Listening comprehension exercises of the last two decades are characterised by three failings which obstruct successful learning: misguided faith in first language research into listening; misplaced hope in the ability of learners to perceive elements of the stream of speech; and misdirected charity in helping the learners by focusing too much on what they can manage, and not focusing sufficiently on what they have to master.
Misplaced Faith
Ten years ago, Anderson & Lynch (1988, p. 21) noted that there was very little research into listening in a second language. This seems still to be the case. As a result, listening comprehension exercises are based on what is known about successful native speaker listening. Successful native listening is characterised by:
- listening for a purpose;
- making predictions based on contextual information;
- making guesses when things aren't clear;
- inferring what is meant where necessary;
- not listening ("straining") for every word (adapted from Brown, 1990, p. 148).
Listening comprehension materials have made appropriate use of some of these findings, and inappropriate use of others. In particular they have taken the last of these points ("they don't listen for every word") and have made it an article of faith. This article of faith promotes "top-down" activities and denigrates any activity which could be characterised as "bottom-up." Of course, there are understandable reasons why we should be careful about this particular issue: we don't want learners to strain so much to hear every word that they cannot understand anything. In my view though, it is a mistake to abandon, as we have, bottom-up activities which introduce learners to the essential characteristics of speech.
The acceptance of this article of faith has resulted in the standard explanation of the communicative language teacher: "You won't be able to understand every word, and you don't need to." Now I find this explanation worryingly insufficient. Here's why.
Let us start with two indisputable facts: first, native listeners don't attend to every word; and second, learners don't understand every word. We make the mistake of proposing the first fact (native listeners don't do it) as a solution to the problems posed by the second fact (learners don't understand). We are ignoring the fact that native listeners have great advantages over non-natives both in terms of perceptual ability (in particular) and in terms of the abilities to guess, and predict on the basis of contextual knowledge. We expect learners to simulate native listener behaviour without helping them acquire one of the major prerequisites for such behaviour--adequate perceptual abilities.
Any activity which encourages bottom-up processing, which requires learners to attend to the substance of speech, has become tabu. For example, some authors deprive learners of the opportunity of looking at the tapescripts for fear that it "reinforces the myth that learners can't understand meaning without catching everything they hear" (Helgesen, Brown, & Smith, 1997, p. xii).
Thus, because of this kind of misplaced faith in native listener research, we have listening comprehension exercises which require learners to simulate native listener behaviour (in top-down activities) but which do not teach learners how to acquire progressively native-like abilities in perception: there are no bottom-up activities. If true, this is a serious indictment of an approach (Communicative Language Teaching) which claims to be "learner-centred" and claims to place great emphasis on learners' needs.
Misguided Hope
Listening exercises are also characterised by misguided hope which often appears in the shape of the following words of encouragement to the learners: "Just listen to the stresses, they'll be in the most important words, then you'll understand."
There are three problems with this view: First, very often, "important" words such as negatives are often unstressed, and so-called "unimportant" grammatical words are stressed. Second, research indicates that it is difficult to pick out stressed words in a language which is not your own (c.f. Roach, 1982), Third, the concept of stress is loosely defined and fails to distinguish between word-level stress, and stresses associated with higher order phenomena such as tone units.
Misdirected Charity
Although all listening comprehension recordings are described as "natural," very few of them are truly so. Many (though not all) are scripted and artificially slow: very few are instances of "naturally occurring speech," or "authentic speech." The reasons for this can be found in statements such as the following from Penny Ur: "Students may learn best from listening to speech which, while not entirely authentic, is an approximation to the real thing, and is planned to take into account the learners' level of ability and particular difficulties" (1984, p. 23).
I myself find nothing wrong in what Ur says here, but I would argue that listening comprehension materials are often over-charitable in leaning towards "the learners' level of ability" and not taking account of the level of ability required to understand spontaneous fast speech. The gap between the learners' level and the target level (fast spontaneous speech) is a gap that we as teachers and materials writers must help learners bridge.
We cannot help them bridge this gap if we continue with our charitable focus on what learners can manage at their current level. We have to help learners cope with speech which is above their current level, and to arrive at a description of "above current level," we need a description of the topmost level, a description of the features of "difficult" (fast spontaneous) speech. We need such a description for use in teaching so that we can have an equal focus on both where our learners are, and where they have to get to.
Field (1998) suggests features such as "hesitations, stuttering, false starts, and long, loosely structured sentences" (p. 13). To this list one can add all the features of speech described by Brazil (1994; 1997; 1982): prominences, tone units of different sizes, tones, and pitch height. One can also add the differences between dictionary and running forms of words, turn taking, accent, voice quality, and the effects of speed on speech.
Once we have a workable description of what happens in fast spontaneous speech, we then have to face the problem of methodology. The difficulty of dealing with fast spontaneous speech is that many of these features occur simultaneously. It is therefore difficult to derive a syllabus in terms of a linear sequence of items each of which can in turn be the exclusive focus of an activity or lesson: most of them are present all the time. However, multimedia technology offers opportunities for a partial isolating of such features, and turning them into experiences which can help learners.
Conclusion: More on Perception Exercises
There was a time when listening comprehension exercises did involve perception exercises (cf. Field, 1998) but they have generally disappeared, a fact that Gillian Brown describes as, "a quite extraordinary case of throwing the baby out with the bath water" (1990, p. 145). Brown goes on to argue: "Students do . . . need help in learning to interpret the spoken form of the language and, in particular, the form of the phonetic signal. What we need to do . . . is to think more carefully about the appropriate methodology" (1990, p. 146).
There are two points which are important here: First we need to bring back perceptual work. Second, we need to think carefully about how we do it (methodology). Clearly we have to balance the requirement to work on perception with the requirement to avoid straining for every word. Although at first sight it might seem impossible to reconcile these requirements, it is in fact quite easy to do so. For a "non-straining" approach to listening, learners have to be made familiar and comfortable with the features of the stream of speech which most distinguish it from writing. At present we are denying them the means of acquiring this comfort and familiarity.
Field (1998, p.14) suggests shortening the pre-listening activities and having an extended post-listening period. I myself advocate multimedia approaches to this problem (Cauldwell, 1996), and it is these I hope to demonstrate at JALT98.
References
- Anderson, A., & Lynch, T. (1988). Listening. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Brown, G. (1990). Listening to spoken English (2nd ed.). Harlow: Longman.
- Brazil, D. (1994). Pronunciation for advanced learners of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Brazil, D. (1997). The communicative value of intonation in English (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Cauldwell, R.T. (1996). Direct encounters with fast speech on CD audio to teach listening. System, 24(4), 521-528.
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Field, J. (1998). The changing face of listening. English Teaching Professional, 6, 12-14.
- Helgesen, M., Brown, S., & Smith, D. (1997). Active listening: Expanding. [Teacher's Edition 3]. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Roach, P. (1982). On the distinction between 'stress-timed' and 'syllable-timed' languages. In D. Crystal (Ed)., Linguistic controversies: Essays in linguistic theory and practice (pp. 73-79). London: Edward Arnold.
- Ur, P. (1984). Teaching listening comprehension. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.