Understanding the Listening Process and Skills

Posted on May 15, 2025 in Pedagogy

What is Listening?

Let’s look at listening as an interactive process!

Process of Listening

According to Clark & Clark (1977):

  1. Hearer processes the “raw/pure speech” (the actual phrases, clauses, etc.).
  2. Hearer determines the type of speech (conversation, speech, etc.).
  3. Hearer infers the objectives of the speaker (to persuade, request, etc.).
  4. Hearer recalls schemata (own background knowledge).
  5. Hearer assigns literal meaning to utterance.
  6. Hearer assigns intended meaning to utterance.
  7. Hearer determines whether information should be retained in short-term or long-term memory.
  8. Hearer deletes the form in which the message was received.

Listening is Interactive

Listening is also interactive because in most situations listening is part of a two-way communication between two or more parties. Listening is a part of an interactive process of communication.

Listening Strategies for Young Learners

  • Predicting: Learners guess what they will be listening to next.
  • Guessing from Context: Learners guess the meaning of a word through the context given.
  • Recognizing Discourse Patterns and Markers: Learners understand signal words, such as first, then, finally, but, so, etc.

Principles for Teaching Listening (Brown, 2001)

  1. In an interactive, four-skill curriculum, make sure that you don’t overlook the importance of techniques that specifically develop listening comprehension competence.
  2. Use techniques that are intrinsically motivating.
  3. Utilize authentic language and contexts.
  4. Carefully consider the form of listener’s responses.
  5. Encourage the development of listening strategies.
  6. Include both bottom-up and top-down listening strategies.

Showing Listening Comprehension

Comprehension can be shown by:

  • Doing: Listener responds physically to a command.
  • Choosing: Listener selects from alternatives such as pictures, objects, and texts.
  • Transferring: Listener draws a picture of what is heard.
  • Answering: Listener answers questions about the message.
  • Condensing: Listener outlines or takes notes on a lecture.
  • Extending: Listener provides an ending to a story heard.
  • Duplicating: Listener translates the message into the native language or repeats it verbatim.
  • Modeling: Listener orders a meal, for example, after listening to a model order.
  • Conversing: Listener engages in a conversation that indicates appropriate processing of information.

Listening Micro Skills

  1. Retain chunks of language of different lengths in short-term memory.
  2. Discriminate among the distinctive sounds of English.
  3. Recognize English stress patterns, words in stressed and unstressed positions, rhythmic structure, intonational contours, and their role in signaling information.
  4. Recognize reduced forms of words.
  5. Distinguish word boundaries, recognize a core of words, and interpret word order patterns and their significance.
  6. Process speech at different rates of delivery.
  7. Process speech containing pauses, errors, corrections, and other performance variables.
  8. Recognize grammatical word classes (nouns, verbs, etc.), systems (e.g., tense, agreement, pluralization), patterns, rules, and elliptical forms.
  9. Detect sentence constituents and distinguish between major and minor constituents.
  10. Recognize that a particular meaning may be expressed in different grammatical forms.
  11. Recognize cohesive devices in spoken discourse.
  12. Recognize the communicative functions of utterances, according to situations, participants, goals.
  13. Infer situations, participants, goals, using real-world knowledge.
  14. From events, ideas, etc., described, predict outcomes, infer links and connections between events, deduce causes and effects, and detect such relations as main idea, supporting idea, new information, given information, generalization, and exemplification.
  15. Distinguish between literal and implied meanings.
  16. Use facial, kinesic, body language, and other nonverbal clues to decipher meanings.
  17. Develop and use a battery of listening strategies, such as detecting key words, guessing the meaning of words from context, appealing for help, and signaling comprehension or lack thereof.

Top-Down Processing

Top-down processing begins with the schemata or background knowledge that the listener brings to the text. Top-down techniques focus on the activation of background knowledge and the meaning of the text.

  • Pre-listening

    Before the listening activity, prepare students by activating schema, connecting the activity to their background knowledge, getting them to predict what they will be listening to, and introducing useful words and concepts.

  • While Listening

    While students are listening, ensure they are actively engaged by using visuals (such as pictures, facial expressions, body movement), asking questions and eliciting answers, and having them respond to the listening by doing, choosing, etc.

  • Post-listening

    After the listening activity, follow up with comprehension checking activities, which can include the same types of activities mentioned above.