TIPS ON LISTENING
Successful listening involves:
1. skills in segmenting the stream of speech into meaningful words and phrases;
2. recognizing word classes;
3. relating the incoming message to one’s own background knowledge;
4. identifying the rhetorical and functional intent of an utterance or parts of an aural text;
5. interpreting rhythm, stress and intonation to identify information focus and emotional/attitudinal tone;
6. extracting gist/essential information from longer aural texts without necessarily understanding every word.
From Designing Tasks for the Communicative Classroom by David Nunan, P26.