Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

128

---

The teaching of listening
How does this view of listening compare with that in teaching guides such as Mary
Underwood’s Teaching Listening (1989)? She recognizes three stages of teaching:
●
pre-listening, where the students activate their vocabulary and their background
knowledge;
●
while-listening, where ‘they develop the skill of eliciting messages’;
●
post-listening, which consists of extensions and developments of the listening
task.
Some of the elements are similar. It is rightly considered important to get the stu-
dents’ background scripts working and the appropriate vocabulary active in their
minds. What seems overlooked is parsing. Listeners do need to know the structure
of the sentence in some way. Teaching has mostly ignored the process of syntac-
tic parsing, perhaps because of its unwelcome overtones of grammar. But, as with
reading, some attempt could be made to train both top-down and bottom-up
parsing skills.
One development has been task-based teaching of listening. The students carry out
a task in which they have to listen for information in a short piece of discourse and
then have to fill in a diagram, check a route on a map or correct mistakes in a text.
The COBUILD English Course 1 (Willis and Willis, 1988), for example, asks the stu-
dents to listen to tapes of people speaking spontaneously and to work out informa-
tion from them. Lesson 9 has a recording of Chris telling Philip how to get to his
house in Birmingham. The students listen for factual information, such as which
buses could be taken; they make a rough map of the route, and they check its accu-
racy against an A–Z map of Birmingham.
One teaching motivation is the practical necessity of checking that comprehen-
sion is taking place. Unfortunately, in normal language use, there is rarely any visi-
ble feedback when someone has comprehended something. A visible sign of
comprehension is useful to the teacher to see if the student has understood. This
check can range from a straightforward question to an action based on what has
happened. If you shout ‘Fire’ and nobody moves, you assume they have not under-
stood. Much teaching of listening comprehension has made the student show some
sign of having comprehended, whether through answering questions, carrying out
tasks, or in some other way.
In task-based listening activities, information is being transferred for a commu-
nicative purpose. Task-based listening stresses the transfer of information rather
than the social side of language teaching. In the COBUILD example, the student is
practising something that resembles real-world communication. The information
that is being transferred in such activities, however, is usually about trivial topics
or is irrelevant to the students’ lives. The factual information the students learn in
the COBUILD exercise is how to get around in Birmingham, somewhere only a few
of them are ever likely to go. Often such exercises deal with imaginary towns, or
even treasure islands. Task-based exercises often neglect the educational value of
the content that can be used in language teaching, as discussed in Chapter 13,
although much psychological research shows that, the more important the infor-
mation is to the listener, the more likely it is to be retained. Box 7.4 gives an exam-
ple of a teaching exercise that solves this problem by choosing a topic of
‘manufacturing systems’ appropriate to ESP students, and making the students
employ an integrated range of skills and strategies to achieve the point of the task.
Listening processes 129

---

Many listening techniques do not so much teach listening as decorate the lis-
tening process with a few frills. They suggest that conscious attention to informa-
tion will improve all the other aspects of listening – hardly justified by the
research described here. If word access, parsing and memory processes are
improved by these activities, this is an accidental by-product. Perhaps listening
cannot be trained directly and the best the teacher can do is devise amusing activ-
ities during which the natural listening processes can be automatically activated.
Another approach to listening, pioneered by Mary Underwood in the 1970s,
relies on authentic tapes of people talking. After some introductory focusing activ-
ities, students were played the tape and then did follow-on comprehension activ-
ities. For instance, in The Listening File (Harmer and Ellsworth, 1989), a unit on
‘The Historic MP, Diane Abbott’ first makes the students think about the House of
Commons and the problems that an MP might face. Then they listen to the tape
and check whether their initial guesses were right; they listen again and answer a
series of detailed factual questions; they go on to follow-up activities in discussion
and writing – literally a textbook example of Mary Underwood’s three phases.
In my own English Topics (1975), I used recordings of English people carrying
out the same tasks or having the same kinds of conversation as the students. For
example, a unit on ‘Buying a House’ had an authentic recording of someone
describing how complicated they had found the whole process. Students listened
to it as often as they liked and then their comprehension was checked by asking
them to agree or disagree with statements such as ‘He paid for the house immedi-
ately’. This led to discussion points and a transcript of the speech that the stu-
dents could look at. The checking element was then kept as minimal as possible
so that it did not add difficulties to the actual comprehension. Students were
using top-down listening as the starting point for their own discussion and opin-
ions. The transcript was available not only for the students’ benefit, but also for
the teacher’s.
Clearly, authentic speech tries to encourage top-down listening by getting the
students to visualize an overall context for the speech before they hear it; neverthe-
less, they are also doing some bottom-up processing on their second listening in
that they have to deal with specific pieces of information. One snag is that such
teaching edges towards testing memory rather than listening itself; if the students
have to remember the content for any period longer than a handful of seconds,
they are being tested on what they can remember, not on what they actually
understood. While this may be a very valuable skill, it is not characteristic of ordi-
nary listening. I once tried out the teaching materials I was using for the
Listening and reading processes