河北师大教学法教案Unit 9 Teaching Listening

Unit 9 Teaching Listening

Aims of the unit:

1. Why is listening so difficult for students?

2. What do we listen to in everyday life?

3. What are the characteristics of the listening process?

4. What are the principles of teaching listening?

5. What are the common activities in teaching listening?

I. The importance of teaching listening

1. Listening is one of the four basic skills of a language.

2. Why does listening seem so difficult for Chinese students?

Task 1: In your English learning experiences, did you find listening more difficult than the other three skills? Can you think of any reasons why

listening is often considered to be more difficult?

Conclusion:

In Foreign language learning, both listening and reading are receptive skills, but listening can be more difficult that reading because:

l Different speakers produce the same sounds in different ways. (different dialects and accents, stresses, rhythms, intonations, mispronunciations)

l The speed of the input of spoken material can not be controlled;

l Spoken material is often heard only once. And the listener cannot pause the speaker to work out the meaning.

l Background noise.

l Memory and recurrence.

3. What do we listen to in everyday life?

As we know, listen is very important in daily communication. There is a great variety of situations where we need to listen to English. As a matter of fact, Chinese students have few chances to be exposed in listening.

Task 3: Below is a list of situations where Chinese people may need to listen to English. Choose eight situations that you think are the most frequent.

II. Characteristics of the listening process

The listening situations in TASK 3 can also be divided as

l Formal or informal:

l Rehearsed or non-rehearsed;

l The listener can or cannot interact with the speaker

According to Ur(1996), listening process has following characteristics:

Spontaneity: We often listen to people speaking spontaneously and

informally without rehearsing what they are going to say ahead of time.

Context: The context of listening is usually known in real life. The situation usually helps us predict what we are going to hear.

Visual clues: While listening, the speakers’facial expressions, gestures and other body language will provide us visual clues which can help us understand and predict what we hear.

Listener’s response: Most of the listening allows the listener to responds the speaker, whether they understand or not.

Speaker’s adjustment: The speaker can adjust the way of speaking according to the listener’s reactions.

III. Objective and Principles for teaching listening

1. Objective of teaching Listening

l Learn how to listen

l Learn to pick up the most important information

l Learn to become a skillful listener

l Like listening

l Like imitating

l Like participating in communicative activities

2. Teaching principles

1) Focus on process：In listening, people must do many things to process information they are receiving. They have to hear what is being said, they have to pay attention to catch as much information as possible so as to construct a meaningful message in their mind by relating what they hear to what they already know..

2) Combine listening with other skills. Listening and speaking skills are closely related. Both of them belong to the oral skill. They need interaction so that to help communication.

3) Focus on comprehension of meaning. Understand the meaning