Theory of teaching listening in foreign language teaching methodology

Actively listening is:
When a person who incorporates listening with concentration;
Method of responding to another that encourages communication.
Listening: Top down and bottom up
In 'real-life' listening, our students will have to use a combination of the two processes, with more emphasis on 'top-down' or 'bottom-up' listening depending on their reasons for listening.
Top-down listening
This refers to the use of background knowledge in understanding the meaning of the message. Background knowledge consists of context, that is, the situation and topic, and co-text, in other words, what came before and after.
Bottom up listening
The ability to separate the stream of speech into individual words to recognize.
A List of Bottom Up Skills
(This list has been compiled from a number of sources: Peterson (1991), and Brown (2001). They are are listed in a rough order of conceptual difficulty):
discriminating between intonation contours in sentences
discriminating between phonemes
listening for word endings
recognizing syllable patterns
being aware of sentence fillers in informal speech
recognizing words, discriminate between word boundaries
picking out details
differentiating between content and function words by stress pattern
finding the stressed syllable
recognizing words with weak or central vowels
recognizing when syllables or words are dropped
recognizing words when they are linked together in streams of speech
using features of stress, intonation and prominence to help identify important information
A List of Top-Down Skills
By using their knowledge of context and co-text, students should either be able
to guess the meaning of the unknown word, or
understand the general idea without getting distracted by it,
putting a series of pictures or sequence of events in order,
listening to conversations and identifying where they take place,
reading information about a topic then listening to find whether or not the same points are mentioned, or
inferring the relationships between the people involved

• A framework for planning a listening skills lesson
• The basic framework on which you can construct a listening lesson can be divided into three main stages.
• Pre-listening, during which we help our students prepare to listen.
• While listening, during which we help to focus their attention on the listening text and guide the development of their understanding of it.
• Post-listening, during which we help our students integrate what they have learnt from the text into their existing knowledge.
• Pre-listening
• There are certain goals that should be achieved before students attempt to listen to any text.These aremotivation, contextualization, and preparation.
• Motivation.It is enormously important that before listening students are motivated to listen, so you should try to select a text that they will find interesting and then design tasks that will arouse your students' interest and curiosity.
• Contextualization.Listening to a tape recording in a classroom is a very unnatural process. The text has been taken from its original environment and we need to design tasks that will help students to contextualize the listening and access their existing knowledge and expectations to help them understand the text.
• Preparation.Prepare specific vocabulary or expressions that students will need.