The Ministry of Higher and secondary education of the Republic of Uzbekistan State World Languages University

Rapport Listening

When trying to build rapport with others we can engage in a type of listening that encourages the other person to trust and like us. A salesman, for example, may make an effort to listen carefully to what you are saying as a way to promote trust and potentially make a sale. This type of listening is common in situations of negotiation. (See: Building Rapport and Negotiation Skills for more information).

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  Selective Listening
  

This is a more negative type of listening, it implies that the listener is somehow biased to what they are hearing. Bias can be based on preconceived ideas or emotionally difficult communications. Selective listening is a sign of failing communication – you cannot hope to understand if you have filtered out some of the message and may reinforce or strengthen your bias for future communications.
Comprehensive (Informational) Listening  Students listen for the content of the message.
Critical (Evaluative) Listening  Students judge the message
Appreciative (Aesthetic) Listening  Students listen for enjoyment.
Therapeutic (Empathetic) Listening  Students listen to support others but not judge them .
Contrasting Effective and Ineffective Listening Habits

Start listening without thinking. Build their background about subject. knowledge on subject before listening.
Have no specific purpose for Have a specific purpose for listening and have not considered listening and attempt to ascertain. speaker’s purpose. speaker’s purpose.
Do not focus attention. Tune in and attend.
Create or are influenced by Minimize distractions. distractions.
Actively listening is:
When a person who incorporates listening with concentration; Method of responding to another that encourages communication Listening: Top down and bottom up In’ real-life listening, our students will have to use a combination of the two processes, with more emphasis on ‘top-down’ or ‘bottom-up’ listening depending on their reasons for listening. Top-down listening This refers to the use of background knowledge in understanding the meaning of the message. Background knowledge consists of context, that is, the situation and topic, and co-text, in other words, what came before and after. Bottom up listening The ability to separate the stream of speech into individual words to recognize. A List of Bottom Up Skills
• discriminating between intonation contours in sentences • discriminating between phonemes
• listening for word endings
• recognizing syllable patterns
• being aware of sentence fillers in informal speech
• recognizing words, discriminate between word boundaries
• picking out details
• differentiating between content and function words by stress pattern
• finding the stressed syllable
• recognizing words with weak or central vowels
• recognizing when syllables or words are dropped
• recognizing words when they are linked together in streams of speech
• using features of stress, intonation and prominence to help identify
important information⁵
A List of Top-Down Skills
By using their knowledge of context and co-text, students should either be able
• to guess the meaning of the unknown word, or
• understand the general idea without getting distracted by it,
• putting a series of pictures or sequence of events in order,
• listening to conversations and identifying where they take place,
• reading information about a topic then listening to find whether or not the same points are mentioned, or
• inferring the relationships between the people involved
• A framework for planning a listening skills lesson
• The basic framework on which you can construct a listening lesson can be divided into three main stages.
• Pre-listening, during which we help our students prepare to listen.
• While listening, during which we help to focus their attention on the
listening text and guide the development of their understanding of it.
• Post-listening, during which we help our students integrate what they
have learnt from the text into their existing knowledge.
Pre-listening
There are certain goals that should be achieved before students attempt to
listen to any text. These are motivation, contextualization, and preparation.
Motivation. It is enormously important that before listening students are motivated to listen, so you should try to select a text that they will find interesting and then design tasks that will arouse your students‘ interest and curiosity.
Contextualization. Listening to a tape recording in a classroom is a very unnatural process. The text has been taken from its original environment and we need to design tasks that will help students to contextualize the listening and access their existing knowledge and expectations to help them understand the text.
Preparation. Prepare specific vocabulary or expressions that students will need.
While listening
For our students to really develop their listening skills they will need to
listen a number of times – three or four usually works quite well.
 1st–to get a general understanding of the text
 2nd–ticking or some sort of graphical response.
 3d – checking their own answers from the second task or could
lead students towards some more subtle interpretations of thetext.
 ‗Breathing‘ or ‗thinking‘ space between listening –get students to
compare their answers between listening as this gives them the chance not only to have a break from the listening, but also to check their understanding with a peer and so reconsider before listening again.
Post-listening
 Reactions to the content of the text – discussion as a response to what
we‘ve heard – do they agree or disagree or even believe what they have
heard? – or it could be some kind of reuse of the information they have
heard
 Analysis of the linguistic features used to express the content – This is
important in terms of developing their knowledge of language, but less so
in terms of developing students‘ listening skills. It could take the form of
an analysis of verb forms from a script of the listening text or vocabulary
or collocation work.
Assessing Listening Proficiency –use post-listening activities to check comprehension, evaluate listening skills and use of listening strategies, and extend the knowledge gained to other contexts.
In order to provide authentic assessment of students‘ listening proficiency, a post-listening activity must reflect the real-life uses to which students might put information they have gained through listening. It must have a purpose other than assessment. It must require students to demonstrate their level of listening comprehension by completing some task.