Listening - Types of Performance, Techniques, Assessment

I. Types of Listening Performance (Brown 308-310)
a. Reactive – This is essentially rote memorization. It is not as valid for an interactive classroom but it may have a small role in correcting pronunciation.
b. Intensive – For stressing specific components of language such as phonemes and intonation or for “imprinting” a phrase.
c. Responsive – Teacher speaks and students respond immediately. It can help with checking comprehension, questions and commands, or clarification.
d. Selective – Finding specific meaning within a longer discourse such as speeches, broadcasts, stories. This is similar to teaching the strategy of picking out the key words in an utterance.
e. Extensive – More effective for lectures and note taking and uses a top down method of teaching.
f. Interactive – Requires integration with speaking and other skills and includes all of the above types of performance. Leads to true, real-world communication.
II. Listening Techniques (Brown 312-317)
a. Bottom-Up – This technique goes from small pieces like phonemes to grammar specifics.
b. Top-Down – More concerned with schemata, which is what the student brings to the classroom.
c. Interactive – An exchange of ideas between two or more people and the effect that they have on each other.
III. Assessment (Brown 318-319)
a. Intensive Listening Tasks – More about distinguishing pieces of language such as phonemic and morphological pairs, stress patterns, recognition and paraphrasing.
b. Responsive Listening Tasks – This is about questions and answers
c. Selective Listening Tasks – Fill in the blanks, verbal responses, chart completion and sentence repetition.
d. Extensive Listening Tasks – Focus is dictation, dialogue, lectures and stories.
e. Interaction – Includes full skills integration and all of the above points including speaking.


Critical Thinking Questions
1. What type of technique would you use for the intensive type of listening performance and why?
2. How would you go about assessing a student or students in an extensive listening performance environment? Give examples.
3. In an interactive teaching situation, which uses all five of the other types performance, which performance type do you feel you might use more and why?