1
There is listening performance that can include all five types as learners actively participate in discussions, debates, conversations, roleplays, and other pair and group work. Their listening performance must be intricately integrated with speaking (and perhaps other) skills in the authentic give and take of communicative interchange.
2
A significant proportion of classroom listening activity consists of short stretches of teacher language designed to elicit immediate responses. The students' task in such listening is to process the teacher talk immediately and to fashion an appropriate reply.
3
Techniques whose only purpose is to focus on components (phonemes, words, intonation , discourse markers , etc.) of discourse may be considered to be intensive - as opposed to extensive- in their requirement that students single out certain elements of spoken language. They include the bottom-up skills that are important at all levels of proficiency.
4
This sort of performance, unlike the intensive processing, aims to develop a top-down, global understanding of spoken language. This performance could range from listening to lengthy lectures, to listening to a conversation and deriving a comprehensive message or purpose. Such listening may require the student to invoke other interactive skills (e.g., note-taking and/or discussion) for full comprehension.
5
In longer stretches of discourse such as monologues of a couple of minutes or considerably longer, the task of the student is not to process everything that was said, but rather to scan the material selectively for certain information. The purpose of such performance is not to look for global or general meanings, necessarily, but to be able to find important information in a field of potentially distracting information. Such activity requires field independence on the part of the learner. Such listening differs from intensive listening in that the discourse is in relatively long lengths.
6
Sometimes you want a learner simply to listen to the surface structure of an utterance for the sole purpose of repeating it back to you. While this kind of listening performance requires little meaningful processing, it nevertheless may be a legitimate, even though a minor, aspect of an interactive, communicative classroom. This role of the listener as merely a "tape recorder" (Nunan, 1991b: 18) is very limited because the listener is not generating meaning.
