Listening for 

Gist
JOSEPH SIEGEL

­Framing the Issue

Listening for gist involves general thematic understanding, without any focus on
specific details or discrete information. It is one among many types of listening
and aims to answer primary questions related to an aural text’s central theme,
topic, and purpose. In a first language (L1), one usually listens for gist, to decide
whether to continue or abandon listening. In a second language (L2), listening for
gist is often done despite linguistic limitations (Elliot & Wilson, 2013) such as syn-
tactic or lexical weaknesses that make comprehension challenging. Gist-level
listening can occur with any type of aural text: conversations, lectures, news
reports, songs. In the TESOL field a number of different terms have been used
interchangeably to refer to this type of listening, for example global listening,
listening for main idea, and topic listening.
Since listening for gist does not require listeners to collect specific details or
answer questions about them, this process does not involve focused or intense
attention. Rather, listening for gist is often done at a shallow level of attention, in
order for the listener to glean topical information from which he or she can make
decisions as to whether to continue listening or to allocate more or less attention
to the text. It is akin to aural skimming of input to determine a text’s general
topic, theme, and main points (Field, 2008). Whereas they may contribute to the
gist of a text, the individual details, in and of themselves, are not the same as
the gist.
Purposes for listening range from gleaning the overall meaning of a text to
identifying a specific piece of information or determining the illocutionary force
inherent in an utterance. Listening for gist distinguishes itself from other types of
listening through its broad goal. It does not have an interactional purpose
because, when listening for gist, one is outside of the text and not expected to
interact with it (Mendelsohn, 1994). Since only a casual relationship exists
between text and listener, only a general or vague understanding is necessary for
the latter to get the gist of the former. At this general level, listeners do not allocate

The TESOL Encyclopedia of English Language Teaching, First Edition.

Edited by John I. Liontas (Project Editor: Margo DelliCarpini).
© 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2018 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
DOI: 10.1002/9781118784235.eelt0609

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 2 Listening for Gist

much attention to all the words they hear. Instead they focus on certain key-
words, linguistic ­markers, and intonational cues that help them unpack the global
meaning. To do this, they also rely on contextual information and top-down
listening processes.
Several ancillary elements contribute to the process. The ability to make connec-
tions between words is one of these elements, which is a more advanced ability
than simply processing words individually and discretely. Others are attention to
stressed and unstressed sounds, the ability to identify keywords, and a coherent
understanding. Situating the text within contextual parameters and using
­inference-drawing skills may also facilitate gist-level listening.
Listening for gist is a fundamental skill for many reasons. At the core, this type
of listening allows for personal decisions that depend on interest, selective atten-
tion, and motivation. Once the main purpose of a text is perceived, the listener is
free to exercise a number of options: stop listening, continue listening at gist level,
or astutely tune in for more details. Thus gist-level listening triggers subsequent
cognitive operations such as increasing or relaxing one’s attention to the input. An
individual listener’s attention to the same text will vary depending on factors
related to that listener—which include linguistic ability, topical knowledge,
­motivation, and fatigue.
Listening for gist in a L2 is particularly important for TESOL students and
educators, not only because of personal decisions but also because of the influ-
ence of this style of listening on L2 listening assessments and materials. Many
listening textbooks include “listening for gist” as a learning point in tables of
contents, and they commonly incorporate main-idea questions for every text.
Listening sections on many internationally recognized proficiency tests (e.g.,
TOEFL, IELTS, TOEIC) contain questions about main ideas, which can typically
be answered by listening for gist. Further, descriptions of learner listening levels
often make reference to the ability to recognize and comprehend main points
(e.g., CEFR levels).
On the surface, listening for gist appears to be a simple concept. However, to
make the concept meaningful for the TESOL community, it is important to explore
the cognitive processes that listeners draw upon when determining gist. Moreover,
practical teaching methods related to listening for gist must be accessible and must
distinguish themselves from other types of listening exercises.

