Pre, while and post-listening skills (Wilson (2008)

1. Pre, while and post-listening
skills and activities

2. Different sources of listening
a) Teacher talk
∙ T in complete control.
∙ Interactive
∙ Planned input
∙ Spontaneous input: words of
encouragement, witty
comments, gossip,
on-the-spot classroom
management.
b) Student talk
“To experiment with new language”
c) Guest speaker
“Foreign culture”
d) textbook recordings
+ Variety
+ Listening sequences
+ Transcrits

3. Different sources of listening
+ Authentic
+ Topical
+ Real-world information
+ Visual aspect
+ People in their natural habitat
- Creativity from T
Radio
+ pronunciation: stress
pattern
+ contain stories
+ accents, voices,
cultures and ideas in the
classroom
+ Podcast

4. Pre-listening 1. Activate schemata: What do I know?
2. Reason: Why listen?
3. Prediction: What can I expect to hear?
While-listening 1. Monitor (1): Are my expectations
met?
2. Monitor (2): Am I succeeding in the
task?
Post-listening 1. Feedback. Did I fulfill the task?
2. Response: How can I respond?
The listening sequence

5. Pre-listening skills and activities
Brainstorm
ing
Situations
Visuals
Realia
Texts and
words
Opinions,
ideas and
facts
1. Activate schemata
Routine situations,
represented in
people’s minds,
are sometimes
called “scripts”

6. Pre-listening skills and activities
2. Give students a
purpose for listening
Setting questions beforehand is the most common way of
establishing a reason for the students to listen.
E.g. from title to question, KWL charts, …
3. Pre teaching
vocabulary
Gives students confidence as well as potentially useful
information about the topic.
# of words to pre-teach?

7. Pre-listening skills and activities
The idea of pre-listening is to introduce the topic rather than to give
all the answers.
Don’t ‘do a listening before the listening’.
During the pre-listening phase, let the students do as much speaking
as possible.
Keep in mind Christine Nuttall’s axiom, ‘Never say anything yourself if
a student could say it for you.’
Don’t just talk about the general topic; if the idea is to introduce the
listening passage, the conversation should stick, more or less, to the
content of the passage. The pre-listening activity must be entirely
relevant to what the students will hear.

8. While listening skills and activities
Why use while-listening activities?
a) well-designed activities can help students to understand the listening
passage.
b) we want our students to show evidence of understanding or non-
understanding.

9. While listening skills and activities
Listening for gist
Listening for detail
Inferring (Making deductions)
Situations
must
demand an
inference.

10. While listening skills and activities
Active participation
Note-taking (improving listening)
Dictation (intensive listening)

11. Post-skills and activities
Checking and summarising
Discussion (personal responses)
Creative responses E.g. Genre transfer
E.g. Moral or headline

12. Post-skills and activities
Critical responses
Information exchange
Problem- solving
E.g. Jigsaw
pose a problem and use a listening passage to help solve it.
1. Listing
2. Sorting
3. Ranking
4. Ordering
according to
criteria
5. Designing
something
6. Solving moral
dilemas
7. Solving
mysteries

13. Post-skills and activities (Other ideas)
Deconstructing the listening text
Reconstructing the listening text
If we want to examine listening texts for their salient features - grammar, vocabulary,
cohesive devices, discourse markers, pronunciation, etc - to a certain extent we need to
pull them apart.
The teacher’s role is to provide fragments of the text or a damaged or abbreviated form of it. By
putting it back together, students have to deal with many aspects of language: grammar,
vocabulary and discourse features of spoken English, for example.
E.g. Gap-fill,
disappearing
dialogues.

14. In summary
Pre-listening
While-listening
Post-listening
Prepares the students, primarily by getting them interested in
the topic, activating schemata and working with top-down
ideas. At this stage we also give the students a listening task.
The students are now ‘on-task’, engaged in real-time processing
of the input.
Besides checking the answers, we go into detail, looking at
both top-down features such as the exact setting of
the passage or information about the speakers, and bottom-up
features such as individual words or phrases.

15. Reference
Wilson, J. (2008). How to teach listening. England, Pearson. Chapters.
3-6.