Listening skills

Some of the most important listening skills are:

Listening for gist
An important listening skill. Students listen to a tape and answer general questions about it to show that they understand the main idea.Example:Students listen to a tape about the problems of the world and answer questions such as:1. Is the speaker optimistic or pessimistic?2. Does the speaker think there are a lot of problems in the world?


Listening for detail
An important listening skill. Students listen to a tape and get the most important information from it. To focus the students’ attention, they can be given questions about the tape before they listen to it.

Example:Students listen to a tape about the problems of the world. Before listening, they read questions such as:

1. What does the speaker think are the five main problems of the world?
2. Which country does he give as an example of each problem?
3. What solution does he suggest for each problem?

Students can then try to answer one or more of the questions before listening (a pre-listening activity), or listen to the tape and then answer the questions.


Listening for specific information

An important listening skill. Students listen for a short list of specific information on a tape which contains other information as well.Example: Students listen to a tape of a person asking for information about a flight times. They answer questions such as:

1. What are the numbers of the flights to France?

2. What times are the flights to France?

3. How long does it take to fly to France?

Listening for specific information is similar to Listening for detail. The difference is that in Listening for specific information, students are required to distinguish relevant information from irrelevant information. In Listening for detail, the students are required to extract all the information.

Inferential listening

In an inferential listening exercise, the answers to the question you ask the students are not in the language of the tape. Students must infer the answers from a range of clues.

Example:Students listen to a tape of an argument in an office. They identify the people who are angry and the people who are trying to stop the argument.