Creating pre- while- and post-listening activities

1.3 The nature of the listening process

Listening is assuming greater and greater importance in foreign language сclassrooms. There are several reasons for this growth in popularity. By emphasizing the role of comprehensible input, second language acquisition research has given a major boost to listening. As Rost 238 0521808294c21 CY011.cls December 5, 2001 11:12 Listening in Language Learning 239 (1994, pp. 141–142) points out, listening is vital in the language classroom because it provides input for the learner. Without understanding input at the right level, any learning simply cannot begin. Listening is thus fundamental to speaking.

Two views of listening have dominated language pedagogy since the early 1980s. These are the bottom-up processing view and the top-down interpretation view.
The bottom-up processing model assumes that listening is a process of decoding the sounds that one hears in a linear fashion, from the smallest eaningful units (phonemes) to complete texts. According to this view, phonemic units are decoded and linked together to form words, words are linked together to form phrases, phrases are linked together to form utterances, and utterances are linked together to form complete, meaningful texts. In other words, the process is a linear one, in which meaning itself is derived as the last step in the process. In their introduction to listening, Anderson and Lynch (1988) call this the listener as tape recorder view of listening because it assumes that the listener takes in and stores messages sequentially, in much the same way as a tape recorder – one sound, one word, one phrase, and one utterance at a time.
The alternative, top-down view suggests that the listener actively constructs (or, more accurately, reconstructs) the original meaning of the speaker using incoming sounds as clues. In this reconstruction process, the listener uses prior knowledge of the context and situation within which the listening takes place to make sense of what he or she hears. Context and situation include such things as knowledge of the topic at hand, the speaker or speakers, and their relationship to the situation, as well as to each other and prior events.
These days, it is generally recognized that both bottom-up and top-down strategies are necessary. In developing courses, materials, and lessons, it is important to teach not only bottom-up processing skills, such as the ability to discriminate between minimal pairs, but also to help learners use what they already know to understand what they hear. If teachers suspect that there are gaps in their learners knowledge, the listening itself can be preceded by schema-building activities to prepare learners for the listening task to come.
There are many different types of listening, which can be classified according to a number of variables, including purpose for listening, the role of the listener, and the type of text being listened to. These variables are mixed in many different configurations, each of which will require a particular strategy on the part of the listener.
Listening purpose is an important variable. Listening to a news broadcast to get a general idea of the news of the day involves different processes and strategies from listening to the same broadcast for specific information, such as the results of an important sporting event. Listening to a sequence of instructions for operating a new piece of computer software requires different listening skills and strategies from listening to a poem or a short story. In designing listening tasks, it is important to teach learners to adopt a flexible range of listening strategies. This can be done by holding the listening text constant (working, say, with a radio news broadcast reporting a series of international events) and getting learners to listen to the text several times – however, following different instructions each time. They might, in the first instance, be required to listen for gist, simply identifying the countries where the events have taken place. The second time they listen, they might be required to match the places with a list of events. Finally, they might be required to listen for detail, discriminating between specific aspects of the event, or perhaps comparing the radio broadcast with newspaper accounts of the same events and noting discrepancies or differences of emphasis.
Another way of characterizing listening is in terms of whether the listener is also required to take part in the interaction. This is known as reciprocal listening. When listening to a monologue, either live or through the media, the listening is, by definition, nonreciprocal. The listener (often to his or her frustration) has no opportunity of answering back, clarifying understanding, or checking that he or she has comprehended correctly. In the real world, it is 0521808294c21 CY011.cls December 5, 2001 11:12 240 David Nunan rare for the listener to be cast in the role of nonreciprocal eavesdropper on a conversation. However, in the listening classroom, this is the normal role.
There was a time when listening in language classes was perceived chiefly as a means of presenting new grammar. Dialogues on tape provided examples of structures to be learned, and this was the only type of listening practice most learners received. Ironically, much effort was spent on training learners to express themselves orally. Sight was lost of the fact that one is (to say the least) rather handicapped in conversation unless one can follow what
is being said, as well as speak. From the late 1960s, practitioners recognized the importance of listening and began to set aside time for practicing the skill. A relatively standard format for the listening lesson developed at this time:
Pre-listening
Pre-teaching of all important new vocabulary in the passage
Listening
Extensive listening (followed by general questions establishing context)
Intensive listening (followed by detailed comprehension questions)
Post-listening
Analysis of the language in the text (Why did the speaker use the present perfect?)
Listen and repeat: teacher pauses the tape, learners repeat words
Pre-listening critical words.
Pre-teaching of vocabulary has now largely been discontinued. In real life, learners cannot expect unknown words to be explained in advance; instead, they have to learn to cope with situations where part of what is heard will not be familiar. Granted, it may be necessary for the teacher to present three or four critical words at the beginning of the listening lesson – but critical implies absolutely indispensable key words without which any understanding of the text would be impossible.
Pre-listening activities Some kind of pre-listening activity is now usual, involving brainstorming vocabulary, reviewing areas of grammar, or discussing the topic of the listening text. This phase of the lesson usually lasts longer than it should. A long pre-listening session shortens the time available for listening. It can also be counterproductive. Extended discussion of the topic can result in much of the content of the listening passage being anticipated. Revising language points in advance encourages learners to focus on examples of these particular items when listening – sometimes at the expense of global meaning.
One should set two simple aims for the pre-listening period:
1. to provide sufficient context to match what would be available in real life
2. to create motivation (perhaps by asking learners to speculate on what they will hear)
Listening the intensive/extensive distinction.
Most practitioners have retained the extensive/intensive distinction. On a similar principle, international examinations usually specify that the recording is to be played twice. Some theorists argue that this is unnatural because in real life one gets only one hearing. But the whole situation of listening to a cassette in a language classroom is, after all, artificial. Furthermore, listening to a strange voice, especially one speaking in a foreign language, demands a process of normalisation of adjusting to the pitch, speed, and quality of the voice. An initial period of extensive listening allows for this.
While-listening activities
While-listening activities vary depending on what learner’s skill or ability the teacher would like to practice.

When students are required to listen for gist, they are asked some basic questions What? Who? Why?

When they listen for details, they practice selective listening: an ability to ignore most of what we hear and focus only on what is relevant. Among such type of activities I want to point out writing down some specific information (dates, numbers, etc.) and spotting the difference (learners look at a picture and listen to its description and spot any differences). Another activity I like is listening to directions and tracing the route on the map. Or students can complete a diagram or drawing based on what they hear.

An important and useful skill to practice while listening is inferring, a thinking skill in which we make deductions by going beyond what is actually stated. For this purpose the teacher can pause the recording from time to time and asks students what they think will come next and why. It can be quite a distracting activity though.

Post-listening
We no longer spend time examining the grammar of the listening text; that reflected a typically structura list view of listening as a means of reinforcing recently learned material. However, it remains worthwhile to pick out any functional language and draw learners attention to it. (Susan threatened John. Do you remember the words she used?). Listening texts often provide excellent examples of functions such as apologising, inviting, refusing, suggesting, and so on. The listen-and-repeat phase has been dropped as well – on the argument that it is tantamount to parroting. This is not entirely fair: In fact, it tested the ability of learners to achieve lexical segmentation – to identify individual words within the stream of sound. But one can understand that it does not accord well with current communicative thinking. As part of post-listening, one can ask learners to infer the meaning of new words from the contexts in which they appear – just as they do in reading. The procedure is to write the target words on the board, replay the sentences containing them, and ask learners to work out their meanings. Some teachers are deterred from employing this vocabulary-inferring exercise by the difficulty of finding the right places on the cassette. A simple solution is to copy the sentences to be used onto a second cassette.