Listening

A: What is listening?

Like all language development skills, listening is a complicated task. ESL learners are not just listening to "English sounds," they are using their knowledge of grammar, vocabulary, and context (including knowledge of cultural norms) to make sense of what they hear.

1. Listening for perception: Individual Sounds and Words

Being able to distinguish individual sounds is important to ensure information is communicated properly. Learners may have difficulty hearing certain sounds in English because these sounds may not exist in their mother tongue. You may have a learner who hears a "t" sound rather than the "th" sound (as in tooth), and believes that the object you are talking about is "toot." Other sounds, which English may use as two separate sounds, may exist interchangeably in some languages. For example, in the Korean language, the letters b and p are represented by the same symbol.

Not only can the inability to hear individual sounds cause listening comprehension problems, but pronunciation problems as well. Thus, helping a learner improve her listening inevitably means that you will assist in remedying some of her pronunciation problems as well. Good pronunciation and good listening skills are developed in tandem.

In order for ESL learners to understand English, they need to know not only the individual sounds that exist in the language but how words are stressed. Word stress can also cause additional difficulties for the ESL learner, particularly when words have different stressed syllables in their noun and verb forms.

2. Listening for perception: Phrases

Words often sound different when spoken in a sentence. When said in isolation, you is pronounced a certain way. When stated rapidly in the phrase would you come, you may sound more like ja. It is important that learners recognize these reduced speech forms. Without knowledge of these reduced forms, understanding day-to-day interactions may be extremely difficult.