2. Techniques should be intrinsically motivating. Appeal to listener's personal interests and goals. Since background information (schemata) is an important factor in listening, take into full account the experiences and goals and abilities of your students as you design lessons.
3. Techniques should utilize authentic language and contexts. Authentic language and real-world tasks enable students to see the relevance of classroom activity to their long term communicative goals.
4. Carefully consider the form of listeners' responses.
Comprehension itself is not externally observable. We cannot peer into a learner's brain through a little window of some kind and empirically observe exactly what is stored there after someone else has said something. We can only infer that certain things have been comprehended through students' overt responses (verbal or nonverbal) to speech.
Lund (1990) offers nine different ways that we can check listeners' comprehension: • doing—the listener responds physically to a command
• choosing—the listener selects from alternatives such as pictures, objects, texts
• transferring—the listener draws a picture of what is heard
• answering—the listener answers questions about the message
• condensing—the listener outlines or takes notes on a lecture
• extending—the listener provides an ending to a story heard
• duplicating—the listener translates the message into the native language or repeats it
verbatim
• modeling—the listener orders a meal, for example, after listening to a model order
• conversing—the listener engages in a conversation that indicates appropriate processing of
information
5. Encourage the development of listening strategies. Most foreign language students are simply not aware of how to listen. One of your jobs is to equip them with listening strategies that extend well beyond the classroom. Draw their attention to the value of such strategies as:
• looking for keywords
• looking for nonverbal cues to meaning
• predicting a speaker's purpose by the context of the spoken discourse
• associating information with one's existing cognitive structure (activating schemata)
• guessing at meanings
• seeking clarification
• listening for the general gist.
• for tests of listening comprehension, various test-taking strategies
