Listening in the Classroom: Teaching Students How to Listen

By Marnie Reed and Tamara Jones

Listening is the skill learners use the most, but language educators often receive the least preparation to teach this skill. Teaching listening means more than just giving students listening activities and checking for understanding—it means teaching them how to listen. Listening in the Classroom takes promising research findings and theory and turns them into practical teaching ideas that help develop listening proficiency.Key topics within this book include: metacognitive awareness for listening, understanding spoken speech, addressing listening challenges, fostering word recognition, identifying thought groups, taking academic notes, and listening in real life. Educators will find more than 50 activities they can start using with their learners right away!

• Language: English
• Publisher: TESOL Press
• Release date: Nov 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9781945351914

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Why Do We Need to Teach Listening?

Listening as an Essential Skill

As a Russian student living in Moscow in the early 1990s, I quickly reached the conclusion that though listening was the most difficult skill for me to improve, it was also the most crucial. My reading and writing skills were very weak, but there was rarely that sense of immediacy which always accompanied listening. If it took me whole minutes to sound out a street address in my map, it usually didn’t matter. Similarly, I could take as long as I needed to address an envelope or write a note to a friend. Speaking was trickier because it always happened in real time, so I couldn’t pause a conversation for 5 minutes to formulate a sentence in my mind.

But, I was still in control of my speech. I could choose to speak, or, if I didn’t know how to say what I was thinking, I could remain silent. I could steer the conversation toward topics that I had the vocabulary and grammar to talk about, and even when I could only string words together into grammatically fraught phrases, I usually got my point across. Listening, however, was different. I had no control over the vocabulary choices, syntactic complexity, or speed of the speaker. Conversations always seemed to progress at lightning speed, and I often found myself just getting the gist of a topic only to find that my friends had moved on to talk about something new. Until I was able to improve my listening skills, I felt like I wasn’t able to fully participate in my exciting expat life.

Clearly, language learners need to develop listening skills. Quite simply, it is the skill learners use the most; according to Nunan (1998), students spend 50% of their second language (L2) time listening. In addition, listening facilitates the emergence of other skills. Comprehensible input can encourage noticing (Nation & Newton, 2009), and when English is the language of English instruction, as it often is, common sense tells us that we can learn nothing from listening to a language unless we understand it (Richards, 2005, p. 88). Likewise, students need strong listening proficiency to learn things in their mainstream classes, where some information will be presented visually through course books and on the whiteboard; but most will be presented through the voice of the teacher (Field, 2008a, p. 3), as well as in their workplaces and personal lives. Finally, a lack of listening strategies can lead to anxiety for our learners, which, in turn, negatively impacts their overall comprehension (Elkhafaifi, 2005; Mills et al., 2006).

Unfortunately, the importance of developing strong listening proficiency is undermined by the fact that it is a difficult skill to master. Speech comes at the listener in an unbroken stream and listeners must break the stream into groups of sounds; recognize the groups as words; attach meaning to the words; understand how the words are related to each other; and use knowledge of the language, the words, and the context to clear up any ambiguities. This complex process happens instantaneously, invisibly and, for proficient listeners, generally unconsciously. However, for weaker listeners, there are many opportunities for breakdown in this process. Further confounding the issue for English language teachers is that we can’t see where the breakdown occurred or if there even was a breakdown. Students will frequently report understanding instructions even when they don’t because in many cultures, asking your teacher to explain something again is insulting, as it implies the teacher did not explain it well the first time (Mendelsohn, 2002). As well, students may think they’ve understood and are often reluctant to abandon their guess (Broersma & Cutler, 2008; Field, 2008b). Therefore, it’s important for teachers to remember that when they are listening to a text along with their students, their experience will be vastly different from what their students are experiencing (Cauldwell, 2018), so it can be difficult to know how to help or if help is even necessary.

The Default to a Product-Oriented Approach

Of all the skills, listening always felt most to me like the final frontier. I had strategies for teaching students vocabulary and grammar, I balanced fluency and accuracy instruction in speaking and writing class, and I felt confident teaching students bottom-up and top-down reading strategies. However, for many years, listening felt a bit mysterious. It all seemed to happen inside my students’ heads, and they either got the comprehension questions right or wrong. It appeared to have very little to do with me, other than I was the person who pressed play on the tape recorder.

