An Introduction to Applied Linguistics

partial because either only part of the discourse has been heard so far, or only 
part has been comprehended. Inferencing is more subtle and in a sense operates 
at a higher level: ‘everything is comprehensible, but there is meaning to the 
discourse that exceeds the understanding of each of the utterances or part of it. 
Adding these together, only by inferencing will the whole be comprehended’ 

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Listening
(Mendelsohn, 1994: 105). Inferencing can be thought of as ‘listening between 
the lines’.
Listening Skills 
The convention is to refer to ‘the four language skills’, but it is clear that each 
of these comprises a large number of sub-skills, whose value and relevance vary 
from one situation to another. Richards (1983) was one of the first to categorize 
the sub-skills required in different listening situations; he came up with 33 micro-
skills for conversational listening (CL) and a further 18 for academic listening to 
lectures (AL). His analysis raises a number of interesting questions, of which we 
will briefly mention two. 
The first question is: What is the relationship between conversational and 
academic micro-skills? Richards implied it was incremental: that all conversational 
listening micro-skills are required for academic listening, but that certain more 
specialized academic listening micro-skills (such as ‘coping with different styles 
of lecturing’) are required only in the lecture hall – making a possible academic 
listening total of 51 micro-skills. On the other hand, some micro-skills listed in 
both sets, such as ‘identifying and reconstructing topics’ (CL) and ‘identifying 
the lecture topic and following its development’ (AL), appear to rely on the same 
comprehension processes. 
Secondly, there is the question of the internal ordering of the micro-skills. 
Richards used the term ‘taxonomies’ of listening skill, which implied that the 
relationship within each set was hierarchical. That leads us to ask whether the 
successful use of some micro-skills depends on prior success in using others. 
Presumably it does; for example, one can hardly deduce the meaning of a 
word (conversational listening micro-skill 12) until you have distinguished its 
boundaries, for example, recognized its phonological form from the rest of the 
speech stream (conversational listening micro-skill 8). 
Richards’ analysis has been extremely influential in helping language 
teachers to distinguish and prioritize the components of different types of 
listening, and his article is still widely cited in discussion of materials design. 
His micro-skill taxonomies were later reshaped and developed by Rost (1990), 
who emphasized the importance of identifying ‘clusters’ of listening micro-
skills. As Rost pointed out, his proposal for clustered practice also reflected 
wider doubts as to whether learning a complex skill can be effectively helped 
by step-by-step practice of its components, and whether learners can re-
synthesize them in actual use. 
Rost’s clusters of micro-skills are shown in Table 11.1, which makes clear his key 
distinction between ‘enabling skills’ (those employed in order to perceive what 
the speaker is saying and to interpret what they intend to mean) and ‘enacting 
skills’ (those employed to respond appropriately to the message).
Rost’s (1990) division of listening into perception, interpretation, and response 
shows parallels with the information processing models we mentioned earlier: 
‘Perception, Parsing and Understanding’ (Anderson, 1985) and ‘Identify, Search, 
File and Use’ (Brown, 1995a). It helps us to distinguish between the levels of 
comprehension success and to pinpoint failure. In the Hands-on Activity at the 
end of this chapter we will be using Rost’s (1990) micro-skill clusters (see above) 
to help us categorize areas of success and failure in an individual L2 learner’s 
understanding of a listening text. 

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186 An Introduction to Applied Linguistics
ENABLING SKILLS 
Perception
1. Recognizing prominence within utterances, including
• Discriminating sounds in words, especially phonemic contrasts
• Discriminating strong and weak forms, phonetic change at word boundaries
• Identifying use of stress and pitch (information units, emphasis, etc.) 
Interpretation
2. Formulating content sense of an utterance, including
• Deducing the meaning of unfamiliar words
• Inferring implicit information
• Inferring links between propositions 
3. Formulating a conceptual framework linking utterances, including
• Recognizing discourse markers (clarifying, contrasting)
• Constructing a theme over a stretch of discourse
• Predicting content
• Identifying elements that help you to form an overall schema
• Maintaining and updating the context 
4. Interpreting (possible) speaker intentions, including
• Identifying an ‘interpersonal frame’ speaker-to-hearer
• Monitoring changes in prosody and establishing (in)consistencies
• Noting contradictions, inadequate information, ambiguities
• Differentiating between fact and opinion 
ENACTING SKILLS
5. Making an appropriate response (based on 1–4 above), including
• Selecting key points for the current task
• Transcoding information into written form (for example, notes)
• Identifying which points need clarification
• Integrating information with that from other sources
• Providing appropriate feedback to the speaker.
(adapted from Rost (1990: 152–3))
Table 11.1 Micro-skill clusters in listening comprehension
Listening Strategies 
Interest in strategy use and strategy instruction derives from research over 
the years into ways of facilitating language learning (Rubin, 1975; Wenden 
and Rubin, 1987; O’Malley and Chamot, 1990; Oxford, 1990; see also Chapter 
10, Focus on the Language Learner: Styles, Strategies, and Motivation). Chamot 
(1987: 71) provides a good basic definition of learning strategies: ‘techniques, 
approaches, or deliberate actions that students take in order to facilitate the 
learning and recall of both linguistic and content area information’. Research 
into strategy use has led to the development of a ‘strategy-based approach’ to 
teaching listening comprehension (Mendelsohn, 1994). As we stated in the 
opening section, people are usually not conscious of how they listen in their first 
language unless they encounter difficulty. So what L2 learners need to do when 
listening is to make conscious use of the strategies they unconsciously use in 
their first language. 
Learning strategies are usually divided into meta-cognitive, cognitive and social/
affective strategies – a tripartite classification developed by O’Malley, Chamot, 

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Listening
Stewner-Manzanares, Kupper and Russo (1985). The table above brings together 
the listening strategies that researchers have identified in L2 contexts.
Skilful listeners use these strategies in combination, varying their use according 
to the needs of the specific situation – a process that has been described as 
‘orchestration’ (Vandergrift 2003). Research into L2 listening strategy use has 
recently tended to focus on meta-cognitive strategies and the work done by 
Vandergrift, Goh, Mareschal and Tafaghodfari (2006) is of particular potential 
interest for the language teacher. This team developed, tested and validated a 
Meta-cognitive Awareness Listening Questionnaire (MALQ), which they trialled 
with L2 listeners in Canada, Singapore and the Netherlands. When the listeners’ 
self-report responses were correlated with their performances on listening tests, 
five factors were found to be associated with success in listening: ‘Problem-solving’ 
(guessing and monitoring those guesses); ‘Planning and Elaboration’ (preparing 
for listening and assessing success); avoiding ‘Mental Translation’; ‘Person 
Knowledge’ (confidence or anxiety, self-perception as a listener); and ‘Directed 
Attention’ (ways of concentrating on aspects of the task).
Cognitive
Meta-cognitive
Social/affective
Predicting / Inferencing
• from the text
• from the voice
• from the body language
• between discourse parts
Elaboration
• from personal experience
• from world knowledge
• from academic learning
• from imagination
Contextualization
Imagery
Summarization
• mental
• physical (notes)
Translation
Repetition
Transfer from other 
language(s)
Deduction
Fixation
• stopping to think about 
spelling
• stopping to think about 
meaning
• stopping to memorize
Planning
• advance organization
• self-management
Comprehension monitoring
• confirming comprehension
• identifying words not 
understood
Directed attention
• concentrating
• persevering despite 
problems
Selective attention
• listening for familiar words
• listening for the overall 
message
• noticing the information 
structure
• noticing repetition and 
reformulation
• listening to specific parts
Evaluation
• checking interpretation 
against predictions
• checking interpretation 
against knowledge
• checking interpretation 
against context
Questioning (two-way tasks)
• asking for clarification
• asking for repetition
• using comprehension 
check
Cooperation
• working with other 
learners
Anxiety reduction
• encouraging yourself
• comparing yourself with 
others
• focusing on success
Relaxation
• using physical techniques
• using visualization
(Based on Goh 2002; Vandergrift 2003; and Kondo and Yang 2004.)
Table 11.2. Listening strategies 

