Basic Skills for Listening Mercedes

By the end of the course, students will be able to feel more confident when encountering listening materials. They will also be able to understand how different pronunciation features play a role in understanding oral input. Last but not least, they will exit the course with a wide range of ideas and an expanded vocabulary bank from the different topic units dealt in the syllabus.

The course will be centred around developing the following listening strategies:
-Listening for gist and listening for detailed information
-Understanding how intonation functions to highlight information.
-Considering the tone of voice and word stress within a sentence to communicate feelings, attitude and intentions.
-Understanding the difference in rhythm between English and other languages.
-Recognizing contractions, word boundaries and connected speech.
-Identifying discourse markers, linking expressions and key vocabulary
-Understanding speaker´s purpose and attitude: suggestions, invitations, offers/requests, contradictions, assumptions, instructions.
-Differentiating facts and opinions.
-Understanding different degrees of formality and registers.
-Engaging students in pre-listening, while listening and post listening so as to commit students to be active during the whole process.
-Making inferences when information is not stated or missed. Guessing the meaning of unknown words.
-Stressing the importance of predicting and activating background knowledge as essential during the listening process.
-Detecting signposts: recognizing rhetorical markers of definition, paraphrase, exemplification and clarification
-Understanding spoken data: graphs, statistics etc.