Strategies for Developing Listening Skills

Language learning depends on listening. Listening provides the aural input that serves as the basis for language acquisition and enables learners to interact in spoken communication.

Students can adjust their listening behavior to deal with a variety of situations, types of input, and listening purposes. This helps students develop a set of listening strategies and match appropriate strategies to each listening situation.

Classroom Listening vs. Listening in the Real World

- The rate of speech
- Boundaries between linguistic units
- The syntax of spoken language
- The teacher: sympathetic listener and speaker
- Listening comprehension as a prerequisite for successful speaking
- Bias of learning through reading
- Only one chance to understand the message: limited processing time
- Other barriers that can impede on interpreting the speech sample (lack of linguistic or general background knowledge; acoustic conditions; dialect; pronunciation; intonation, etc.)