­Making the Case

From a theoretical perspective, it is important to distinguish listening for gist from

other types of listening. Gist-level listening involves several interconnected fac-
tors, for example an individual’s linguistic knowledge (intonation, stress patterns,
lexicon), life experience, inferencing skills, and cultural awareness. These factors
interact on aural input that must be recognized within the context in which it
occurs. Listening for gist does not occur through mechanistic word-by-word

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 Listening for Gist 3

processing. Understanding of a speaker’s main idea can rather be achieved

through less than a full comprehension of the text. Essentially, listeners engage in
aural skimming at a global level to establish topics, purposes, attitudes, and main
points (e.g., Field, 2008).
What follows is a list of specific cognitive processes that contribute to listening
for gist (the list is based on Richards, 1983; Mendelsohn, 1994):
●● the ability to recognize primary sentence stress,
●● the ability to distinguish between lexical and grammatical words,
●● the ability to identify key lexical items and major constituents,
●● the ability to recognize discourse markers and sentence connectors,
●● the ability to understand relationships between units within the text,
●● the ability to infer relationships (e.g., between speakers or between pieces of
information).
The order in which these abilities are triggered is not fixed and likely varies accord-
ing to the individual, the specific text, and the environment in which the listening
takes place. It is important to note that, even if listeners have engaged in all of
these cognitive processes, they may not unpack the full or exact meaning of the
message. However, engaging in some of these cognitive processes will likely make
the gist of a text apparent. While some of the cognitive processes (e.g., r­ ecognizing
stress patterns or distinguishing grammatical from lexical words) are related to
bottom-up listening, others, such as using inferring (i.e., inference-drawing) skills,
rely on top-down processing. Thus, in order for successful ­gist-level listening to
occur, a listener needs the ability to access both bottom-up and top-down strategies.
These cognitive processes act on idea units in speech: idea units are separate and
discrete chunks of language, each carrying a unique message. In order to deter-
mine the gist of a passage or conversation, listeners must extract and accumulate
meaning from several idea units and subsequently establish the relationship
between them (Buck, 2001). Listeners may not remember verbatim the content of
each idea unit; once they have constructed its overall meaning, the actual words
are replaced by a summary of the text (Sachs, 1967). To get the gist of a text, the
listener is required first to process the text at the level of idea units and then to
combine those summaries to construct the overall gist. When considering the
notion of idea units, it is important to acknowledge that understanding a single
idea unit, an individual piece of information, or a discrete fact from a text may
contribute to getting the overall gist but does not by itself achieve this purpose or
constitute such achievement.

­Pedagogical Implications

When it comes to facilitating learners’ ability to listen for gist in the TESOL class-
room, educators can select from three types of exercise: response, demonstration,
and production. The first category, response, is the most common type of

