LISTENING COMPREHENSION

Listening comprehension is more than just hearing what is said; rather, it is a child’s ability to understand the meaning of the words he hears and to relate to them in some way. When children hear a story, for instance, good listening comprehension enables them to understand it, remember it, discuss it, and even retell it in their own words. This is an important skill to develop even at an early age, because good listeners grow up to become good communicators.

Reflection on the video by Jack C. Richards regarding Listening

Listening Comprehension is compounded by two different strands which are: Bottom Up Processing, and Top Down Processing. These may vary depending on the students' learning background. Let's discuss a little bit deeper the topic.

Bottom up:  students are taught an specific topic. The following strategies can help teachers to put into practice the bottom up processing while teaching: 

• listening for specific details
• recognizing cognates
• recognizing word-order patterns

Bottom-up strategies are text based; the listener relies on the language in the message, that is, the combination of sounds, words, and grammar that creates meaning.

Top down: this one depends on the background knowledge of the student on a certain topic.

Let's take a look to the strategies that can be done while teaching:

•          listening for the main idea
•          predicting
•          drawing inferences
•         summarizing

Top-down strategies are listener based; the listener taps into background knowledge of the topic, the situation or context, the type of text, and the language. This background knowledge activates a set of expectations that help the listener to interpret what is heard and anticipate what will come next.

To sum up, listening comprehension is really important for teachers to implement or develop this skills into their students no matter if they teach it inductively or deductively. It has to be mentioned that sometimes is necessary to expose students to real world material for creating interest on the classes.