Testing listening

Three people were on a train in England. As they approached what appeared to be Wemberly Station, one of the travelers said, "Is this Wemberly?" "No," replied a second passenger, "it's Thursday." Whereupon the third person remarked, "Oh, I am too, let's have a drink!"

The importance of listening in language learning can hardly be overesti­mated. Through reception, we internalize linguistic information without which we could not produce language. In classrooms, students always do more listening than speaking. Listening competence is universally "larger" than speaking competence. Is it any wonder, then, that in recent years the language teaching profession has placed a concerted emphasis on listening comprehension?

In an interactive, four-skills curriculum, make sure that you don’t overlook the importance of techniques that specifically develop listening comprehension competence.

Include both bottom-up and top-down listening techniques.

Speech processing theory distinguishes between two types of processing in both listening and reading comprehension.

Bottom-up processing proceeds from sounds to words to grammatical relationships to lexical meanings, etc., to a final "message."

Top-down processing is evoked from "a bank of prior knowledge and global expectations"  and other background information that the listener brings to the text.

Bottom-up techniques typically focus on sounds, words, intonation, grammatical structures, and other compo­nents of spoken language.

Top-down techniques are more concerned with the activation of schemata, with deriving meaning, with global understanding, and with the interpretation of a text. It is important for learners to operate from both directions since both can offer keys to determining the meaning of spo­ken discourse. However, in a communicative, interactive context, you don't want to dwell too heavily on the bottom-up, for to do so may hamper the development of a learner's all-important automaticity in processing speech.

Exercise Types for Beginning-Level Listeners

This list is taken from Teaching by Principles; H. Douglas Brown; Prentice Hall Regents 1994)

1) Goal: Discriminating between Intonation Contours in Sentences

Listen to a sequence of sentence patterns with either rising or falling intonation. Place a check in column I (rising) or column 2 (falling), depending on the pattern you hear.

2) Goal: Discriminating between Phonemes

Listen to pairs of words. Some pairs differ in their final consonant (stay/steak), and some pairs are the same (laid/laid). Circle the word "same" or "different," depending on what you hear.

3) Goal: Selective Listening for Morphological Endings

Listen to a series of sentences. Circle "yes" if the verb has an -ed ending, and circle "no" if it does not.

Listen to a series of sentences. On your answer sheet are three verb forms. Circle the verb form that is contained in the sentence that you hear.

4) Goal: Selecting Details from the Text (Word Recognition) Match a word that you hear with its picture.

Listen to a weather report. Look at a list of words and circle the words that you hear. Listen to a sentence that contains clock time. Circle the clock time that you hear, among three choices (5:30, 5:45, 6:15).

Listen to an advertisement, select out the price of an item, and write the amount on a price tag. Listen to a series of recorded telephone messages from an answering machine. Fill in a chart with the following information from each caller: name, number, time, and message.

5) Goal: Listening for Normal Sentence Word Order

Listen to a short dialog and fill in the missing words that have been deleted in a partial transcript.

6) Goal: Discriminating between Emotional Reactions

Listen to a sequence of utterances. Place a check in the column that describes the emotional reaction that you hear: interested, happy, surprised, or unhappy.

7) Goal: Getting the Gist of a Sentence) Listen to a sentence describing a picture and select the correct picture.

8) Goal: Recognize the Topic

Listen to a dialog and decide where the conversation occurred. Circle the correct location among three multiple choice items.

Listen to a conversation and look at a number of greeting cards that are pictured. Decide which of the greeting cards was sent. Write the greeting under the appropriate card.

Listen to a conversation and decide what the people are talking about. Choose the picture that shows the topic.

9) Goal: Build a Semantic Network of Word Associations

Listen to a word and associate all the related words that come to mind.

10) Goal: Recognize a Familiar Word and Relate It to a Category

Listen to words from a shopping list and match the words to the store that sells it.

11) Goal: Following Directions

Listen to a description of a route and trace in on a map.

