Teaching and Learning Second Language Listening

Metacognition in Action

Christine C. M. Goh, Larry Vandergrift

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367254261
• eBook ISBN: 9781000397918
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Now in its second edition, this reader-friendly text offers a comprehensive treatment of concepts and knowledge related to teaching second language (L2) listening, with a particular emphasis on metacognition.

This book advocates a learner-oriented approach to teaching listening that focuses on the process of learning to listen. It applies theories of metacognition and language comprehension to offer sound and reliable pedagogical models for developing learner listening inside and outside the classroom. To bridge theory and practice, the book provides teachers with many examples of research-informed activities to help learners understand and manage cognitive, social, and affective processes in listening.

Comprehensively updated with new research and references, the new edition includes additional and expanded discussions of many topics, including metacognition in young learners, working memory, and a L2 listening systems model. It remains an essential text on L2 listening pedagogy, theory, and research.

Part I
Second Language Listening Theory and Research

1
Teaching Listening and Learning to Listen

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 view?
4. What purpose does the listening activity serve? How does it influence language learning?

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, many 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.

Graham (2017) observed a disconnect between research findings and the everyday practice of teaching L2 listening. While research is showing the value of teaching listening explicitly, through focusing on listening processes, skills, and strategies that learners need for listening, the reality in the classroom may still be one where learners listen to input passively to complete exercises and activity sheets. Although teachers may believe in the importance of explicit teaching of listening, some have a rather limited view of what such explicit instruction entails (Emerick, 2019; Siegel, 2014). Some teachers experience challenges in apportioning class time for listening instruction, and some may even believe that learners can develop listening on their own without the need for explicit teaching (Panteloglou, 2017).

We believe that every language teacher needs to have a clear understanding of the processes involved in listening and in particular, how metacognition (thinking about thinking) plays an important role in helping learners manage their comprehension and learning efforts. In the same way, language learners need to learn about themselves as second language (L2) listeners, the task of learning to listen and understand, and the various processes they can engage in to improve their own listening. They should become strategic listeners who can manage the processes of listening comprehension and learning to listen over a sustained period, in and beyond the classroom.

Becoming Strategic L2 Listeners

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 also respond in an appropriate way, learner stress and anxiety levels increase even further.

A group of EFL learners were asked by Zeng (2012) to use a metaphor to express their efforts in L2 listening. They made these interesting comparisons: “climbing mountains”; “squeezing a tube of tooth paste”; “simmering hot soup”; “sailing in the ocean”; “crossing the glass maze” (pp. 222–227). Zeng observed that these comparisons depicted the challenges that many language learners faced with learning to listen. He observed that these metaphors showed learners’ focus on the process of learning and that they knew it was a difficult endeavor, but many were still hopeful that one day they would scale that mountain, reach their destination beyond the horizon, and navigate those glass walls and emerge as proficient L2 listeners.

Learners face many challenges in the classroom, such as not knowing how to listen effectively when they are given a listening task. In other words, they are not familiar with the process of learning to listening. 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 ‘primed’ 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 speaker’s voice or ‘tune in to’ 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 in manageable chunks. Many teachers also feel that they should ask learners to listen to the input without any interruption or repetition, as this mirrors real-life communication. The downside 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 learners’ 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 earnestly participate in all class listening activities in the hope that these will help them become listeners who are more successful over time. They 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 to gain native speakers as conversation partners. Most of these activities, when planned by the teacher, are accompanied by ‘homework’ 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 need to understand the listening processes they are using. In short, teachers need to focus on the learning process from the learners’ perspective by engaging with their metacognition.

Metacognition is the act of thinking about thinking or cognition. It is an individual’s ability to control thoughts and regulate learning. Meta-cognition is integral to human learning. In L2 learning, metacognition enhances thinking and comprehension (Baker, 2002; Wenden, 1998). While listening has gained greater prominence in language teaching, listening instruction has, until recently, overlooked the potential of harnessing learner metacognition for listening development. For a long time now, approaches to listening instruction has focused mainly on text comprehension and oral communication. The focus of much of listening instruction has been getting learners to comprehend the meaning latent in a piece of spoken text on their own and with little support. With time, the focus has shifted to the comprehension of details and the gist of messages that have a communicative purpose. Graham (2017) observed that there has been some emphasis on teaching listening through a process-based approach in recent years.

Listening Instruction: An Overview

Although initially neglected, listening finally found a place in the language classroom about 50 years ago. Since then, 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 demonstrate comprehension; that is, 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 “quiz-show” 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.

Table 1.1 Features of Text-Oriented Listening Instruction

Learning objectives	Decode sounds: phonemes, word stress, and sentence-level intonation Listen to, imitate, and memorize sound and grammar patterns Identify relevant details from oral input Demonstrate understanding of the meaning of the passage
Listening input	Words, phrases, and sentences read aloud Written passages read aloud
Classroom interaction	Learner-teacher Individual listening
Learner response	Discriminate sounds at word and sentence levels Write dictation of written passages Answer comprehension questions based on the listening passage Complete written texts with details from the listening passage
Challenges for learners	Listening not taught as a language skill Learner comprehension is constantly assessed informally Listening passages are often dense and do not reflect the linguistic features of spoken texts

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. 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. With each stage, the listener’s understanding of the message was presumed to develop. 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 written passages read aloud. These passages were often 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 ‘packed’ with complex sentences and therefore had a higher “lexical density.” 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, thes...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• In Memoriam
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue: Reflecting on Issues Related to Teaching and Learning L2 Listening
• Part I Second Language Listening Theory and Research
• Part II Metacognition and Learning to Listen
• Part III Developing Listening Competence
• Epilogue: Synthesis of Issues Related to Teaching and Learning Listening
• Appendices
• References
• Index