No matter what proficiency level my students were, from absolute beginner to advanced, whenever we encountered a listening activity in the textbook, we’d do the provided prelistening activities; we might even brainstorm some potential vocabulary associated with the listening topic. Then, I’d play the recording, and my students would do the textbook comprehension activity. We’d check the answers and then move on to the postlistening conversation questions. For years, I was pretty content with this product-oriented approach. Sure, my students occasionally got frustrated when they got a question wrong, but I’d play the recording again for them, pausing at their mistake, and assume that all confusion had been cleared up. Sadly, rather than providing my learners with instruction and practice that developed their listening skills, I had been really just testing their listening comprehension (Vandergrift, 2004). I simply didn’t know there was any other way to do listening in a language learning context.

Unfortunately, many other English language educators may have had a similar experience. Very often listening activities in many 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 (Vandergrift & Goh, 2012, p. 4). Certainly, many of the authors in this volume describe employing a traditional approach to teaching listening until they realized that it wasn’t working well for their students. Graham et al. (2014) found that teachers often implement a product-oriented approach to listening instruction, even though they believe that the teaching of listening is important. Moreover, Siegel (2014) revealed that the English as a foreign language teachers in his study tended to adopt a product-oriented approach when incorporating listening into their lessons and that the listening comprehension questions that are so familiar to many of us actually occupied 70% of the time devoted to teaching listening.

This imbalance may be partially due to the fact that many English language teaching (ELT) professionals have comparably little exposure to a variety of approaches for teaching listening strategies in their MATESOL and teacher training programs. Despite specific training in how to teach listening emerging as the number one need in Henrichsen’s (1983) survey of educators and employers, it appears to receive relatively little attention in MATESOL curricula. Uber Grosse (1991) found that in the majority of TESOL programs she surveyed, while the teaching of writing, reading, and speaking received a fair amount of class time, listening pedagogy received almost the least coverage of all the topics on the syllabus, coming in ninth out of 10 topics. Perhaps this explains the findings of a study conducted by Emerick (2019), which found language instructors, by and large, believed that direct, explicit listening instruction is essential in developing L2 listening skills, yet they report to only rarely provide process-oriented or metacognitive instruction for their students (p. 115).

Another likely reason for this overreliance on the product-oriented approach to listening instruction is that most ELT materials provide product-oriented practice activities that require students to answer listening comprehension questions. Even though research into developing aspects of L2 listening acquisition has emerged in recent years (notably Field, 2008a; Brown, 2011; and Vandergrift & Goh, 2012), in a 2016 survey of several popular ELT course books, Nguyen and Abbott found that 92% of the listening activities in the texts were still product oriented. Though it is often the case that course materials do not reflect the findings of research in language acquisition, it is particularly problematic when it comes to listening instruction because many teachers haven’t learned how to teach students to listen in their preservice training and, therefore, rely heavily on the approaches they see in their course books for methodological support (McGrath, 2013, p. 5).

What Teachers Need to Know

The mismatch between what learners need when it comes to developing strong listening skills and the limitations of many teacher training programs and published course materials has left TESOL practitioners with the tasks of figuring out what skills are necessary for students to learn to develop their listening proficiency and to create classroom lessons and activities that push learners toward this goal. We believe this book can assist instructors with these tasks. However, to fully access the suggestions in the following chapters, readers must understand several key terms.

Top-Down Listening Skills

Seasoned travelers may be familiar with the notoriously staticky announcements that pilots often make from the cockpit. Generally, pilots communicate messages about things like the travelling time and cruising altitude. We rarely panic when we can’t hear every word clearly in these announcements because we are using our prior knowledge about air travel and pilot announcements to fill in the gaps. In other words, we are using our top-down processing skills to make sense of what we are hearing.

Top-down processes involve the listener going from the whole—their prior knowledge and their content and rhetorical schemata—to the parts. In other words, the listener uses what they know of the context of communication to predict what the message will contain and uses parts of the message to confirm, correct or add to this. (Nation & Newton, 2009, p. 40)

Bottom-Up Listening Skills

When I first moved to Korea, I’d had absolutely no experience with the language. When I sat with my Korean colleagues, I felt like the sounds they were making simply washed over me; I had no way to even break the acoustic stream into identifiable sounds, much less understand how the sounds combined to form words and phrases. All the background knowledge in the world couldn’t help me follow their conversation. In short, my bottom-up processing skills in Korean were nonexistent.

