Models of lisitening (14/12)

Model 1: Listening and repeating

Learner goals:

• To pattern-match; to listen and imitate; to memorize.

Instructional material:

• Features audio-lingual style exercises and/or dialogue memorization; based on a hearing-and-pattern matching model.

Procedure: asks students to:

• Listen to a word, phrase, or sentence pattern
• Repeat it
• Memorize it (often, but not always, a part of the procedure).

Value:

• Enables students to do pattern drills, to repeat dialogues, and to use memorized prefabricated patterns in conversation; enables them to imitate pronunciation patterns.

Model 2: Listening and answering

Comprehension questions

Learner goals:

• To process discrete-point information.
• To listen and answer comprehension questions.

Instructional material:

• Features a student response pattern based on a listening-and-question- answering model with occasional innovative variations on this theme.

Procedure: asks students to:

• Listen to an oral text from sentence length to lecture length.
• Answer factual questions. Uses familiar types of questions adapted from traditional reading 
• Comprehension exercises.
• It has been called a quiz-show formal of teaching.

Value:

• Enables students to manipulate discrete pieces of information, hopefully with increasing speed and accuracy of recall.

It can increase students’ stock of vocabulary units and grammar constructions. Does not require students to make use of the information for any real communicative purpose beyond answering the questions. It is not interactive two-way communication.

Model 3: Task listening

Learner goals:

• To process spoken discourse for functional purposes.
• To listen and do something with the information, that is, carry out real tasks using the information received.

Instructional material:

• Features activities that require a student response pattern based on a listening-and-using (i.e. “listen-and-do”) model.
• Students listen, then immediately do something with the information received: follow the directions given, complete a task, solve a problem, transmit the gist of the information orally or in writing, listen and take lecture notes, etc.

Procedure: asks students to:

• Listen and process information.
• Use orally transmitted language input immediately to complete a task which is mediated through language in a context in which success is judged in terms of whether the task is performed. 

Value:

• The focus is on instruction that is task-oriented, not question oriented.
• The purpose is to engage learners in using the informational content presented in the spoken discourse, not just in answering questions about it. Two types of tasks are:

               - Language use tasks, designed to give students practice in listening to get meaning from the input with the purpose of making functional use of it immediately. 

               - Language analysis tasks, designed to help learners develop cognitive and metacognitive language learning strategies (i.e. to guide them toward personal intellectual in their own learning). 

Model 4: Interactive listening

Learner goals:

• Aural/oral skills in semiformal interactive communication.
• To develop critical listening.
• Critical thinking.
• Effective speaking abilities.

Instructional material:

• Features the real-time/ real-life give-and-take of academic communication.
• Provides a variety of student presentation and discussion activities, both individual and small group panel reports that include follow-up audience participation in question/answer sessions as an integral part of the work.
• Follows an interactive listening-thinking-speaking model with bidirectional listening/speaking.
• Includes attention to group bonding and classroom discourse rules (e.g. taking the floor, yielding the floor, turn taking, interrupting, comprehension checks, topic shifting, agreeing, questioning, challenging, etc.).