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 4 Listening for Gist

classroom practice that targets gist-level listening and is probably familiar to many
practitioners. The second type, demonstration, focuses on teacher-led explana-
tions of how to take advantage of linguistic signals to help identify main ideas.
Production, the third category, requires learners to produce some language in
order to show their understanding of gist. It should be noted that many of these
activities do not isolate the listening skill, since they may incorporate reading,
writing, and speaking abilities. Thus, while such activities may support listening
improvement, learners need to have acquired other language skills if they are to
participate in meaningful ways.
Listening-for-gist activities that require learners to select an appropriate answer
from a set of options are response activities (e.g., continuing to listen or not;
answering true or false; selecting from multiple choice options). The limited num-
ber of choices can help students succeed and gain confidence in this easier category
of gist-level activities. One natural activity for the TESOL classroom can tap into
this personal type of listening, which is similar to the ways people listen for gist in
their L1. Teachers can play several short texts and ask learners to decide whether
they would continue listening and why. Answers will vary according to individual
interests, and the activity allows for natural decisions that reflect the choices
­listeners make in everyday life.
Response activities can often be found in language textbooks in the form of
multiple-choice questions that ask about the main idea or purpose of a passage.
Teachers can easily generate similar response exercises to match any text. For
lower-level learners, giving appraisals of “true” or “false” regarding a text’s topic
and setting or a speaker’s intent or attitude can provide achievable global listen-
ing activities. More advanced learners can be challenged with multiple-choice
items similar to those found in many textbooks and on standardized tests of
English proficiency (e.g., TOEFL). Learners can also be encouraged to select an
appropriate title for a passage from a list of options. This activity is similar to
“newspaper headline” activities as well as to TOEFL-style questions. To select an
appropriate title, learners must understand the purpose, intention, and attitude
of a passage.
In a similar activity, the teacher can write the main idea along with a few select
details from a passage and ask learners to identify the main idea. This activity
prompts students to distinguish between primary and secondary information.
Another activity, particularly useful for stories, consists in ordering events. While
listening, students put events in the order in which they hear them. To challenge
more capable students, extra events not included in the story can be added to
the list.
Intonation and word stress can be important indicators of key information that
contributes to the overall meaning of a passage. To help learners recognize the
importance of attitude and intonation, teachers can provide a list of feelings or
emotions. Upon hearing a text or conversation, learners can decide which feelings
or attitudes best describe the speakers. More capable learners can go back to the
passage to explain and justify their answers. For lower level learners, teachers
­can point out specific instances of word stress or intonation that help identify a

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 Listening for Gist 5

particular emotion. Such activities encourage learners to be attuned to affective

factors when listening—and not just to the content.
A second group of activities consists of teacher-led demonstrations, which aim
at improving linguistic knowledge and at showing learners how to access key
information that people use when they attempt to get the gist. Visual depictions
of sounds and words can help learners understand where to focus their atten-
tion. Demonstration activities can take the form of work at the chalkboard, with
transcripts, or using slideshows. These demonstrations can range in focus, from
looking for stress patterns to identifying word types and keywords. In order to
show learners how patterns of stress and non-stress occur in both words and
sentences, teachers can illustrate the difference by using capital letters for stressed
sounds and lower-case letters for unstressed sounds. The size and stress differ-
ences can be reinforced through rhythmic clapping and through listen-and-
repeat exercises.
Other demonstration activities adopt similar visual devices. For example, capi-
tal letters can be used to show how the stress of a single word can change the
meaning of a sentence. The teacher selects an utterance, capitalizes a selected word
to mark it as stressed, and then models how the stress changes the purpose of the
utterance (e.g., You just BROKE my computer; YOU just broke my computer; You just
broke my COMPUTER). Likewise, capital and lower-case letters can show learners
which words are grammatical in nature (and therefore of lesser importance to the
gist) and which are lexical (and tend to carry more significant meaning). Typically,
learners should focus their attention primarily on nouns and verbs, adjectives and
adverbs being secondary points of interest. To practice, students can take note of
nouns and verbs while listening, and then may try to reconstruct the main ideas of
the speech they heard.
In another demonstrative exercise, teachers can type transcripts into a visual
slide program such as PowerPoint or Keynote. Not all of the words in the tran-
script will be keywords that contribute to the gist. Many may be grammatical
words, or words only tangentially related to the core meaning. To show students
which words stand out as being important to the gist, teachers can use the slide
program to “black out” less important words and highlight those keywords that
students need to recognize in order to successfully understand the gist. By
manipulating the slide program, teachers can demonstrate how some words,
likely nouns and verbs, distinguish themselves as important. In using this activity
teachers can also show how speakers use repetition and synonymity to empha-
size their main message. Further, the slide format allows teachers to display dif-
ferent cohesive devices that speakers use for coherence. Finally, when showing a
large section of a passage, teachers can point out how the gist of a conversation or
lecture is often first stated at the beginning and reviewed at the end, thereby
drawing learners’ attention to these places that typically contain valuable infor-
mation about gist.
Production activities related to gist are the most challenging because, rather
than presenting learners with a controlled set of choices (as in response) or having
the teacher illustrate techniques for listening for gist (as in demonstration), this

