Types of Classroom Listening Performance With literally hundreds of possible techniques available for teaching listening skills, it will be helpful for you to think in terms of several kinds of listening performances, that is, what your students do in a listening technique.
1. Reactive Sometimes you simply want a learner to listen to the surface structure of an utterance for the sole purpose of repeating it back to you. While this kind of listening performance requires little meaningful processing, it nevertheless may be a legitimate, even though a minor, aspect of an interactive, communicative classroom. This role of the listener as merely a "tape recorder" (Nunan, 1991b:18) must be very limited, otherwise the listener as a generator of meaning does not reach fruition. About the only role that reactive listening can play in an interactive classroom is in brief choral or individual drills that focus on pronunciation.
2. Intensive Techniques whose only purpose is to focus on components (phonemes, words, intonation, discourse markers, etc.) of discourse may be considered to |be intensive—as opposed to extensive—in their requirement that students single out certain elements of spoken language.. Examples of intensive listening performance include:
• students listen for cues in certain choral or individual drills
• the teacher repeats a word or sentence several times to "imprint" it in the student's mind
• the teacher asks students to listen to a sentence or a longer stretch of discourse and to notice a specified element, e.g., intonation, stress, a contraction, a grammatical structure,
3. Responsive A significant proportion of classroom listening activity consists of short stretches of teacher language designed to elicit immediate responses. The students' task in such listening is to process the teacher talk immediately and to fashion an appropriate reply. Examples include:
• asking questions ("How are you today?" "What did you do last night?")
• giving commands ("Take out a sheet of paper and a pencil.")
• seeking clarification ("What was that word you said?")
• checking comprehension ("So, how many people were in the elevator when the power
went out?")