Exercise Types for Intermediate-Level Listeners

12) Goal: Recognizing Fast Speech Forms

Unstressed function words. Listen to a series of sentences that contain unstressed function words. Circle your choice among three words. Circle your choice among three words on the answer sheet—for example: "up," "a," "of.

13) Goal: Finding the Stressed Syllable

Listen to words of two (or three) syllables. Mark them for word stress and predict the pronunciation of the unstressed syllable.

14) Goal: Recognizing Words with Reduced Syllables

Read a list of polysyllabic words and predict which syllabic vowel will be dropped. Listen to the words read in fast speech and confirm your prediction.

15) Goal: Recognize Words as They Are Linked in the Speech Stream

Listen to a series of short sentences with consonant/vowel linking between words. Mark the linkages on your answer sheet.

16) Goal: Recognizing Pertinent Details in the Speech Stream

Listen to a short dialog between a boss and a secretary regarding changes in the daily schedule.

Use an appointment calendar. Cross out appointments that are being changed and write in new ones.

Listen to announcements of airline arrivals and departures. With a model of an airline information board in front of you, fill in the flight numbers, destinations, gate numbers, and departure times.

Listen to a series of short dialogs. Before listening, read the questions that apply to the dialogs.

While listening, find the answers to questions about prices, places, names, and numbers. Example:

"Where are the shoppers?" "How much is whole wheat bread?"

Listen to a short telephone conversation between a customer and a service station manager. Fill in a chart which lists the car repairs that must be done. Check the part of the car that needs repair, the reason, and the approximate cost.

17) Goal: Analyze Discourse Structure to Suggest Effective Listening Strategies

Listen to six radio commercials with attention to the use of music, repetition of key words, and number of speakers. Talk about the effect these techniques have on the listeners.

18) Goal: Listen to Identify the Speaker or the Topic

Listen to a series of radio commercials. On your answer sheet, choose among four types of sponsors or products and identify the picture that goes with the commercial.

19) Goal: Listen to Evaluate Themes and Motives

Listen to as series of radio commercials. On your answer sheet are listed four possible motives that the companies use to appeal to their customers. Circle all the motives that you feel each commercial promotes: escape from reality, family security, snob appeal, sex appeal.

20) Goal: Finding Main Ideas and Supporting Details

Listen to a short conversation between two friends. On your answer sheet are scenes from television programs. Find and write the name of the program and the channel. Decide which speaker watched which program.

21) Goal: Making Inferences

Listen to a series of sentences, which may be either statements or questions. After each sentence, answer inferential questions, such as: "Where might the speaker be? " "How might the speaker be feeling?" "What might the speaker be referring to?"

Listen to a series of sentences. After each sentence, suggest a possible context for the sentence (place, situation, time, participants).

22) Goal: Discriminating between Registers of Speech and Tones of Voice

Listen to a series of sentences. On your answer sheet, mark whether the sentence is polite or impolite.

23) Goal: Recognize Missing Grammar Markers in Colloquial Speech

Listen to a series of short questions in which the auxiliary verb and subject have been deleted. Use grammatical knowledge to fill in the missing words: ("Have you) got some extra?" Listen to a series of questions with reduced verb auxiliary and subject and identify the missing verb (does it/is it) by checking the form of the main verb. Example: '"Zit come with anything else? 'Zit arriving on time?"

24) Goal: Use Knowledge of Reduced Forms to Clarify the Meaning of an Utterance

Listen to a short sentence containing a reduced form. Decide what the sentence means. On your answer sheet, read three alternatives and choose the alternative that is the best paraphrase of the sentence you heard. Example: You hear, "You can't be happy with that." You read: "(a) Why can't you be happy? (b) That will make you happy, (c) I don't think you are happy".

25) Goal: Use Context to Build Listening Expectations

Read a short want-ad describing job qualifications in the employment section of a newspaper. Brainstorm additional qualifications that would be important for that type of job.

26) Goal: Listen to Confirm Your Expectations

Listen to short radio advertisements for jobs that are available. Check the job qualifications against your expectations.