Bottom-up processing describes how a listener makes sense of an acoustic cluster. Just as readers use their bottom-up skills to decode print—identifying letters, understanding how they fit together to make words, and understanding how the words combine into sentences and paragraphs to tell a story or argue a point—listeners draw primarily on linguistic knowledge, which includes phonological knowledge (phonemes, stress, intonation and other sound adjustments made by speakers to facilitate speech production), lexical knowledge and syntactic knowledge (grammar) of the target language (Vandergrift & Goh, 2012, p. 18). Though strong listeners make use of both top-down and bottom-up processes, less competent listeners tend to rely more heavily on their bottom-up skills (Tsui & Fullilove, 1998).

Syllables

When I was in China on a tour of Beijing, the tour guide began telling an anecdote about a sin-tist. As I was listening, I was thinking, What in the world is a sin-tist? Within a few minutes I could understand that the speaker was telling a story about a scientist, but because he had pronounced the word with two syllables instead of three, I had a hard time following him. Language teachers often refer to syllables as the beats in a word. Another way to identify a syllable is to listen for the vowel sounds in a word. Teaching students about syllables is key for listening skill development because learners accustomed to different phonological rules may not hear the syllable divisions in the same way (Gilbert, 2008, p. 4).

IPA

I have a cut. She is black and cute. I love her. I have sometimes found that when students make pronunciation errors, like not opening their mouths and dropping their jaw sufficiently so they are saying cut instead of cat, it can be difficult to correct them. They may not even be able to hear the difference between cat and cut if one or both of the vowel sounds don’t exist in their native language. The subsequent conversation might sound like this:

Teacher: "Not cut, cat."

Student: "Yes, cut."

This exchange is probably familiar to many teachers. If students have trouble differentiating between sounds in English, having a way to show them which sound you are referring to can be helpful. The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is one way of visually depicting sounds because it provides a consistent one-to-one relationship between a written symbol and the sound it represent[s] (Celce-Murcia et al., 2010, p. 3). There are several versions of the IPA, as well as other phonetic transcription systems. To ease confusion, teachers and their students will generally want to refer to the phonetic transcription system that appears in their textbooks; for this book, we’ve used the transcription system found in Celce-Murcia et al. (2010), for which a transcription key can be found on the last page of this book.

Lexical Segmentation

I grew up listening to an American song that was written in the 1940s but has since become a children’s song, Mairzy Doats. The song’s lyrics are seemingly nonsensical: Mairzy doats and dozy doats and liddle lamzy divey. A kiddle edivey do. Wooden chew? I remember thinking they were so funny as I sang the song as a child. It wasn’t until I was much older that I realized how the songwriters were playing with connected speech. In fact, if we want the sentences to make sense, we would read them as: Mares eat oats and does eat oats and little lambs eat ivy. A kid will eat ivy, too. Wouldn’t you? The song lyrics demonstrate how English speakers link words in natural speech through elision and assimilation. Elision occurs when a sound is omitted as two words are connected; for instance in the song, the word will is contracted to [əl] and the sound /w/ is elided. Assimilation describes the transformation of two sounds into one. For example, in the song, the words wouldn’t you are linked. The /t/ and the end of wouldn’t and the /y/ at the beginning you are assimilated into the sound /ʧ/. The song also exemplifies how that can cause issues with listening comprehension, because students are often stymied by what is arguably the commonest perceptual cause of breakdown of understanding: namely, lexical segmentation, the identification of words in connected speech (Field, 2003, p. 327).

Weak Forms

A student in my English as a second language class was struggling with tech issues and had run into trouble when attempting to do some recording homework I had assigned the class. I gave him some troubleshooting instructions and the following week in the class I asked him if they had solved the problem. He responded I can do the recording now. However, he said each word clearly, and as a result I couldn’t tell if he was saying I can do the recording or I can’t do the recording.

When proficient speakers talk naturally, we often reduce some words, often function words, such as pronouns, articles, prepositions, and affirmative modal verbs (e.g., can). We tend to say content words, for instance nouns, adjectives, adverbs, and negatives (e.g., can’t) more clearly. Proficient listeners’ ears are trained to listen for stressed words, and they use what they know about the context, syntax, and grammar to fill in the gaps caused by the reduced function words. For instance, if the student had applied English speech rhythm when he said I can DO the RECORDING NOW, I would have understood that the problem had been solved, but because he said can clearly, it sounded more like can’t, and I was confused. Cauldwell (2018) refers to the syllables that occur in speech between stressed syllables as squeeze zones because the reduced syllables are squeezed between the clearly pronounced words. Not using squeeze zones can cause problems in speaking, and it’s also true for listening, because when listeners do not attend to (or are unaware of) subtle phonetic differences in English, communication can break down in interesting ways (Celce-Murcia et al., 2010, p. 375).