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 6 Listening for Gist

category requires learners first to understand gist and subsequently to show their
understanding through language production. Hence it can require two or more L2
skills (e.g., listening plus speaking, listening plus writing). A simple production
activity is for learners to listen and then retell the gist in their L1. This exercise,
ideal for beginners, places more emphasis on the listening aspect and may lessen
anxiety at the production stage. Teachers can also play audio or video texts and
ask students to paraphrase the content. This activity can be done with texts of
varying lengths: lectures, conversations, single utterances. The paraphrase can be
expressed in written or spoken form as well as in the L1 or L2, which means that
teachers can adjust their expectations to the level of individual learners. Pausing a
text after 1–2-minute periods and allowing students to paraphrase, either on their
own or in pairs, is a practical and engaging way to conduct such exercises.
Prediction practice is another option in the production category. The ability to pre-
dict upcoming content presupposes that the gist of previous input has been under-
stood. This activity prompts learners to draw on their prior knowledge and life
experience, which thus contribute to listening comprehension. Prediction practice
can be applied to longer or shorter stretches of input. One way to incorporate predic-
tion is to play a text for 1–2 minutes and encourage learners to predict what will
happen next. They can then check their expectations against the incoming input in
order to confirm or modify hypotheses. Introducing words and phrases that describe
possibility (e.g., could, probably, I bet) can be useful. Another productive prediction
activity can be done at the single-utterance level, where learners hear the beginning
of a sentence and must predict how it will end. While this activity can be practiced
with any utterance, it is particularly useful with sentence connectors such as however,
on the other hand, or and so. These sentence connectors give some indication (or gist)
of the upcoming idea unit and are therefore important for the overall gist.
Teachers can use these different categories of activities according to student ­ability
and course objectives. For instance, for courses focused on test preparation, more
response-type activities would correspond to the tasks that learners will be expected
to complete. If learners struggle to glean the gist, then teachers should employ dem-
onstration activities more, so that learners can develop abilities and recognize lin-
guistic patterns that will help them listen for gist on their own. At intermediate and
advanced levels, learners can integrate listening for gist with productive skills, in
order to show their ability to paraphrase and summarize the gist of a passage.

SEE ALSO: Listening Activities; Listening Processes; Teaching Bottom-Up and

Top-Down Strategies

References

Buck, G. (2001). Assessing listening. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Elliot, M., & Wilson, J. (2013). Content validity. In A. Geranpayeh & L. Taylor (Eds.),
Examining listening: Research and practice in assessing second language listening (pp. 152–241).
Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

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Field, J. (2008). Listening in the language classroom. Cambridge, England: Cambridge

University Press.
Mendelsohn, D. (1994). Learning to listen: A strategy-based approach for the second-language
learner. Carlsbad, CA: Dominie Press.
Richards, J. C. (1983). Listening comprehension: Approach, design, procedure. TESOL
Quarterly, 17, 219–40. doi:10.2307/3586651
Sachs, J. S. (1967). Recognition memory for syntactic and semantic aspects of connected
discourse. Perception and Psychophysics, 2, 437–42. doi:10.3758/BF03208784

Suggested Readings

Council of Europe. (2001). Common European framework of reference for languages: Learning,
teaching, assessment. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Lynch, T. (2009). Teaching second language listening. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
Richards, J. C., & Burns, A. (2012). Tips for teaching listening: A practical approach. White
Plains, NY: Pearson.
Siegel, J. (2014). Advice in listening instruction: Degrees of transferability. International
Journal of Innovation in English Language Teaching and Research, 3(2), 1–18.
Siegel, J. (2015). Exploring listening strategy instruction through action research. Basingstoke,
England: Palgrave Macmillian.

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