LISTENING IN LANGUAGE LEARNING
THE NATURE OF THE LISTENING PROCESS
Importance in foregein language classrooms, major boost to listening. Two views of listening have dominated language pedagogy since the early 1980s, listening is a process of decoding the sounds that one hears in a linear fashion, from the smallest meaningful units are decoded and linked together to form words, words are linked together to form phrases, phrases are linked together to form utterances and utterances are linked together to form complete meaningful texts.

Listener as tape recorder view, the listener takes in and stores messages sequentially, the listener uses prior knowledge of the context and situation within which the listening takes place to make sense of what he or she hears, context and situations include such things as knowledge, both bottom-up and top-down strategies are necessary, it is important to teach not only bottom-up processing skills, discriminate between minimal pairs use what they already know to understand what they heard, the listening itself can be preceded by schema-building activities, to prepare learners for listening task to come.

LISTENING AND PRACTICE
Give learners some degree of control over he content of the lesson, personalise content so learners are able to bring something of themselves to the task.
Increase learner involvement by providing extension tasks which  take the listening material as a point of departure, but which lead learners into providing part of the content themselves.
Tasks, work or homework can be devised in which the classroom action is centered on the learner, not on the teacher, in tasks exploting the idea, students are actively involved in structuring and restructuring of the language and in building their skills

• making instructional goals explicit to the learner
• giving learners a degree choice
• giving learners opportunities to bring their own background knowledge and experience into the classroom
• encouraging learners to develop a reflective attitude to learning and to develop skills in self-monitoring and self assessment