Teaching and Assessing Listening - Week 7 - Approaches to Teaching Listening

Introduction: Hello and welcome to Week 7 of the course Teaching and Assessing Listening for the master's in English teaching at ULACIT term IIICO 2022. In today's class we will review seven hypotheses based on the last several decades of research that have influenced current approaches to teaching listening.

Today's Goal:

• Consider the implications of seven language acquisition hypotheses for listening instruction.
• Identify teaching strategies to make input comprehensible and provide optimal emotional and cognitive conditions for acquisition.
• Review and experiment with a series of interactive tasks to stimulate listening and speaking development. 

Guiding Question: 

• What theoretically informed principles can support my approach to listening instruction?
• How can I provide abundant quantities of engaging and comprehensible input?
• What is the role of speaking in learning to listen in a second language?

Warm Up: What's the Phrase?

One of your partners will share the screen and sound. Click the three dots at the bottom of the slide and put the presentation in fullscreen. Then play the audio clips and try to identify the mystery phrases. When you finish, discuss the questions.

If the presentation is not displaying properly, CLICK HERE.

Topic 1: Approaches to Teaching Listening

Click your group link below and complete the instructions in the document to review the important ideas from your study guide. 

• Group 1: CLICK HERE
• Group 2: CLICK HERE

Topic 2: Comprehension Based Approaches

The Affective Filter and Input hypotheses are two of the five hypotheses proposed by Stephen Krashen in his highly influential Monitor Model. His ideas have important implications regarding the teaching of recpetive skills like listening and reading. Click the group link below to explore these ideas in greater detail.

• Group Link: CLICK HERE
• TPRS Results: CLICK HERE

Topic 3: Interaction Based Approaches

Interaction based approaches accept that comprehensible input is a requirement for language acquisition and they go a step further by claiming that interaction among students that requires both listening and speaking is optimal. The Comprehensible Output hypothesis states the following.

• Students learn when they notice a "gap" in their ability to express their ideas.
• Students become aware of the gap when they try to say something and their partner does not understand.
• Students then seek information that will help them close that gap and this makes them more attentive to features of the input they are exposed to.

The related Interaction Hypothesis highlights the connection between listening and speaking. 

• Input made more comprehensible through interaction adjustments.
• Negative feedback indicates possible production errors.
• Opportunities for pushed output, being required to try out new structures and phrases in a social context.
• Opportunties for negotiation of meaning. 

Communicative Tasks for Interaction

Communicative tasks are one of the primary strategies for encouraging meaningful interaction among students. All communicatives tasks involve some form of gap in order to require interaction.

• Information Gap: Students have access to different sets of information and must communicate to share their information in order to accomplish the task.
• Spot the Differences - CLICK HERE
• Schedule a Meeting - CLICK HERE

• Opinion Gap: Like the information gap task, in opinion gap activities students have access to different information but this time it is not information provided by the teacher. Instead, it is their own thoughts and opinions which they must share with their partners to negotiate some kind of agreement.
• Vehicle Differences - CLICK HERE
• Health Consultants - CLICK HERE

• Reasoning Gap: In a reasoning gap task there is a problem to be solved and students need to communicate with each other to share their ideas in order to find a solution.
• Chef's Activity - CLICK HERE
• Sport's Agent - CLICK HERE

Dictogloss Demo

• Dictogloss is one of the techniques designed by Swain, one of the early promotors of interaction based approaches to SLA. It involves listening to a spoken text created by the teacher, taking notes individually, then working collaboratively with partners to reconstruct the text to produce a version that is as close as possible to the original. Let's try it out!

• Group 1: CLICK HERE
• Group 2: CLICK HERE

• More Info about Dictogloss: CLICK HERE

Topic 4: Summary of Other Hypotheses

Here are some final ideas related to the remaining four hypotheses.

Click to see the full sized version.

References: 

Rost, M. (2026). Teaching and Researching Listening (3rd ed.). Routledge.