89 ISSN 1648-2824 KALBŲ STUDIJOS. 2009. 15 NR. * STUDIES ABOUT LANGUAGES. 2009. NO. 15 Developing Listening Skills in CLIL Vilmantė Liubinienė Abstract. Listening, like reading, writing, and speaking, is a complex process best developed by consistent practice. Listening is the vital skill providing the basis for the successful communication and successful professional career. Effective listening skills enhance the ability to learn and adapt new information, knowledge, and skills. Listening comprehension is more than extracting meaning from incoming speech. It is a process of matching speech with the background knowledge, i.e. what the listeners already know about the subject. Listening in a CLIL environment is different from listening in a content class conducted in the mother-tongue and from listening comprehension tasks in the language class. The aim of this paper is to analyse how CLIL methodology could be useful in developing listening comprehension in both content and language classes. It is very important to teach students how to listen. In this light, listening emerges first and foremost as a process and second as a product. Consequently learners become responsible for their own learning and gain control over the listening process. Listening skills can be developed by the instruction of general learning strategies. The CLIL approach could be of great help in reaching this goal and is going to be discussed in a greater detail in this paper. Key words: Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL); Language In Content Instruction (LICI); listening skills; cognitive skills; learning strategies. Introduction Listening is a language skill, thus it can be developed through practice. In Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) it is important that students are provided with the suitable materials to listen to. These materials come in a variety of forms, first as a teacher‟s input, as well as peer input and interaction and as information source (recorded lectures, films, tutorials, etc). In language classes an audio-lingual method was considered to be very important for students to develop a better pronunciation, to train comprehension skills. Vandergrift (2002) points out that in the early 70‟s, work by Asher, Postovsky, Winitz and, later, Krashen, emphasized the role of listening as a tool for understanding and central to the process of language learning. The aim of this paper is to analyse how CLIL methodology could be useful in developing listening comprehension in both content and language classes. Research findings are based on the materials produced by the international team of a Socrates Lingua 2 project - “Language in Content Instruction” (LICI) which was carried out during 2006- 2009 and has involved 8 partners coming from 7 European countries. The focus of the LICI project and its products was the language of learning and instruction in a CLIL environment. The Language In Content Instruction (LICI) model emphasizes the role of language resources in encoding content-specific meaning. Language and meaning are integrated, and by extending language, meaning resources extend accordingly. The language focus consists of the training of language skills (listening, speaking, reading and writing), vocabulary and grammar. For linking content with language, general and content-specific thinking skills and strategies are analysed. This paper focuses on the analysis of theoretical issues as well as practical examples illustrating how it might be possible to select and use different strategies in order to develop listening skills in a CLIL environment. Overview of theoretical developments in the field of listening comprehension Larry Vandergrift (1999) emphasizes that listening is a complex, active process of interpretation in which listeners match what they hear with what they already know. Two distinct processes characterize listening comprehension. When learners rely on prior knowledge in order to understand the meaning of a message, they are using „top-down‟ processes. Prior knowledge includes the knowledge of the topic, familiarity with the discipline, awareness of the listening context, the text-type, the culture or other information held in long-term memory. Top-down processing refers to how we use our world knowledge to attribute meaning to language input; how our knowledge of social convention helps us understand meaning. It involves “the listener‟s ability to bring prior information to bear on the task of understanding the “heard” language” (Morley, 2001). „Bottom-up‟ processes are also used by learners when they rely on specific components of the L2 for aural comprehension. Meaning is constructed from morphemes to words to grammatical relationships to lexical meanings until, eventually, the message is decoded. “Bottom-up refers to that part of the aural comprehension process in which the understanding of the “heard” language is worked out proceeding from sounds to words to grammatical relationships in lexical meanings” (Morley, 2001). Listening comprehension, according to Vandergrift (2002), is an interactive, interpretive process where listeners use both prior knowledge and linguistic knowledge in understanding messages. In other words, both „top-down‟ and „bottom-up‟ processes are at work in the listening activity. It is a continuum where learners will lean towards one process or the other depending on their knowledge of the language, the topic or the listening objectives. If objectives are established before the listening task, learners have a purpose. They can