, where listeners interpretive use both prior knowledge and language skills of understandingmessages. The degree to which listeners use the process either based on your knowledge of the language, familiarity with the subject or purpose for listening. For example, listening forgist is mainly top-down processing, while listening for specific information, such as time transmission involves mainly bottom-up processing to understand all the details desired.