Types of listening

The problem of typology of listening still remains open for further discussion. According to Adrian Doff(1989), in real life there are two ways in which we often listen: casual and focussed listening.

Casual listening. Sometimes we listen with no particular purpose in mind, and often without much concentration. Examples of this kind of listening are listening to the radio while doing some housework or chatting to a friend. Usually we do not listen very closely, unless we hear something that particularly interests us, and afterwards we may no remember much of what we heard.

Focussed listening. At other times we listen for a particular purpose, to find out information we need to know. Examples of this kind of listening are listening to a piece of important news on the radio; listening to someone explaining how to operate a machine. In these situations we listen more closely; but we do not listen to everything we hear with equal concentration – we listen for the most important points or for particular information. Usually we know beforehand what we are listening for (the things we want to know), and this helps us to listen. Thus, some writers (Wilga Rivers, Peter Hubbard, Hywel Jones, Barbara Thornton, Rod Wheeler, Yury Dubovsky) distinguish two types of listening exercises – extensive and intensive listening.

A. Intensive listening. Two types of intensive listeningexercises can be distinguished.

1. Exercises which focus on detailed comprehension of meaning. This can be done through:

a) Comprehension questions. These can be:

- factual, where the answer is clearly stated somewhere in the passage;

- inferential, where the student has to make some sort of connection for himself. This can be a connection between two parts of the passage or between something in the passage and the student’s knowledge of the outside world;

- personal, where the question is related to the student’s own experience or opinion.

b) Summary questions where the student listens to a passage and then has to summarise what he has heard. One possibility is that the student takes notes as he listens. The summary could be written up in the form of a letter or a newspaper report.

c) Logical problems, e.g. ‘All Frenchmen speak French but not everybody speaking French is a Frenchman’. Questions based on such sentences as the above should encourage very careful intensive listening.

2. Intensive listening for language. Teachers often do more detailed work on language once the students can understand what they are listening to. It is usually more effective if the linguistic exercises are somehow related to each other and to the passage and are not just unconnected bits and pieces.

It is useful to remember that questions for both language and comprehension work need not necessarily be asked at the end of the passage, but can be asked in the middle, as this will lighten the memory load.

B. Extensive listening. With the extensive listening, the student is not reinforcing a structure or practising a grammar point, which is linked to the rest of the course work. Extensive listening exercises are those where a student is primarily concerned with following a story or finding something out from the passage he is listening to.

As students can sometimes be overawed by the prospect of doing extensive listening, the teacher can prepare the students for listening to a passage by telling them something about the topic of the listening text or by giving them the key words.

To a large extent, however, the division between intensive and extensive listening is somewhat artificial. Listening does not lend itself neatly to this type of categorisation. It is perfectly easy to use the same listening passage for both extensive listening and more detailed work.

Another successful attempt to distinguish types (=levels) of listening comprehension in teaching English was done by V.L. Skalkinin 1989. Taking into consideration psychological peculiarities of listening in dialogical speech, V.L. Skalkin distinguishes searching-informative, reconstructive, analytical and creative listening.

According to V.L. Skalkin, psychologically, a listener is engaged in a dialogue as:

1) a participant of dialogical exchange of an individual type (the so-called dilog).In this position it is not scarce that a listener speaks himself parallel to listening to his partner;

2) a participant of group communication where the speech of any other member of joint dialoguisation is listened to. It is useful to remember the so-called ‘cocktail party effect’, discovered by C. Cherryin 1950. You can hear voices of crowds of people simultaneously. However, it is possible to distinguish only 4 distinct pieces of verbal information in this commotion. Moreover, you can keep a close check on a single partner’s utterance, which seems to be the most important at the moment. Three other voices are readjusted to your check on them as long as you need to follow what is being said;

3) a passive participant of public intercourse where he listens to the verbal exchange of 2 or several interlocutors. The listener himself does not take part in the exchange of verbal information as at a press conference, briefing or pair compare;

4) a listener to radio, TV, film/video, LP sound track where a performance, show, conversation etc. is heard from a technical device, very often at a distance;

5) a listener to a language-training dialogue recorded on tape.

These listener positions enumerated above allowed V.L. Skalkinto point out particular features characteristic for each of the types of listening:

Thus, searching-informative listening is defined as a skill to pick out main facts and details of the heard. On this basis, a listener can take notes, ask questions, etc.

Reconstructive listening is a skill to reconstruct the content of a text in full, in spite of the gaps in reception, caused by linguistic and any other reasons.

Analytical listening is a skill to draw the corresponding conclusions, to approach the heard critically, to understand the purpose and the implications of the text.

Creative listening is a skill to interpret the received information, to place it in a different light or a new way, to develop the idea conveyed in it, to comment on the heard depending on the listener’s own knowledge and experience. This type of listening is considered to be the most important one for successful dialogisation.

Further elaboration in typology could bring to light another type of listening. It can be called interpretative listening. With interpretative listening, a listener deals with a number of opinions on the same subject or is offered 2 or more texts on the same topic. The job of the listener is to summarise what he has heard and interpret all this in his own way. As a result, a listener’s compilation may take the form of an oral or written essay, summary or annotation.

It should be noted that as soon as a listener’s position varies greatly, the degree of difficulty of comprehension is increased in every other position. The easiest type of listening is individual listening. This is so because a participant of a dilog can influence his interlocutor and is guided with meaningful extra- and paralinguistic means through a communicative interaction.

In teaching practice, students taking part in a conversation receive the transmitted information without much difficulty. This is so because the content and language of their speech is of common origin. As phrases of a conversation, the teacher’s utterances are easily understood by his students too. The teacher’s speech is adapted. It is often realised in stereotype teaching situations, because it is mainly based on everyday speech formulas and the language students already know.

Group communication (or the so-called polilogs) is much more difficult for the students to listen to. The main reason lies in an uninteresting character of the subject or topic under discussion or, sometimes, a boring procedure of the discussion, which often becomes optional. When the procedure makes it optional for a student to participate, the latter chooses the easiest way out – he simply switches off.

As far as the positions of a passive participant of public intercourse, a passive listener to mass media and a listener to tapes are concerned, these types of dialogical listening are usually observed in communicative situations being monological in their structure. A monological structure of communication in receiving information allows to consider listening as a skill in broad sense. This consideration mainly depends on types of text as major sources for teaching listening in school.