Teaching Listening
Introduction
The following pages will be concerned with the process of listening and its influence on foreign language teaching and learning. Questions to be discussed will be: What kind of process is listening?[1] Which elements is it composed of? Which qualities of listening are present, and can one learn to listen “better”? Finally, which role does listening play in the classroom? The overall aim will be to show the importance of listening in Foreign Language Learning (FLL).
This paper is connected to the seminar “EFL Teaching Methodology” held by Ms. Eva Knierim and Mr. Wolrad König during the winter semester 2004/2005 at the university of Kassel.
The following definition was made by Yasuyuki Sakuma in an essay on listening:
“Listeners cannot reconstruct speakers’ messages […] until they come to possess a semiotic system like that contained in the speakers’ language […]. In this way, listening is a very active behaviour and is quite different from hearing, which is the activity of just receiving sound waves.” (Sakuma 2000)
Sakuma continues with listing the factors that listening is composed of, namely linguistic structures, prior knowledge, attention and memory.
In order to understand the process of listening, one must also pay attention to what is listened to; the sound. Sakuma names a particular problem of listening in authentic situations.
“The sounds that we hear in authentic situations are not determined by their presence in individual words, but by the way in which speech is created when words are connected. Words are individually pronounced differently than when used in speech.”
This means that the actual parole differs from the “theoretical” langue – a vital factor in foreign language teaching, which was traditionally focussed on technical teaching, i.e. grammar and vocabulary rather than on real-life situations. We will come back to this topic later in the chapter “Listening in the classroom”.
Graphic 1: The characteristics of sound after Sakuma
According to Sakuma, an adaptable prior knowledge is essential when listening to a foreign language: “[…]Those [listeners] who cannot adapt their prior knowledge easily cannot understand speech properly.” He states that listening comprehension is easier when you know something about the content; listeners with suitable prior knowledge have “existing schemata which help them to organise the information they are hearing and assimilate it to their prior knowledge.” In other words, preparation is another crucial element of listening, as it alleviates understanding.
Digesting language information by listening demands more attention than by reading; because, as Sakuma puts it, “phonetic language information […] fades away instantly […].” Sakume continues with citing O’Malley, who said that “effective listeners seemed to be aware when they stopped attending, and made an effort to redirect their attention to the task.”
Actively trying to focus attention can improve the quality of listening
Thus, it is obvious that memory plays an important role in listening, too.
Graphic 2: Elements of memory after Sakuma
The quality of listening is most strongly influenced by the following factors:
- adequate physical preconditions (i.e. not hard of hearing)
- noise level (should be held as low as possible, to avoid distraction)
- language skill (the more meanings of words you know, the more you will understand)
- message quality (e.g. a quiet conversation vs. a poor recording)
3.1 Listening in the classroom
Taking the importance of the listening skill for granted, is there a way to learn and teach how to listen better? The following listening activities are examples from a variety of methods by Ur (Ur, 1996). They range from no overt response to extended response expected from the learner.
1. No overt response: story
A simple activity that requires no special equipment is telling a joke or a story; if it’s interesting enough, the learners are likely to be motivated to attend.
2. Short responses: cloze
“Cloze” means presenting a listening text with gaps; learners write down what they think is the missing word. The text can be read out by the teacher or be recorded; the latter has the advance of enabling the teacher to use native speakers’ utterances.
3. Longer responses: Summarizing
Learners are told to write a brief summary of the content of the listening passage. This activity focuses on the question of how much was understood.
4. Extended responses: Problem solving
A problem given orally is discussed by the learners and possible solutions are worked out. The results may also be taken down in writing. This method combines several activities and is advisable to use in holistic and action-oriented teaching.
These methods can be varied in difficulty by the complexity of their content and the range of vocabulary used. As you can see, the skills of listening and speaking are interwoven so closely that practising will almost certainly involve the other.
1.2 Transformation of Language Information into Listening Comprehension
Sakuma’s view on the process: Speech makes the eardrum vibrate; the message is conveyed to the brain. Listeners decipher the content of the utterance phonetically, grammatically and semantically; this happens instantly in the short-term memory. Then the messages are transferred to the long-term memory – via the rehearsal buffer – and “saved” in the long-term memory.
4. Conclusion
5. Sources