Teaching Listening Better

Is Listening being taught as well as it could be?

In Listening classes, students are usually given practice in listening but they are not often taught listening.

Research and case studies have told us many things about how listening should be taught. But often, this knowledge has not made the jump into classroom practice.

We know that teachers work hard to make their classes educational and interesting. It is in this spirit that we want to begin a dialog about how to teach listening.

A Teacher's Checklist

How do you teach listening? After taking your classes, do your students know about:

• how words link together (liaison)
• how vowels weaken (the central vowel)
• how sounds mix together (assimilation)
• how sounds disappear (elision)
• how syllables disappear (ellipsis)
• how helping sounds are used between vowel sounds (instrusion)
• how intonation signals speaking turns (intonation)
• how stress signals new information (prominence)
• how to use grammar to help guess meaning (strategies)
• how to use discourse knowledge to help guess meaning (strategies)
• how to use knowledge of intonation and stress to guess meaning (strategies)

How many can you answer "yes" to?

Many of our students name 'listening' as their weak point with English. There is a very simple reason for this. Many of our EFL/ESL students have never been taught how to listen to English. They have had practice but they have never actually been taught or given guidance about how to listen to natural English.

We want to help.

What do we teach when we teach Listening?

When we teach listening we need to teach not only English, but we also need to teach how it is used. We need to teach both:

1. the language system itself, (our knowledge of language: grammar and vocabulary etc.) and
2. the use of the language system, (the skills of language use)

The problem with most listening classes, is that they get stuck at number 1. Too many classes concentrate on teaching the language system and miss the skills of language, in this case listening.

Our knowledge of the language system includes our knowledge of words, how these words are properly put in order (syntax or grammar), how these words are said in connected streams (phonology), how these words are strung together in longer texts (discourse) and so on.

Using the language system involves how we apply this knowledge of the language system to understand or convey meaning and how we apply particular skills to understanding and conveying meaning.

The Listening Skills (an all too often forgotten skill set)

Listening skills are often divided into two groups:

• bottom up listening skills and
• top down listening skills

Bottom up listening skills, or bottom up processing, refers to the decoding process, the direct decoding of language into meaningful units, from sound waves through the air, in through our ears and into our brain where meaning is decoded. To do this students need to know the code. How the sounds work and how they string together and how the codes can change in different ways when they're strung together. And most students have never been taught how English changes when it's strung together in sentences.

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.

The Default Method

Perhaps THE common way to teach listening is to have students listen to a language tape. Whereupon the teacher asks a few comprehension questions. No focus is drawn to the form of the language to help them understand. This is sometimes called the comprehension approach. If students understand, great. If they don't, they need to practice. In such classes teachers aren't really teaching, (and perhaps students aren't really learning as much as they could be!)

Another approach is to pick out a particular grammar point. Perhaps the passage uses the present perfect quite a bit, so you might go over some of the differences between the simple past and the present perfect. Maybe write a formula or two up on the board. This is an approach taken by many teachers but it's not really teaching listening is it. Students need to be told how English works. They need to be told how to use their world knowledge to improve their skills. Yes practice makes perfect. But instruction makes this process much more efficient. We need to teach our students.

Well known SLA (Second Language Acquisition) expert Richard Schmidt, has put forward a theory called the "Noticing Hypothesis", which states that learners have to notice something before they can learn it. And as such teachers need to help our students notice language points. Teachers need to teach.

"There is support in the literature for the hypothesis that attention is required for all learning. Learners need to pay attention to input and pay particular attention to whatever aspect of the input (phonology, morphology, pragmatics, discourse, etc) that you are concerned to learn" (Schmidt: 1995)

An ideal listening class should thus provide both practice and instruction. Students need practice in listening for meaning and also some instruction about how to do so effectively.

"Classroom data from a number of studies offer support for the view that form focused instruction and corrective feedback provided within the context of communicative programs are more effective in promoting second language learning than programs which are limited to a virtually exclusive emphasis on either accuracy or fluency". (Lightbrown & Spada)

What Listening Teachers Need to Do

Teachers should expose students to listening texts which ask students to interpret and understand meaning, AND also teach learners about how English is actually spoken.

That is: Students need practice in listening for meaning and instruction about how to do this.
(a focus on form within a framework of attending to meaning / an explicit focus on listening skills within a broad communicative framework).

This approach has been the recommended method for teaching listening for years and yet teachers still use the "Practice makes perfect plus a little grammar" approach, a method not well supported by research into language learning. We want to change this!

You've read our views. We'd now like to hear your views. Send us your comments and we'll post them here. Let's start a dialog and move our teaching forward. Help us to make things better.

A Teaching Method Supported by Second Language Acquisition Research

If you've agreed so far with what we've said, perhaps you'd be insterested in seeing a book that attempts to teach listening in the manner described above, Top-Up Listening. This is a book written by teachers, all with advanced qualifications in education and years of experience. Furthermore this book has been edited and tested by editors with advanced teaching qualifications in the field and years of experience. Top-Up Listening teaches listening in accordance with all that we know about teaching listening. In short this book teaches listening they way listening is supposed to be taught!

I've heard it said that 90% of all drivers think they are above average drivers. Well clearly they all can't be right! If you think this might also apply to you as a listening teacher, have a look through our textbook. It won't disappoint.

Lastly if you are interested in information on teaching listening click through to browse our annotated bibliography on teaching listening. Lastly if you have any comments or questions please send us an email.(you will get a reply!)