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

• Learners must be offered opportunities for practice inside and outside the classroom and connect
English with other subject matters;
• Integrating listening with other skills ensures that skills reinforce each other; i.e. a listening task
might be preceded or followed by an oral or written report (or both);
• Written texts and activities with pictures, maps, authentic videos, recordings, plays; etc. which
provide visual support, help learners learn to listen;
• Real-world tasks which require that learners should process information by selecting, categorizing,
and analyzing it;
• Using listening to interact culturally with peers and/ other speakers of English (e.g. listening to a
conversation, a monologue, a talk, a song, etc);
• Learning listening is spiral in nature; thus, teachers need to allow for an on-going recycling of this
language skill;
• Using pre-listening, while-listening and post-listening tasks 12 that tap on cognitive processes should
be top on our ‘pedagogical list’.
The focus on listening for ‘comprehension’ and listening for ‘acquisition’ are vital for teachers to make sure
learners are developing listening competencies as well as developing their linguistic repertoire; especially
because learners hardly, if ever, use English outside the classroom. Teachers are advised to vary their task
types to keep learners motivated and on task. Some of the tasks, activities and resources are supplied by
textbook(s), while others need to be provided by teachers themselves. Learners’ generated spoken texts
(talks, conversations, or discussions) can be recorded and used as listening tasks.
Within the framework of learner training advocated by the standards-based approach, special care should be
directed towards fostering the learners’ ability to make use of meta-cognitive strategies: how to plan and
listen purposefully, how to tolerate ambiguity, how to monitor their comprehension when using the selected
strategy (or strategies) 13 , and how to evaluate their listening as a whole. Teachers prompt learners into
deciding on which strategy (or strategies) to use, help them with the means of self-assessment, and guide
them through the process of evaluating whether their listening has been successful or not.
12 A series of pre, while and post-listening activities are in Appendix A
13 Learners select top-down or bottom-up strategies or use them concurrently, flexibly, and interactively to construct
meanings.
13
التوجيهات التربوية وبرامج تدريس مادة اللغة الإنجليزية س ت ث ت 2007