Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

Listening-based methods of teaching
So far listening has been taken as a process of decoding speech – working out the
‘message’ from the sentence you hear, just as a spy decodes a secret message by
using a code he or she already knows. However, recent discussions of teaching
methodology have focused on listening as a way of learning rather than as a way
of processing language. Logically, L2 learners cannot learn a language if they
never hear it; the sounds, the words, the structures, have to come from some-
where. This process can be called codebreaking – listening means working out the
language code from the ‘message’, just as a cryptographer works out an unknown
code from an intercepted message. Decoding speech has the aim of discovering
the message using processes that are already known. Codebreaking speech has the
aim of discovering the processes themselves from a message.
One of the first to interpret listening as codebreaking was James Asher’s total
physical response method (TPR) (Asher, 1986), which claimed that listening to
commands and carrying them out was an effective way of learning a second lan-
guage. A specimen TPR exercise consists of the teacher getting the students to
respond to the following (Seely and Romijn, 1995):
1 You get a present from a friend.
2 Look it over.
3 Feel it.
4 Shake it and listen to it …
… and so on. The students follow the directions given by the teacher. This can
now be done through an interactive CD-ROM called Live Action English (Romijn
and Seely, 2000).
TPR came out of psychological theories of language learning and was based on
extensive research. Its unique twist on listening is the emphasis on learning
Listening processes 131

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through physical actions. As Asher puts it, ‘In a sense, language is orchestrated to
a choreography of the human body.’ TPR gradually leads in to student production
of language. According to Seely and Romijn (1995), TPR relies on four main 
exercises: