Teaching and Researching Chinese Second Language Listening

Wei Cai

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780367181901
• eBook ISBN: 9780429594649
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Teaching and Researching Chinese Second Language Listening focuses on Chinese L2 listening with theory and pedagogy at its heart. The objectives of the book are to recount the development of Chinese L2 listening pedagogy, to synthesize research on Chinese L2 listening, and to propose a Chinese L2 listening approach.

This book is the first to bridge the gap between Chinese L2 and general L2 listening and develop a much-needed systematic teaching approach to Chinese listening based on research findings in L2 listening, the unique features of the Chinese language, and the distinctive characteristics of the Chinese L2 learner population. This book grounds Chinese L2 teaching in solid theories of L2 acquisition and teaching. The research-informed and evidence-based Chinese L2 teaching approach proposed in the book seeks to move beyond the traditional product-oriented approach to integrate form-, meaning-, process-, and learner-focused listening. This book also discusses Chinese L2 listening from learners' perspectives: heritage versus non-heritage learners and motivation. These are presented together with theory and teaching practice.

The book is aimed at researchers, in-service teachers and students taking upper-level undergraduate courses and postgraduate courses for programs in Chinese applied linguistics and teaching Chinese as a second language (TCSL).

Chinese listening studies to date have mostly been published in the Chinese language, which severely limits their readership. This book is therefore written in English to fill the gap in current scholarship. Due to a large number of Chinese learners and the consequential booming programs in TCSL and CIE (Chinese international education), it is important to dedicate a book specifically to Chinese listening.

Part I Listening in the general L2 context

1 Listening theories

DOI: 10.4324/9780429060007-3

Cognitive psychology exerts heavy influence on L2 listening research and shapes teaching priorities and the development of associated teaching methods. Couched in cognitive psychology, L2 listening is conceived as an active process of human cognition and information processing involving a series of sub-processes of perceiving, recognizing, and analyzing speech signals (Yang, 1996). The transformed information is stored in the short-term memory and selectively transferred to the long-term memory. Starting in the 1990s, Chinese L2 listening has witnessed the same trend, endorsing the cognitive nature of listening. Scholars presented descriptions of the sub-processes of listening and the competence required for successful listening from the cognitive perspective. In his pioneering work on Chinse L2 listening, Yang (1996) specifies listening as receiving and encoding speech signals through the processes of analyzing, recognizing, and categorizing signals and establishing connections with background knowledge in the long-term memory. Studies have also emerged that analyze listening ability and difficulties from cognitive and information-processing perspectives (Wang, 2000).

Bottom-up models

The bottom-up view of language comprehension

Earlier models of language comprehension tend to be bottom-up, characterizing the comprehension process as a serial decoding of information from the lowest level (the phonetic level) via intermediate levels (syntactic and semantic levels) to the highest level (the pragmatic level) (Garrod, 1986). The bottom-up view of the listening process is sufficiently presented in Chinese L2 listening research and teaching. Xu (2000, as cited in Zhai & Su, 2010) divides listening into three consecutive processes that transform sound signals into propositions: (a) auditory processing; (b) decoding; and (c) cognition processing. The first stage of auditory processing includes sound screening (filtering all sounds for speech sounds), discriminating (ascertaining Chinese speech sounds among all speech sounds), and differentiating and analyzing (discriminating initials, finals, and tones of syllables). The listener then moves to decoding, which consists of activation (activating stored words with the same phonetic codes), matching (selecting words matching the sound stimulus), and accessing (accessed words being retained in the working memory). Finally, cognition processing occurs, which includes combination (combining words based on grammatical rules and correcting improperly accessed words) and comprehension (converting language forms into propositions, showing semantic meanings in L1 or L2). This depiction of the listening process as a serial decoding from smaller to larger units fully reflects the bottom-up view. This bottom-up view of language comprehension, however, has been challenged. The main challenges are encapsulated as follows.

First, the bottom-up model depicts listening as a process of serially decoding information from smaller units to larger ones, starting with phonemes, followed by words, sentences, and finally discourse. The bottom-up processing view conflicts with observations from human memory studies (Brindley & Nunan, 1992). Our working memory is believed to perform two functions in language comprehension: storing information and processing information (Just & Carpenter, 1992). Due to the limited capacity of working memory, the principles of “economy and efficiency” (Rickheit et al., 1985, p. 15) become highly important for its functioning. If a listener resorts to complete serial decoding, as is described by bottom-up processing models, the working memory is likely to be overloaded (Brindley & Nunan, 1992). Thus, previous information may be lost or subsequent information is left unstored or unprocessed. Listening is an “immediate” task in that listeners decode sound speech “at a delay behind the speaker of as little as a quarter of a second,” which provides evidence that processing in sequential “neat steps” is unlikely (Field, 2008b, p. 129). Second, the bottom-up view underscores the importance of linguistic processing but underplays the role that the listener’s background knowledge plays in comprehension. However, existing studies show that background knowledge is crucial to listening comprehension (Garrod, 1986; Markham & Latham, 1987; Wolff, 1987; Anderson & Lynch, 1988; Brown, 1990; Long, 1990; Buck, 1991; Lund, 1991; Brindley & Nunan, 1992; Anderson, 1995; Rost, 2002). Third, there is a lack of evidence that listeners use all the “levels of representation” (Field, 2008b, p. 129) to arrive at comprehension of an aural text. Some researchers maintain that listeners do not use phonemes but resort to syllables directly to match sounds with words (Field, 2008b). Fourth, listeners can derive the intended meaning of the speaker before the end of an utterance, providing evidence on the early role of higher-level information in comprehension.

