The Roles of the Teacher Harmer (2001) mentions that the teacher should play the following roles

when doing listening activities. To star with, the teacher is an organizer when he tells the students exactly what the listening purpose is, gives them clear instructions, and offer achievable tasks. The teacher is a machine operator when he uses tapes or CDs. We need to be as efficient as possible in the way we use the tape or CD player. It means also trying the material out before taking it to the classroom. We need to observe with great care students when doing live listening activities so we can then adjust the way we use the machine.

Being a feedback organizer means to lead a feedback session to check that they have completed the task successfully. Be supportive when organizing feedback after listening activities if we wish to sustain students motivation. We can have the students notice the variety of language and spoken features. We can also give them script descriptions to provoke their awareness of certain language items.

Harmer believes that listening can occur at a number of points in a teaching situation. He tells us that sometimes it is possible to have the first stage of a listening and acting out sequence where students can role-play the situation they have heard on the audio, or make live listening be a prelude to a piece of writing which is the main focus of a lesson. He explains that most listening sequences involve a mixture of language skills, being gist one of the most recurrent one, listening for information at and or for the main idea or details other times. He suggests that we should aim to use listening materials for as many purposes before students get tired of it, which makes us think about how much we should do that. An important aspect to consider when planning in a variety of skills, we presume.

Harmer (2001) recommends six different principles teachers should bear in mind when teaching listening. The first principle is encouraging students to listen as much as possible. Similarly, teachers should help students prepare to listen

since one may not be enough. Teachers should also encourage students to respond to the content of a listening, not just to the language, and remember that different stages demand different listening tasks. Finally, he mentions that good teachers exploit listening texts to the full.

McDonough and Shaw (1993) say that there is close relationship between reading and listening. They mention in their book Materials and Methods in English Language Teaching that the reader and listener are not passive when working with skills. Learners, for instance, guess anticipate, check, interpret, as a few examples, the information to process it. They assure that human beings seem to have a general processing capacity which enables them to deal with written and spoken input using comparable cognitive strategies. They also say that a listening context often contains visual clues, such as gesture, which generally support the spoken words. More negatively, there can be extraneous noise such as traffic, or other people talking which interferes with message reception. They have a theory of two categories when processing skills: one would be to process sound and other to process meaning. Processing sounds involves the phonological, lower and automatic skills, recognition of sound words, localizing the immediate text, decoding what was said, and perception. Processing meaning includes semantic, higher order skills of organizing and interpreting, and comprehension, as well as, global meaning of the whole text, and the reconstruction after processing meaning and cognition.

McDonough and Shaw (1993) explain that listening is a complex skill and our job as teacher should be to teach the language. They ask themselves what would be then a suitable balance for the classroom between tasks and texts, and how closely should the classroom attempt to replicate authentic language and authentic listening tasks. They say that real-life listening experience is very complex and unlikely to transfer easily except with very advanced learners.