Taxonomy of Listening Skills:

1. Ability to retain chunks of the language of different lengths for short periods
2. Ability to discriminate among distinctive sounds of the target language (English)
3. Ability to recognize the stress patterns in words
4. Ability to recognize the rhythmic pattern of words
5. Ability to recognize the functions of stress and intonation to signal the information structure of utterances
6. Ability to identify words in stressed and unstressed positions (sentence stress)
7. Ability to recognize reduced forms of words
8. Ability to distinguish word boundaries
9. Ability to recognize typical word order patterns in the target language (English)
10. Ability to recognize vocabulary used in core conversational topics
11. Ability to detect keywords (i.e. those that identify topics and propositions)
12. Ability to guess the meanings of words from contexts in which they occur
13. Ability to recognize grammatical word classes (parts of speech)
14. Ability to recognize major syntactical patterns and devices
15. Ability to recognize cohesive devices in spoken discourse
16. Ability to recognize elliptical forms of grammatical units and sentences
17. Ability to detect sentence constituents
18. Ability to distinguish between major and minor constituents
19. Ability to detect meanings expressed in different grammatical forms/sentence types (i.e. that a particular meaning may be expressed in different ways)
20. Ability to recognize the communicative functions of utterances, according to situations, participants, goals
21. Ability to reconstruct or infer situations, goals, participants, procedures
22. Ability to use real-world knowledge and experience to work out purposes, goals, settings
23. Ability to predict outcomes from events described
24. Ability to infer links and connections between events
25. Ability to causes and effects from events
26. Ability to distinguish between literal and implied meanings
27. Ability to identify and reconstruct topics from ongoing discourse