Parsing

There is a funny meme that exists on the internet that contains the contrast between the sentences Let’s eat grandma. and Let’s eat, grandma. Of course, the humor stems from the fact that without the comma, the speaker is suggesting an unthinkable act; however, with the comma, the speaker is merely inviting a family member to a meal. These sentences not only look different, they sound different, too. The first sentence is said as one chunk or thought group. The second is broken into two chunks or thought groups by a little pause and change in intonation. A thought group is a discrete stretch of speech that forms a semantically and grammatically coherent segment of discourse (Celce-Murcia et al., 2010, p. 221).

Proficient listeners parse speech into thought groups using their knowledge of English. Sentence parsing requires knowledge of segmental phonology, including phonotactics (the permissible sound sequences in a language) and connected speech processes. A lack of this skill may result in learner failure to grasp the locution, the utterance itself. For instance, if we were to hear the sentence, Let’s eat, grandma, we would use what we know about pausing and intonation changes in English to understand that the speaker was inviting their grandmother to eat. If were unable to parse successfully, of course, we would be horrified by what we understood the speaker to be suggesting. The ability to parse a stream of speech into appropriate thought groups is extremely beneficial for English learners because it helps them comprehend and remember more of what they have heard (Harley, 2000).

Metacognition

When I moved to Belgium, I dusted off my high school French for daily encounters. My husband, however, studied German when he was younger and barely knew any French beyond what he learned in his workplace-sponsored orientation course. Interestingly, I noted that whenever we were out and about together, shopkeepers tended to direct their utterance toward him instead of me because he appeared to be the more proficient listener. This was infuriating, but it really caused me to think about what was going on. I reflected on the exchanges and came to understand that my husband is a calmer listener; because he was expecting to understand nothing, he was pleasantly surprised when he was able to follow what someone was saying. On the other hand, I was putting more effort into listening, making me an anxious conversationalist. Once I realized that, I tried to remember to relax more when I was listening. As a result, my comprehension actually improved. By thinking about my listening challenges, I was able to improve my skills. "Metacognition is, as it were, the ability to step back from the intense activities of learning, problem solving and communicating to becoming an observer, a critique [sic] and a commentator of one’s own endeavors" (Goh, 2019, p. 2). If L2 listeners can be encouraged to reflect on what they know about how they listen, what they know about the listening task, and what they know about strategy use, their listening proficiency will increase (Vandergrift et al., 2006).

Listening is a complex process, and, because it happens inside our ears and brains, it can be incredibly challenging for language instructors to teach students how to listen and it can be difficult for students to identify what is going wrong when they don’t understand. The overreliance that many published ELT listening resources place on top-down skill development and the overrepresentation of product-oriented listening practice in our classrooms have resulted in frustration among both teachers and students.

Fortunately, research has also shown that systematic listening instruction can help improve students’ ability to comprehend spoken language, which in turn can help enhance the acquisition process (Renandya & Hu, 2019, p. 1). In other words, when we start to incorporate bottom-up skill development and metacognitive awareness-raising activities into our lessons, students can improve the skills that lead to increased comprehension for conversations, lectures, and extensive listening. Efficient processing at the phoneme and syllable levels leads to accurate lexical segmentation at the word level. After words have been distinguished between one another, they are grouped into chunks by parsing processes at the syntactic and intonation levels (Goh & Wallace, 2019, p. 1).

How This Book Can Help

The goal of this book is to provide teachers with research-based activities and teaching tips so that you can incorporate more listening instruction and focused practice into your lessons. As Wallace points out in Chapter 1 and Sheppard describes in Chapter 12, developing metacognitive awareness is a key aspect of L2 listening proficiency. After all, without establishing why the errors occurred, we have no means of assisting learners to get it right next time (Field, 2008a, p. 81).

Further chapters deal with the business of making meaning from a steady stream of unedited and therefore messy spontaneous speech. The activities presented by Jones and Siegel in Chapters 2 and 3, respectively, help students listen at the word level. In Chapter 4, Bogorevich and Kia suggest activities for helping students identify words in connected speech, a process referred to as lexical segmentation, which is a major challenge for L2 listeners (Vandergrift & Goh, 2012, p. 21).

Chapters 5, 6, 7, and 8 further propose additional strategies for helping students make sense of this jungle of spontaneous speech, where the vegetation is crushed together in a messy and unruly manner which is quite unlike any orderly garden arrangement (Cauldwell, 2014, p. 41), including using their knowledge of grammar (Rimmer, Chapter 5), understanding the message implied in a speaker’s intonation (Reed, Chapter 6), listening for weak forms (Gay, Chapter 7) and making use of thought groups to boost comprehension and retention (McAndrews, Chapter 8).

