92-pages-GUIDELINES-FOR-SECONDARY-SCHOOLS-All-Streams-and-Sections

Teaching listening
Within the standards-based approach adhered to, the teaching of listening is given priority on the following
grounds:
• It is the most frequently-used skill;
• It provides the aural input that serves as a premise and a necessary ingredient for language
learning;
• It provides learners with the opportunity to interact in spoken communication;
• Language learning is highly dependent on listening (i.e. listening to teachers, to peers, to
recordings, etc.);
• It aims at extracting meanings/messages from spoken texts, which requires an appeal to both
bottom-up and top-down strategies;
The teaching of listening should help learners become effective listeners. Learners need to be made aware
that although words carry meanings, it is unnecessary to dwell long on them once the message has been
captured. Being able to listen effectively also lessens pressure that the speaker may have with regard to
speaking speed adjustment and language tuning. While teaching listening as a skill in its own right, it is
essential that we take account of the fact that it involves the following basic sub-skills 8 :
Discriminating sounds, recognizing stress patterns, intonation, etc. (phonology and phonetics);
processing sentences: analyzing their elements, building a structure frame ( syntax) ;
recognizing and understanding of words/ lexical chunks or formulas ( semantics);
recognizing how texts are rhetorically structured( genres);
recognizing cohesive devices in discourse;
constructing the literal meaning;
storing the information in short-term memory;
identifying speaker’s intent and text tone (active listening);
puzzling out paralinguistic aspects (body language);
predicting what is to be said;
deciding on what to say or do to react.
These various sub-skills show that listening is not a passive process. It rather involves an ongoing interaction
between both bottom-up and top-down strategies 9 . Effective listening also makes use of linguistic as well as
non-linguistic knowledge. These abilities are partly built in what constitutes the core of the standards put
forward for the teaching of listening.
8 See Appendix C for more details about listening comprehension micro-skills ( Brown, D. 1994).
9 Top-down strategies involve listening for the main idea, anticipating, drawing inferences, summarizing, etc. Bottomup
strategies involve listening for specific details, identifying collocations or cognates, recognizing pronunciation of
individual words, recognizing word order patterns, etc
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التوجيهات التربوية وبرامج تدريس مادة اللغة الإنجليزية س ت ث ت 2007