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Part I
Learning to Listen
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Chapter 1
Challenges and Opportunities in Listening Instruction
Scenario
It is time for Class 2B to have their listening lesson. Miss Campbell tells her students to take out their course book and look at the listening exercise on pages 28 and 29. She tells them that they will be listening to a passage about wedding rites of a group of people who live in Asia. Next she tells them to read the questions and the multiple-choice answers for the listening passage very carefully. She explains that this will help them find out what the passage is about as well as what to listen for when the recording is played. When the class is ready, she plays a CD recording of a listening passage.
The students listen attentively and select what they think is the correct answer to each question. When the recording ends, Miss Campbell plays it a second time so that learners can check their answers. After this, she goes over each question and gives them the correct answer. Finally, she checks how individual learners have performed and then goes over some of the difficult questions and explains the correct answers. When this is done, the class moves on to the next part of the lesson, which requires them to write a short composition based on what they have heard from the passage.
Pre-reading Reflection
1. Does this listening lesson resemble any of the listening lessons that you have experienced as a learner or taught to your students? What are the similarities or differences?
2. Do you think it is useful to ask learners to preview the comprehension questions? Why or why not?
3. Some people would say that this lesson tests listening rather than teaches it. What is your response to this statement?
Introduction
Listening is an important skill: it enables language learners to receive and interact with language input and facilitates the emergence of other language skills. Compared with writing and reading, or even speaking, however, the development of listening receives the least systematic attention from teachers and instructional materials. While language learners are often taught how to plan and draft a composition or deliver an oral presentation, learners are seldom taught how to approach listening or how to manage their listening when attending to spoken texts or messages. Although they are exposed to more listening activities in classrooms today, learners are still left to develop their listening abilities on their own with little direct support from the teacher. A possible reason for this is that many teachers are themselves unsure of how to teach listening in a principled manner. We believe that every language teacher needs to have a clear understanding of the processes involved in listening and in particular how strategies can be used to manage comprehension efforts. A teacher also needs to know how to harness the potential for learning inherent in every student, so as to help them achieve success in developing listening and overall language proficiency.
Listening activities in many language classrooms tend to focus on the outcome of listening; listeners are asked to record or repeat the details they have heard, or to explain the meaning of a passage they have heard. In short, many of the listening activities do little more than test how well they can listen. Because learners are often put in situations where they have to show how much they have understood or, more often, reveal what they have not understood, they feel anxious about listening. In addition, when they not only have to understand what the person is saying but must also respond in an appropriate way, learnersā stress and anxiety levels increase even further.
In addition to anxiety, learners also face the challenge of not knowing how to listen when they encounter listening input. Although pre-listening activities are a common feature in some classrooms, these activities mainly provide learners with the background knowledge they need to make listening easier. Learners are āprimedā to listen to a specific piece of text through a pre-listening activity, but they are seldom taught how to listen once the audio or video begins. For example, many learners need time to get used to the speakerās voice or ātune intoā the message. They often miss the first parts of an aural text and they struggle to construct the context and the meaning for the rest of the message (Goh, 2000).
Once learners begin listening, they are often expected to complete the listening task without any help along the way. The nature of spoken text, experienced in real time, does not normally allow the listener to slow it down or break it down into manageable chunks. Many teachers also feel that they should ask learners to listen to the input without any interruption or repetition because this mirrors real-life communication. The downside of this practice is that learners are constantly trying to understand what they hear but never get a chance to step back and learn how to deal with the listening input. Unlike reading, where the teacher can direct learnersā attention to specific parts of a reading passage or ask guiding questions to scaffold their thinking and comprehension, listening lessons do not typically offer such opportunities for learning. As a result, learners do not learn about strategies they can use to improve their listening ability, nor do they understand the processes that are involved in learning to listen in a new language.
