Selecting Tasks

and
Selecting Text
Selecting Task
O One-way listening tasks do not require learners to
interact with a speaker.
O The goal is to understand a text they hear according to
specified communicative purposes.
O Two types of listening texts can be used for one-way
listening: direct and indirect authentic listening texts.
Examples of direct authentic listening texts include
lectures, talks, radio broadcasts, podcasts, TV programs,
and movies that are aimed at a general audience.
O With indirect authentic listening texts, however, learners
play the role of “over hearers” of the conversations and
other exchanges in an interaction where
they are not a participant.
Figure 9.3 presents a selection of one-way
listening tasks and the response that learners could
make in each task, the listening skills that are practiced,
and the expected outcome(s). The tasks are arranged in
order of increasing cognitive demands and relative
complexity of the tasks. The listening skills highlighted are
the main ones
that learners are expected to use and which teachers can
foster. They do not, however, preclude other skills and
strategies that learners can use
Selecting Text
O One-way listening tasks rely heavily on texts to
develop listening competence. It is therefore
important that texts are carefully selected for this
purpose.
O Authentic materials for listening are texts that have
not been produced or scripted for the purpose of
language teaching but are recordings of natural
speech taken from everyday sources where speech is
produced (Underwood, 1989).
O Authentic materials for one-way listening can be
found in a number of sources, such as videos, radio
and television broadcasts, songs, audio recordings,
CD ROMs, the internet, and situations in which
speech is performed, such as drama and poetry
recitals.
O Authentic materials are intrinsically interesting
because they contain information on current topics
and well-known personalities of interest to learners of
all ages and backgrounds.
O However, natural speech in this context has features
that can be both helpful and problematic to language
learners. These include hesitations, pauses, fillers,
redundancies, a range of accents, and rapid speech
rate.
O For beginning listeners, some of these features may
pose too much of a challenge and, therefore, there
may still be a needful scripted or “semi-authentic”
materials to be used (Rogers & Medley,1988).
Besides authenticity, other points also need to be
considered when selecting texts for listening. These
are reflected in the seven questions below. The first
four questions pertain to the communicative context
for the material while the remaining three focus on
features in the text:
1. What is the original communicative purpose for the
material?

The quickest way to decide whether a text should be

considered further is to establish its original purpose.
This does not mean, however, that you must have a
total match of the original purpose with the listening
purpose for the classroom. Knowing what a text is for
will give you an idea of whether it will be suitable for
your particular group. Should you want to adapt the
material for teaching listening, it will also alert you to
the things you need to do and the extent of what needs
to be done.
2. Who is the intended audience?

It is useful to match the intended audience of the

listening text with the profile of your learners because the
content and even the style of delivery
may be more attractive to one group of listeners than to
another. Finding a good fit between the intended audience
for a text and a group of language learners will ensure that
the learners find their listening task relevant and
appropriate. Another point to consider is the presence of
any unfamiliar cultural elements. While there is common
ground between different groups of people in the world,
something that is produced for a group of teenagers in
one country, for example, may not necessarily be accepted
by their peers in another culture.
3. Who is speaking?

The characteristics of speakers can have a huge

influence on L2 listening comprehension. These include
speech rate, accent and pronunciation, fluency, clarity, and
even gender. It is best to avoid speech that is too fast by the
standards of competent speakers while at the same time
speakers who speak too slowly, haltingly, or in a monotonous
manner should also be avoided. When a task requires
learners to play the role of “overhearers,” the number of
speakers in an interaction should also be a consideration.

An audio recording with several speakers may

sometimes create a problem for learners who are not able to
follow the change in turns, particularly when the voices are
quite similar, or when the speakers are speaking fast.
4. What kind of visual support is available?

Visual support can provide useful contextual clues

to enhance comprehension through drawing inferences
and monitoring understanding. Illustrations, maps,
pictures, etc. can also help learners focus their attention
on the listening input and predict what they will hear. Not
all forms of visual support, however, are useful for
learners. TV news reports may provide an example here. It
is quite common for TV viewers to watch video footage
while listening to a voice-over reporting on details of an
incident. Sometimes, what is showing on the screen bears
little relation to what is actually said by the reporter. In
such situations, the visuals do not provide support for
listening and may even be a source of confusion for non-
proficient listeners.
5. Is the level of language appropriate?

Ideally, the text you choose should be at a level

that your students will be able to understand minimally at
a global level. It should also present some challenges that
will push them to use listening strategies in order to
achieve the listening outcomes. The level of acceptable
difficulty relates to the task. A difficult text can be
manageable for learners if all they have to do is listen for
global understanding. A text that is normally considered
easy could be used for a more complex task, which
requires not merely listening for details or main points, but
also eliciting judgments or evaluations from the listener. In
other words, learners have to listen critically, using high-
level
skills such as inferencing to listen between the lines.
 This can be made more challenging by including
other factors that influence listening and its outcomes,
such as listening to something from the perspectives of
people in different roles. Avoid texts for which learners
have very little background knowledge, which contain a
number of unfamiliar lexical items, or which are spoken in
an unfamiliar accent. Texts that contain such linguistic
challenges, but on a familiar topic, can be used to
practice skills such as listen for main points, listen for
global understanding, or listen and predict. Of course,
listener processing of input can also be supported by
relevant preparatory activities before the listening task.
As a rule of thumb, there should not be more than one
aspect of a text that learners will find challenging
6. Is the length (duration) of the text appropriate and realistic
for the learners?

One way to assess whether the length of a text is suitable

is to consider the listening purpose and the intended listening
outcomes. For example, if learners have to obtain detailed
information, then a long text will not be appropriate because it will
require prolonged attention to details and this can be tiring. On the
other hand, if the purpose is to produce a short summary, learners
will be listening for main points and global understanding, and they
can use different strategies to enhance their understanding. If a
long text is particularly relevant to the lesson objectives, you may
consider segmenting it for use with a sequence of listening tasks in
a lesson. Very short texts (less than a minute) present a different
set of challenges. Some learners need time to “tune in” to a topic
and part of this “tuning in” involves getting the ears used to the
way the speaker sounds. Thus, if the text is not long enough for this
“tuning in” to take place, learners may end up feeling frustrated
7. Is the text really meant for listening?

This may seem like an odd question to ask, but in

reality many written texts meant for reading find their way
into listening classes; this does a great disservice to L2
listeners. Texts meant to be read silently tend to be high
on content or lexically dense. Clauses in spoken language,
on the other hand, tend to have fewer content words (e.g.,
nouns and adjectives) and more function words (e.g.,
prepositions, auxiliary verbs, articles), thus allowing
meaning to build up over more words and utterances.
Speech is organized
differently: spoken grammar differs from the grammar of
written language (Carter & McCarthy, 1997). Instead of
multiple clausal embeddings, the coordinator “and” is
used frequently to link ideas together.
 These features of spoken language are mainly
due to limited cognitive capacities to process and
produce speech, but they are in fact helpful to listeners
who are also limited by similar constraints while
processing spoken input. As a general principle,
therefore, written texts that are meant to be read
silently should not be read aloud or recorded for
learners to practice their listening. Unlike the printed
word, listening input is transient and not reiterative
under normal circumstances. If written texts are used,
select those with features of the spoken language or
adapt them so that more features of speech are
included to facilitate listening