UNIT 5 LISTENING TEACHING STRATEGIES. Oral texts are the hardest to understand for non-native speakers. Some of the reasons are the reduced opportunities to practice in quotidian situations, priority in grammar when teaching and teachers do not use many authentic materials. This complex ability requires intentional listening that employs strategies for identifying sounds and making meaning from them. Teachers´ tasks consists in helping their students become effective listeners, it means choosing and practicing listening strategies like top-down where understanding is based on the listener background and knowledge of the topic. It includes identifying main idea, predicting, drawing inferences, summarizing. Sidney festival and dioramas are useful movies to practice this strategy. Bottom-up strategy uses the combination of sounds, words and grammar that creates meaning. Word stress pattern encourages students to know words function, improve good pronunciation, getting underlying meaning of a sentence. Phonetic links like http://www.shiporsheep.com/, tag questions, idioms, minimal pairs, can be used. An inadequate rhythm and Intonation -falling and raising- can result in misunderstandings or losing interest in conversation. Helpful pages are http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLOBq2WcINY&NR=1, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2bHdXcszJ4 http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=Qh6kUsJcu3k Thought groups and punctuation strategies are explained in these links. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHZIA0G1sc&feature=related , http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=nM5AS4XIPSM&NR=1 Authentic texts like video or news are helpful ways to teach culture and develop listening.
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