Another instruction gap is the lack of guidance on how learners can self-direct and evaluate their efforts to improve their listening. Many learners who desire to improve their listening participate earnestly in all class listening activities in the hope that these will help them become more successful listeners over time. They also look to their teachers to show them how they can improve their listening abilities. Usually, the advice is to listen to songs more, watch more movies, listen to the radio or watch the news on TV, and find native speakers as conversation partners. Most of these activities, when planned by the teacher, are accompanied by āhomeworkā that requires learners to demonstrate some outcome of their listening. These outcomes might include writing a summary of a movie or TV news report they have watched or giving a response to something they have heard. Efforts to improve, however, are sometimes not sufficiently monitored or supported. Learners may try their best to engage in listening on their own outside class time, but they may not know how to take advantage of these opportunities to improve their listening proficiency. Second language (L2) learners need to be supported and to understand the listening processes they are using. In short, teachers need a way to engage learnersā metacognition in teaching listening.
Metacognition, or the act of thinking about thinking, refers to the ability of learners to control their thoughts and to regulate their own learning. It plays an important role in learning to listen. There is a general consensus among researchers in the fields of comprehension and second language (L2) learning that metacognition enhances thinking and comprehension (Baker, 2002; Wenden, 1998).
Although metacognition is a crucial aspect of learning to listen, it does not have a significant and explicit role in many language classrooms. A survey of the various approaches to listening instruction shows that listening has gained greater prominence in language teaching, but listening lessons have, until recently, been mainly text-oriented and communication-oriented rather than learner-oriented. The focus of much listening instruction has been on getting learners to comprehend, on their own and with little support, the meaning latent in a piece of spoken text. With time the focus has shifted to the comprehension of details and the gist of messages that have a communicative purpose. More recently, we see a greater emphasis on how learners listen; however, even in situations where the learners and their learning have become factors for consideration in the planning and delivery of the lesson, more could be done to engage learners directly in improving their listening comprehension and managing their own learning.
Listening Instruction: An Overview
Although frequently neglected, listening has had a place in the language classroom for about 50 years. Over this time period the way in which listening activities are conducted has changed. Broadly speaking, we have witnessed three types of listening instruction over the years: text-oriented instruction, communication-oriented instruction, and learner-oriented instruction.
Text-Oriented Instruction
Brown (1987) noted that listening instruction was heavily influenced by reading and writing pedagogy in the 1950s and 60s, even though listening activities were carried out for the purpose of comprehension. There was a heavy emphasis on decoding skills, as well as imitation and memorization of sound and grammar patterns. Typically, learners had to discriminate sounds, answer comprehension questions based on a listening passage, or take dictation of written passages. Under such circumstances, learners had to reveal precisely how well they understood what they had heard. Instead of learning how to listen accurately, listening activities tested the accuracy of their comprehension. According to Morley (1999), this type of instruction is sometimes called a āquiz showā format, where learners have to answer different types of questions based on traditional reading comprehension exercises. Instead of writing out their answers, learners were required to respond in the form of short answers or to select answers from options given. When tests and examinations began to make use of multiple-choice questions, these response formats also made their way into many course books and classrooms. This tendency to test rather than teach listening continues in many classrooms to this day. Table 1.1 summarizes the key features of text-oriented listening instruction and outlines some key challenges that learners face in their attempts to develop listening skills under these conditions.
In text-oriented instruction, the emphasis is on recognizing and understanding different components of a listening input. These include individual sounds and phonological features, as well as key words and phrases.
