How To Teach Listening.

This paper discusses how to teach listening so that English-as-a-Second-Language students can develop a level of listening ability that is useful in the real world, not just in the classroom. It asserts that if teachers know the processes involved in listening comprehension and some features of spoken English, they can provide students with appropriate advice and effective listening practice. Three chapters focus on the following: (1) "The Current Situation of Teaching Listening in Japanese High Schools" (teaching listening in English classes and recognizing the need for improvement); (2) "The Listening Process for Comprehension and Some Features of Spoken English" (bottom-up and top-down processing, schema theory, reduced forms of spoken English, performance variables and redundancy, and rhetorical markers, and skills for listening); and (3) "Improved Approach" (basic skills for listening comprehension should be taught, schema-building activities should precede the listening activity, students should learn strategies for effective listening, students should listen to a variety of authentic materials, and post-listening strategies should be integrated with other skills, such as reading, writing, and speaking). (Contains 28 references.) (SM)