27) Goal: Use Context to Build Expectations. Use Bottom-Up Processing to Recognize Missing Words. Compare Your Predictions to What You Actually Heard

Read some telephone messages with missing words. Decide what kinds of information are missing so you know what to listen for. Listen to the information and fill in the blanks. Finally, discuss with the class what strategies you used for your predictions.

28) Goal: Use Incomplete Sensory Data and Cultural Background Information to Construct a More Complete Understanding of a Text

Listen to one side of a telephone conversation. Decide what the topic of the conversation might be and create a title for it.

Listen to the beginning of a conversation between two people and answer questions about the number of participants, their ages, gender, and social roles. Guess the time of day, location, tern perature, season, and topic. Choose among some statements to guess what might come next.

Exercise Types for Advanced-Level Learners

29) Goal: Use Features of Sentence Stress and Volume to Identify Important Information for Note Taking

Listen to a number of sentences and extract the content words, which are read with greater stress. Write the content words as notes.

30) Goal: Become Aware of Sentence Level Features in Lecture Text

Listen to a segment of a lecture while reading a transcript of the material. Notice the incomplete sentences, pauses, and verbal fillers.

3 I) Goal: Become Aware of Organizational Cues in Lecture Text

Look at a lecture transcript and circle all the cue words used to enumerate the main points. Then listen to the lecture segment and note the organizational cues.

32) Goal: Become Aware of Lexical and Suprasegmental Marker for Definitions

Read a list of lexical cues that signal a definition; listen to signals of the speaker's intent such as rhetori­cal questions; listen to special intonation patterns and pause patterns used with appositives.

Listen to short lecture segments that contain new terms and their definitions in context. Use knowledge of lexical and intonational cues to identify the definition of the word.

33) Goal: Identify Specific Points of Information

Read a skeleton outline of a lecture in which the main categories are given but the specific examples are left blank. Listen to the lecture, and find the information that belongs in the blanks.

34) Goal: Use the Introduction to the Lecture to Predict Its Focus and Direction

Listen to the introductory section of a lecture. Then read a number of topics on your answer sheet and choose the topic that best expresses what the lecture will discuss.

35) Goal: Use the Lecture Transcript to Predict the Content of the Next Section

Read a section of a lecture transcript. Stop reading at a juncture point and predict what will come next. Then read on to confirm your prediction.

36) Goal: Find the Main Idea of a Lecture Segment

Listen to a section of a lecture that describes a statistical trend. While you listen look at three graphs that show a change over time and select the graph that best illustrates the lecture.

37) Goal: Use incoming Details to Determine the Accuracy of Predictions about Content

Listen to the introductory sentences to predict some of the main ideas you expect to hear in the lecture. Then listen to the lecture as it is played. Note whether or not the instructor talks about the points you predicted. If she/he does, note a detail about the point.

38) Goal: Determine the Main Ideas of a Section of a Lecture by Analysis of the Details in that Section

Listen to a section of a lecture and take notes on the important details. Then relate the details to form an understanding of the main point of that section. Choose from a list of possible controlling ideas.

39) Goal: Make Inferences by Identifying Ideas on the Sentence Level That Lead to Evaluative Statements

Listen to a statement and take notes on the important words. Indicate what further meaning can be inferred from the statement. Indicate the words in the original statement. Indicate the words in the original statement that serve to cue the inference.

40) Goal: Use Knowledge of the Text and the Lecture Content to Fill In Missing Information

Listen to a lecture segment to get the gist. Then listen to a statement from which words have been omitted. Using your knowledge of the text and of the general content, fill in the missing information. Check your understand by listening to the entire segment.

41) Goal: Use Knowledge of the Text and the Lecture Content to Discover the Lecturer's

Misstatements and to Supply the Ideas That He Meant to Say

Listen to a lecture segment that contains an incorrect term. Write the incorrect term and the term that the lecturer should have used. Finally, indicate what clues helped you find the misstatement.

Examples taken from YOU&ME