The principles the teaching of listening

1. The tape recorder is just as important as the tape

However good your tape is, it will be useless if the tape recorder has a poor speaker or if the motor speed keeps changing and the tape goes faster or slower. Another vital feature is a tape couter that is easy to see. If you want to use your tapr recorder for music as well as speech you may need a better machine.

2. Preparation is vital

Teachers and students need to be prepared for listening because of the special features we discussed above. Teachers need to listen to the tape all the way through before they take it into the class. Students need to be make ready to listen. Teacher will do their best to get students engaged with the topic and the task so that they really want to listen.

3. Once will not be enough

There are almost no occasions when the teacher will play a tape only once. Students will want to hear it again to pick up the things they missed the first time. The first listening iis often used hust to give students an idea of what the listening material sounds like. once students have listened to atape two or three times, however, they will probably not want to hear it too many times more.

4. Students should be encouraged to respond to the content of a listening, not just to the language

As with reading, the most  important part of listeniong practice is to draw out the meaning, what is intended, what impression it makes on the students.

5. Different listening stages demand different listening tasks.

Because there are different things we want to do with a listening text, we need to set different tasks for different listening stages.

6. Good teachers exploit listening texts to the full

If teachers ask students to invest time and emotional energy in a listening task nd if they themselves have spent time choosing and preparing the listening then it makes sense to use the tape for as many different applications as possible.