Learning different listening strategies

After you learned about Active Listening, I will now present some more listening strategies which will help you enhancing your listening skills.

There are two different main strategies: top-down and bottom-up strategies.

Top-down strategies

People who follow these strategies are listener based. Listener will examine the background knowledge of a topic, situation or the context. They will focus on the type of text and the language. This method will help the learner to set up certain expectations. This will help the listener understand what he or she is listening to and also what to expect. 

The top-down strategy includes:

Listening to the main idea. You listen to a person in a general way and you will get the rough meaning of his or her message. You do not need to pay attention to all the details.

Predicting. If you know what the conversation is about, you are more likely able to predict the way of the conversation. For example: Someone explains the preparation of a dish. Now you can predict the vocabulary the speaker is about to use.

Drawing inferences. It helps if you use your prior knowledge while listening. Pay also attention to the tone, expressions, and body language. This will help you to understand the message better. By examining gestures and facial expressions, you can usually tell if the person is trying to be funny or serious for example.

Summarising. Try to summarise what you just heard. You can either summarise everything in your head or ask summarising questions, like “By saying … do you mean … ?”. You can also make a summary together with the speaker by saying something like “As far as I understood, you said that…”.

Bottom-up strategies

There strategies are text based. That means that the listener relies on the language. They focus on the meaning and everything that will lead to this meaning. These listeners will focus on sounds, words and grammar.

The bottom-up strategy includes:

Listening for specific details. While listening, you are looking for specific information. You will listen very carefully to key words and details. In classrooms, when you are asked to answer question about a text you listened to, you can use the following strategies: underline key words in the question; think about which words could be used and listen to them; try to think about other ways of expressing something.

Listening to words with cognates. Cognates are words which sound the same in two different languages. This will help you to identify and understand some words. But be careful of false friends!

Listening to word patterns. While listening, you will come across word patterns. This will help you to understand everything better.