Listening Skills

Effective listening skills are essential for successful interpersonal communication, whether in socializing with English-speaking people or in getting things done. Good listening ability also increases opportunities for leisure and entertainment. In the process of listening, the listener activates various types of knowledge, e.g. knowledge of a topic, the culture or the context, in order to construct a personal interpretation of what has been said. Successful listening requires the interpretation of contextual information such as physical setting, the number of listeners and speakers, their roles, and their relationship to each other. Listening can be demanding because learners often have little control over the speed and complexity of the listening texts, and they cannot re-listen in real-life situations. Listening to what the teacher says in the primary English classroom and understanding it are of key importance in the development of listening skills. Teacher language in the classroom is authentic and purposeful. Successful listening to the teacher can enhance motivation, and the feedback on listening difficulties can be provided immediately. Further discussion on the importance of classroom English can be found in Section 3.2.6.

At primary level, the listening skills to be developed include skills for

• identifying and discriminating sounds, stress and intonation; and

• listening for explicit and implicit meaning.

Details of the listening skills to be developed in Key Stage 1 and Key Stage 2 can be found in Section 2.2.2.

Development of Listening Skills through Task-based Activities

Good listening skills enable learners to understand what they hear in English even before they can communicate effectively in the language.

Teachers need to engage learners in various types of tasks and activities to help them develop and practise their listening skills. Good task-based listening activities provide learners with a purpose for listening and enable learners to acquire skills in a meaningful context. Listening activities are more effective if they use purposes and contexts as close to authentic situations as possible. There are two main types of task-based listening activities: activities that require learners to listen and make non-linguistic responses (e.g. listen and colour); and activities that require learners to listen and make linguistic responses (e.g. listen and complete a written plan for the weekend’s activities).

The following example serves to highlight how listening skills can be developed through a series of task-based activities.

Task: The Chinese New Year Fair

In the task, each group of learners is required to make a handicraft for a Chinese New Year Fair in school.

• Learners learn or revise some relevant vocabulary items and grammar structures in preparation for the task. For example, the teacher plays a game of bingo with the learners to help them identify words beginning with different letter sounds. This practice helps them discriminate the initial sounds of the target vocabulary items.

• Learners listen to a taped dialogue in which two children discuss what and how to prepare for a Chinese New Year Fair in school.

They also listen to short descriptions of the materials used to make the handicraft. They complete a matching activity. They circle the pictures of these materials on a task sheet. In this activity, learners recognize the stress in connected speech to identify the main ideas.

They also recognize the differences in the use of intonation to indicate the speaker’s preferences and feelings in the discussion.

• After this activity, the teacher invites the class to share their observations about the use of intonation or recurrent sentence structures in the discourse. If necessary, the teacher re-plays a selected part to highlight the learning point.

• Learners work in groups and discuss the handicraft they want to make with some of the materials mentioned in the dialogue. They also write a short text to describe the handicraft they are going to make and how they are going to make it. During the group discussion, they find out the group members’ preferences and the materials to be used for making the handicraft. In this way, they listen for main ideas and supporting details.

• When all groups are ready, a game of “Twenty Questions” begins.

Each group describes the materials they will use to make the handicraft, and lets the class guess what they are going to make.

Other learners listen, ask questions and guess what is to be made. In this activity, they listen for specific information.

• The whole class can then choose the ideas they like best and make the handicraft for an activity or a stall to be included in the Chinese New Year Fair.

Other Considerations for the Development of Listening Skills

• Teachers should consider using a variety of task-based activities that require learners to listen and do, listen for information, and listen to stories, to help them develop their listening skills. These activities need not be conducted formally with worksheets and listening tapes.

If teachers can introduce them as games and as regular classroom interactions, learners will develop good listening skills even at an early stage of learning.

• To develop the good habit of listening to the whole before reacting prematurely, learners need to be given opportunities to practise listening to the whole recording once to get the gist or main ideas the first time they listen. In subsequent listening, they should be guided to locate and understand specific details.

• It is useful to expose learners to authentic listening materials covering

English in real-life situations. If the materials seem to be too demanding or difficult for the learners, teachers may set simple tasks while maintaining the real-life settings. The content of the listening materials should increase in complexity as learners progress from Key Stage 1 to Key Stage 2.

• As discussed in Section 3.2.1, schools are encouraged to adopt different teaching strategies to promote reading to learn. It is in storytelling, reading aloud and shared reading that learners are provided with the best opportunity to develop their listening skills.

These are contexts in which young learners are relaxed and enjoy their English lessons most. With the use of appropriate facial expressions, gestures, stress and intonation in storytelling and reading aloud, teachers can help learners understand the explicit and implicit meaning of what they hear. Learners may also develop their phonological awareness, if the teacher focuses their attention on words which have a common sound as a post-reading activity.

• Poems, songs and rhymes are very useful resources to help learners recognize English sound patterns. They are fun to learn and can help learners discriminate sounds and identify the stress in connected speech. Learners will be helped to develop sensitivity towards the sounds and rhythm of the English Language. They may also begin to appreciate the beauty of the language and develop positive attitudes towards learning English.

• Resources such as educational television programmes, cartoons, audio books, e-books and web-based listening materials can be useful materials for learners to pick up correct pronunciation, stress and intonation. These materials usually provide good models of speech and pronunciation from native speakers of English. Multi-media listening materials can engage learners in an interactive mode of learning. These materials allow learners to work at their own pace and help them become independent learners.

• Learners’ development of listening skills should not be confined to classroom learning activities. Teachers may draw learners’ attention to the use of spoken English in their daily life, e.g. the announcements on the MTR or the programmes on English-medium television channels.

• As stated at the beginning of this section, listening and responding to teacher’s instructions in English is an authentic situation through which learners can develop their listening skills. English used for classroom management is fully contextualized and appropriate to the setting. Examples of English for classroom interaction for teachers and learners are provided in Appendix 4.