The influence of bottom-up models on Chinese listening instruction

Bottom-up models stress the segmentation of sound stream into smaller components, such as sounds, syllables, words, and sentence structures. Earlier Chinese L2 listening instruction placed emphasis on the decoding of the aural input through discriminating initials, finals, tones, syllables, words, and intonation groups. This kind of teaching approach gained considerable momentum in Chinese language teaching in the 1980s and 1990s and is still commonly seen in language classrooms today. Regardless of the different formats of the activities, the central idea of this approach is that listening success resides in correctly decoding and practicing language units from smaller to larger units. (See Chapter 7 on form-oriented instruction for more details.)

Top-down models

The top-down view of language comprehension

As another influential language comprehension view, the top-down model depicts listening as a process in which listeners engage in hypothesis testing with their background knowledge and then selectively process textual information to test the hypothesis. This model emphasizes that context and general world knowledge can impact the processing of smaller units, such as word recognition and syntactic parsing.

A typical example of top-down models is the schema theory, which has deeply influenced L2 listening. While reading is depicted as a psycholinguistic guessing game (Goodman, 1967), listening proves to be more so in the sense that “listeners rely more on top-down, schema-based processing than readers” (Lund, 1989, as cited in Field, 2004, p. 93). Bartlett (1932) introduces the term schema to refer to “an active organization of past reactions, or past experiences” (p. 201). This definition is broad in scope. Rumelhart (1980) adds clarity by refining the definition: “a schema … is a data structure for representing the generic concepts stored in memory. There are schemata representing our knowledge about all concepts” (p. 34).

The above two definitions together highlight three important features of schemata: they are broad, organized, and active. Schemata are broad as we have schemata for all the regularly occurring events (Buck, 2001). Schemata are organized: the huge amount of knowledge stored in our minds and the efficiency with which we retrieve related knowledge together indicate that the storage of knowledge is a well-organized structure. As Rost (2002) points out, “the conceptual knowledge that the listener brings to text comprehension is organized in ways that allow him to activate it efficiently” (p. 62). Finally, schemata are active in the sense that they play an active role in language comprehension. According to schema theory:

a schema…serves as a control structure that regulates comprehension process in a top-down fashion. It works, on the one hand, like a perceptual filter, in that it admits material consistent with itself but blocks irrelevant material, and, on the other hand, it serves as an inference machine, in that it fills in the gaps that are inevitably found in the actual stimulus material.

(Kintsch, 1998, p. 94)

These features of schemata are important for explaining why prior knowledge influences language comprehension easily and extensively.

Schema theory improves on bottom-up models in understanding comprehension as a process in which the text and the comprehender’s prior knowledge interact. Nassaji (2002), in his critical analysis of schema theory in relation to reading comprehension, encapsulates three important insights of the theory: “the constructive nature of the reading process”; “the critical role of the reader”; and “the interaction between the text and the reader’s background knowledge” (p. 80). These ideas are currently widely accepted by researchers in the psychology of reading and are believed to apply to listening (e.g., Anderson & Lynch, 1988; O’Malley et al., 1989; Long, 1990; Rost, 1990; Buck, 1992). For instance, Anderson and Lynch (1988) argue that “the listener has a critical role to play in the process, by activating various types of knowledge, and by applying what he knows to what he hears and trying to understand what the speaker means” (p. 6). The importance of schemata in listening comprehension has been largely recognized. For instance, O’Malley et al. (1989) argue that schemata can help listeners to anticipate information and predict outcomes and infer meanings when one’s comprehension is incomplete. Similarly, Long (1990) states that schemata can fill in information and provide a context to facilitate comprehension.

In spite of the important ideas of schema theory, it has been critiqued for at least three reasons. First, schema theory views language processing as a method of testing hypotheses, in which one first generates hypotheses and then attempts to verify them by processing linguistic stimuli selectively. Stanovich (1980) questions this top-down view because generating and verifying hypotheses “requires implausible assumptions about the relative speeds of the process involved” (p. 34). Generating hypotheses is unlikely to take place more quickly than straightforward decoding of stimuli. Likewise, Field (2008b) points out that drawing upon information from context or co-text (the linguistic context or the internal context of a discourse) is a much slower process than using input or straightforward decoding in fluent L1 listening. Furthermore, Field argues that there is no fixed relationship between the use of input and context, and a balance needs to be stricken between “confidence in the input and the need to draw upon external information” (p. 135). This applies to both L1 and L2 listening.

A second critique of schema theory relates to its rigid nature. Schema theory understands schemata as pre-existing knowledge structures. Kintsch (1998) points out that “human comprehension is incredibly flexible and context-sensitive. It is hard to see how one could model that process with fixed control structures like schemas” (p. 94).

Finally, schema theory underplays lower-level linguistic processing, such as word decoding and syntactic parsing. Although schema theory claims that efficient comprehension depends on both linguistic processing and background knowledge activation, the two processes do not actually receive equal attention, with more emphasis being placed on the latter. However, empirical studies support the view that lower-level linguistic processing is actually basic to successful listening comprehension (e.g., Tsui & Fullilove, 1998; Wu, 1998).

A few more words are needed on the application of bottom-up and top-down models to L2 listening studies. The most crucial difference between the two models is in the processing direction (Field, 2004). However, the terms bottom-up and top-down are loosely defined and used in L2 listening. Bottom-up largely refers to basic linguistic skills, such as the skills involved in sound discrimination, word decoding, and syntactic parsing. Top-down, on the other hand, often refers to the use of context and world knowledge to make sense of a text (e.g., Vandergrift, 2007). It could also refer to the use of cognitive strategies (such as...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I: Listening in the general L2 context
• Part II: Listening in the Chinese L2 context
• Part III: Teaching Chinese L2 listening
• Conclusion
• References
• Index