Part 1 Understanding spoken English 1
1 Real-life listening 2
1.1 Purpose and expectation 3
1.2 Response 4
1.3 Visibility of the speaker 4
1.4 Environmental clues 5
1.5 Shortness 6
1.6 Informal speech 6
Redundancy 7
'Noise' 7
Colloquial language 8
Auditory character 9
2 Listening to English as a foreign language 11
2.1 Hearing the sounds 11
2.2 Understanding intonation and stress 13
2.3 Coping with redundancy and 'noise' 13
2.4 Predicting 16
2.5 Understanding colloquial vocabulary 17
2.6 Fatigue 19
2.7 Understanding different accents 20
2.8 Using visual and aural environmental clues 20
3 Planning exercises 22
3.1 Listening materials 22
Producing suitable discourse 22
Using recordings 24
3.2 The task 25
A pre-set purpose 26
Ongoing learner-response 26
Motivation 27
Success 27
Simplicity 28
Feedback 28
3.3 Visual materials 29
Contextualization 29
Learning and motivation 30
Pictures and diagrams as task-bases 30
Part 2 Suggestions for classroom activities 33
4 Listening for perception 35
4.1 At word-level 36
Oral activities 37
Reading and writing activities 39
Meaning-based activities 40
4.2 At sentence-level 41
Oral activities 42
Reading and writing activities 43
Meaning-based activities 44
5 Listening for comprehension 47
5.1 Listening and making no response 51
Following a written text 51
Listening to a familiar text 52
Listening aided by visuals 53
Informal teacher-talk 62
Entertainment 63
5.2 Listening and making short responses 67
Obeying instructions 68
Ticking off items 74
True/false exercises 77
Detecting mistakes 80
Aural cloze 83
Guessing definitions 87
Noting specific information 91
Pictures 96
Maps 103
Ground-plans 108
Grids 116
Family trees 121
Graphs 124
5.3 Listening and making longer responses 127
Repetition and dictation 128
Paraphrase 129
Translation 132
Answering questions 133
Answering comprehension questions on texts 136
Predictions 139
Fillinggaps 142
Summarizing 145
5.4 Listening as a basis for study and discussion 148
Problem-solving 148
Jigsaw listening 152
Interpretative listening 160
Evaluative and stylistic analysis 164
A postscript:conversation 167
Bibliography 169
Index 173