Expanding from the metaphorical trees to the forest, in Chapter 9, Ryan recommends activities designed to help students participate more comfortably in conversations by strengthening their ability to predict turns and anticipate responses; in Chapter 10, Cole-French shares classroom activities targeting note-taking; and in Chapter 11, Ivone and Renandya advocate for extensive listening practice. We hope that the listening strategies and techniques that are addressed in the book bring a new understanding of listening challenges along with pedagogical tools to address them. We recommend that readers take the advice and suggestions from this volume and practice in class with your students.

References

Broersma, M., & Cutler, A. (2008). Phantom word activations in L2. System, 36, 22–34. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2007.11.003

Brown, S. (2011). Listening myths: Applying second language research to classroom teaching. The University of Michigan Press.

Cauldwell, R. (2014). Listening and pronunciation need separate models of speech. In J. Levis & S. McCrocklin (Eds.), Proceedings of the 5th pronunciation in second language learning and teaching conference (pp. 40–44). Iowa State University.

Cauldwell, R. (2018). A syllabus for listening: Decoding. Speech in Action.

Celce-Murcia, M., Brinton, D. M., & Goodwin, J. M. (2010). Teaching pronunciation: A course book and reference guide. Cambridge University Press.

Elkhafaifi, H. (2005). Listening comprehension and anxiety in the Arabic language classroom. The Modern Language Journal, 89, 206–220. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-4781.2005.00275.x

Emerick, M. R. (2019). Explicit teaching and authenticity in L2 listening instruction: University language teachers’ beliefs. System, 80, 107–119. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2018.11.004

Field, J. (2003). Promoting perception: Lexical segmentation in L2 listening. ELT Journal, 57, 325–334. https://doi.org/10.1093/elt/57.4.325

Field, J. (2008a). Listening in the language classroom. Cambridge University Press.

Field, J. (2008b). Revising segmentation hypothesis in first and second language listening. System, 36, 35–51. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2007.10.003

Gilbert, J. B. (2008). Teaching pronunciation Using the prosody pyramid. Cambridge University Press.

Goh, C. C. M. (2019). Metacognition in listening. In J. I. Liontas (Ed.), The TESOL encyclopedia of English language teaching. Wiley Blackwell.

Goh, C. C. M., & Wallace, M. (2019). Lexical segmentation in listening. In J. I. Liontas (Ed.), The TESOL encyclopedia of English language teaching. Wiley Blackwell.

Graham, S., Santos, D., & Francis-Brophy, E. (2014). Teacher beliefs about listening in a foreign language. Teaching and Teacher Education, 50, 107–119. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2014.01.007

Harley, B. (2000). Listening strategies in ESL: Do age and L1 make a difference? TESOL Quarterly, 34(4), 769–776. https://doi.org/10.2307/3587790

Henrichsen, L. E. (1983). Teacher preparation needs in TESOL: The results of an international survey. RELC Journal, 14(1), 18–44. https://doi.org/10.1177/003368828301400102

McGrath, I. (2013). Teaching materials and the roles of EFL/ESL teachers: Practice and theory. Bloomsbury.

Mendelsohn, D. (2002). The lecture buddy project: An experiment in EAP listening comprehension. TESL Canada Journal / Revue TESL du Canada, 20(1), 64–73. https://doi.org/10.18806/tesl.v20i1.939

Mills, N., Pajares, C., & Herron, C. (2006). A re-evaluation of the role of anxiety: Self-efficacy, anxiety and their relation to reading and listening proficiency. Foreign Language Annals, 39, 276–295. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1944-9720.2006.tb02266.x

Nation, I. S. P., & Newton, J. (2009). Teaching ESL / EFL listening and speaking. Routledge.

Nguyen, H., & Abbott, M. L. (2016). Promoting process-oriented listening instruction in the ESL classroom. TESL Canada Journal / Revue TESL du Canada, 34(11), 72–86. https://doi.org/1018806/tesl.v34i1.1254

Nunan, D. (1998). Approaches to teaching listening in the language classroom. In Proceedings of the 1997 Korea TESOL Conference (pp. 1–10). Korea Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages. https://koreatesol.org/sites/default/files/pdf_publications/KOTESOL-Proceeds1997web.pdf

Renandya, W. A., &