Table 1.1. Features of Text-Oriented Listening Instruction
Learning objectives | ā¢ Decode sounds: phonemes, word stress, and |
sentence-level intonation |
ā¢ Listen to, imitate, and memorize sound and |
grammar patterns |
ā¢ Identify relevant details from oral input |
ā¢ Demonstrate understanding of the meaning of the passage |
Listening input | ā¢ Words, phrases, and sentences read aloud |
ā¢ Written passages read aloud |
Classroom interaction | ā¢ Learnerāteacher |
ā¢ Individual listening |
Learner response | ā¢ Discriminate sounds at word- and sentence-levels |
ā¢ Write dictation of written passages |
ā¢ Answer comprehension questions based on the listening passage |
ā¢ Complete written texts with details from the listening passage |
Challenges for learners | ā¢ Listening is not taught as a language skill |
ā¢ Learner comprehension is constantly assessed informally |
ā¢ Listening passages are often dense and do not |
reflect the linguistic features of spoken texts |
An explanation for this emphasis is found in the early ideas of cognitive psychology. Meaning was presumed to be built in an incremental manner from individual sounds to words, to strings of words and, eventually, to a complete text. The listenerās understanding of the message was presumed to develop with each stage. Learners were also often asked to write down what they heard as a way of reinforcing the input.
Another feature of text-oriented listening pedagogy is the dominance of the written language. Listening texts were traditionally written passages read aloud. These passages were frequently written without due consideration of the difference between written and spoken language. They were often lexically dense and grammatically complex, and they did not reflect the linguistic features of spoken texts. The language produced when we speak is seldom, if ever, identical to the language produced in the written word, even when we are talking about the same thing. Evidence of this difference was convincingly demonstrated by linguists such as Halliday (1985). He showed, for example, that written texts were more tightly āpackedā with complex sentences and therefore had a higher ālexical density.ā More recently, the differences between spoken and written discourse have also been empirically demonstrated through corpus studies of the spoken language such as the CANCODE project (Carter & McCarthy, 1997; McCarthy & Carter, 1995). With these insights, it became clear that many texts chosen for listening practice were totally unsuitable for use in listening classes. More importantly, these same texts often created additional challenges for language learners due to the heavy cognitive demands made on working memory.
Communication-Oriented Instruction
The position of listening as a distinct and important skill in language learning received a much-needed boost when the Council of Europe set out a model of the communicative needs of the archetypal adult foreign language learner in the early 1970s (Howatt, 1984). Proposals by Munby (1978) on communicative syllabus design, based on the original work of the Council of Europe, provided models for each of the four language skills. Listening was presented as a complex set of skills and micro-skills. It was no longer perceived as something that could simply be āpicked upā by language learners, but as a complex communicative skill that had to be learned as one would learn other language skills such as reading and writing. Soon other models and taxonomies of listening skills and sub-skills for different types of communicative situations were published and these directly influenced how listening was presented in many course books. Many of these models were influenced by cognitive psychology and emphasized the importance of listening comprehension as active meaning construction. Richards (1983), for example, presented a taxonomy based on listening skills organized within the context of conversational and academic listening. Rixon (1981) proposed a five-stage framework that included: knowing objectives; understanding language (making guesses if language is not understood); filtering for relevance; checking against own knowledge; and applying information.
The success and influence of the communicative language teaching (CLT) methodology that emerged in the 1970s engendered much discussion about innovative methods for teaching, as well as criteria for selecting materials, designing tasks, and developing materials (Johnson & Morrow, 1981). Teachers were encouraged to move away from using long written passages in favor of authentic materials, such as songs, movies, and recorded conversations for listening. With the availability of portable radio cassette recorders and video recorders, this quickly became a reality in many classrooms. Pre-listening activities were also introduced to engage learners in preparatory activities that enabled them to use their background knowledge for the topic during listening (Anderson & Lynch, 1988; Underwood, 1989; Ur, 1984). Table 1.2 summarizes the key features of communication-oriented listening instruction. It shows that, even in lessons with a communicative purpose, learners could still face challenges such as a neglect of listening in favor of speaking or fourskill integrated units and the indirect assessment of comprehension.
Table 1.2. Features of Communication-Oriented Listening Instruction
Learning objectives | ā¢ Develop both macro and micro skills for listening |
ā¢ Develop specific enabling skills for listening |
Listening input | ā¢ Spontaneous learnerālearner talk |
ā¢ Scripted or semi-scripted texts wit... |