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188 An Introduction to Applied Linguistics
How do we Gain Insights into Listening? 
Settings 
Experiments
Experimental investigation has tended to concentrate on quantifiable aspects, 
such as the effects of prosody on speech recognition. From experiments we 
know that the characteristic patterning of speech in our L1 provides a metrical 
template that influences the way we process L2 speech. Speakers of French, for 
example, have been shown to rely on syllable patterns to segment the stream of 
spoken French, whereas speakers of English use stress patterns rather than syllable 
patterns to parse L1 speech (Cutler, 2001). Delabatie and Bradley (1995) found 
that maintaining these unconscious L1 metrical habits caused listeners problems 
up to relatively advanced levels of L2 proficiency. 
Experimental approaches are well-suited to assessing the effects of other 
quantitative features on L2 comprehension. In the case of speed of speaking, for 
example, the absolute rate of speaking seems to matter less than the position and 
frequency of pauses. However, since real-life listening occurs in a specific social 
and cognitive context, other approaches are necessary to study the processes of 
making sense of ‘meaning’, as opposed to recognizing form. 
Pedagogic tasks
As we mentioned earlier, the literature on L2 listening has tended to focus on 
pedagogic settings, such as the lecture theatre (Chaudron and Richards, 1986, 
Flowerdew, 1994; Vidal 2003; Carrell, Dunkel and Mollaun, 2004). Among the 
main findings have been the beneficial effects on L2 comprehension of content 
redundancy, pausing, macro-level signposting and visual support. Foreign 
language classroom studies that have explored listening within an interactive 
setting (Yule and Powers, 1994, Lynch, 1997) have emphasized the additional 
complexities for the listener of having, in Rost’s terms, to ‘enact’ a response, by 
contributing relevantly and coherently at an appropriate point in the discourse. 
Test performances
Researchers with access to candidates’ performances in listening in worldwide 
tests such as IELTS and TOEFL have been able to investigate listening skills on a 
very large scale. Tsui and Fullilove (1998) sampled 150,000 item performances by 
Chinese learners of English to investigate whether skill in bottom-up processing 
(rather than top-down) makes some listeners more successful than others. They 
compared performances on questions where the correct answer matched the 
likely content schema with items where the answer conflicted with the schema. 
Candidates who got the correct answer for non-matching schema items tended to 
be more skilled listeners; presumably, the less skilled could rely on guessing for the 
matching items, but not for non-matching ones. Bottom-up processing seemed 
therefore to be more important than top-down processing in discriminating 
between candidates’ listening performance. 
Ethnographic research
Although test-based studies have the advantage of scale, what they gain in 
terms of statistical robustness has to be weighed against what they may lose in 

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Listening
lifelikeness. Observation of actual listening behaviour – such as misunderstandings 
in conversation – can yield rich data for analysis. One context in which such 
misunderstandings are common is the daily life of immigrants or migrant 
workers, as shown by an extensive ethnographic study of immigrant listeners in 
five European countries (Bremer, Roberts, Vasseur, Simonot and Broeder, 1996). 
The study was based on real-life or naturalistic encounters with native speakers in 
a variety of gate-keeper roles, such as job interviewer and social security officer. 
In some cases, misunderstandings were found to have primarily linguistic causes, 
but in most cases the miscommunications the research team analysed were rooted 
in non-shared expectations of members of different cultures, rather than simply 
in gaps in linguistic knowledge. We will be analysing just such an intercultural 
misunderstanding in the second Hands-on Activity at the end of this chapter. 
Methods 
The fact that comprehension occurs largely unobserved means that it can be 
very difficult to establish the ‘process’ by which listeners have reached their 
interpretations, even if we have evidence of the ‘product’ (what they understood). 
However, for the listening researcher or language teacher it is vital to establish 
the source of listening problems: ‘Until the teacher is provided with some sort 
of method of investigating the student’s problems, the teacher is really not in 
a position of being able to help the student “do better”’ (Brown, 1986: 286). 
Investigations of the routes by which listeners achieve understanding have 
adopted three main methods: ‘observation’, ‘introspection’ and ‘retrospection’. 
Observation
Observation takes many forms, from informal noticing of real-life examples of 
misunderstandings (Bond and Garnes, 1980) to experiments designed to create 
ambiguities and referential conflicts (Brown, 1986). Numerous studies have 
investigated communication on map-based tasks (Brown et al., 1984; Brown, 1986; 
Yule and Powers, 1994). By adjusting the degree of difficulty built in to the tasks 
at specific ‘trouble spots’, the researcher can adjust the amount of negotiation 
required to resolve the problems. However, even in the most controlled of 
experiments the researcher cannot be certain of the cause of the listener’s doubts, 
or the current state of the listener’s mental model. 
Introspection
One way of supplementing the information available from observation is to use 
introspection (comments by the listener at the time of listening or immediately 
afterwards). This form of inquiry is also known as the ‘think-aloud protocol’. A