Teaching English as a Foreign Language, Second Edition

Training in listening
There is a clear parallel between the spoken and the written
language. On the one hand, listening and reading with
understanding are receptive (but not passive) decoding skills;
on the other, speaking and writing are productive, encoding
skills. But the parallel goes beyond this. The concept of
intensive reading (the close study and exploitation of a text for
its meaning and the language used) and extensive reading (the
more leisurely perusal of a longer text where the learning goes
on in a less direct, more unconscious way) is well established
and discussed in Chapter 7. There is a similarly valuable and
practical distinction to be made between extensive and
intensive listening. Indeed, listening is often harder than
reading, since it is not often taught and practised, nor is it
usually possible to go over again what one hears, whereas it is
simple to read and re-read a difficult page in a book.
Both extensive and intensive listening practice should be
part of the armoury of a language teacher. Their use will
differ in relation to the aim—for example, a French teacher
of English may feel that his students are not producing
satisfactorily the ‘th’ sounds in ‘this’ and ‘thin’, and
confusing them with /z/ and /s/, so he would perhaps, as a
first step towards imitation, then production of the sounds,
get them to listen carefully for the sounds in a given passage
(which he has chosen because of the high incidence of these
phonemes). There are various books available which provide
practice of this type, e.g. Combe Martin’s Exercising Spoken
English (Macmillan, 1970). Trim’s English Pronunciation
Illustrated gives similar practice in quite a different format,
as the extract from p. 60 shows (reproduced by permission):

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Listening and Speaking
67
Figure 5  Intensive listening practice (reproduced from Trim’s
English Pronunciation Illustrated by permission of Cambridge
University Press)

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Listening and Speaking
68
On the other hand, the teacher may be aware that his
students cannot understand ordinary colloquial English as
used by native-speakers. In this case, his aim would be rather
to create a more general familiarity not only with the
phonological characteristics of conversation (especially the
stress, rhythm and intonation patterns), but also with the
lexis and grammar typical of this style of discourse. He
would then set his class to listen to a passage of natural
English speech suitable to their level, e.g. D.Crystal and
D.Davy, Advanced Conversational English. At intermediate
level, V.J.Cook’s English Topics makes similar use of
recorded material. This particular book provides a direct
transcript of a spontaneous conversation recorded on tape
which should be played to the class. The pupils are asked to
listen and answer comprehension questions before they see
the written transcript. It is an interesting exercise to ask them
then to ‘edit’ this so that it represents a more normal written
representation of a dialogue. The book itself provides an
edited version of the same dialogue for the student to check
his own efforts against and for the teacher to read from if the
tape is not available. An extract from the unedited and edited
version of one passage is included below.
Unedited
Richard Parry: Yes, I suppose I suppose that is true. I mean
we I suppose it sounds very smug to say it
but we do tend to perhaps er see other
people rather along our own lines. And
perhaps they’re not. I don’t know I mean…
Vivian Cook:
I remember on one of the… Richard Parry:
…they’re fairly discriminating as a as a
collection of people.
Vivian Cook:
In one of the space shows a few years back
that I I happened to turn on and there was
this rocket zipping across the sky with sort
of smoke belching from all directions. I
thought ‘Good heavens! How did they get a
camera close up like that?’ And of course
because they’d they’d omitted to show

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Listening and Speaking
69
‘simulation’ at the bottom um er and it
wasn’t for five minutes that I sort of realised
you know that they hadn’t quite achieved
such miracles of communication by that
stage and um certainly the sort of ersatz um
reality is a is a danger.
Edited
Richard Parry: Yes, I suppose that’s true. I suppose we do
tend to see other people as ourselves. And
perhaps they’re different.
Vivian Cook:
I happened to turn on one of those space
programmes a few years ago and saw a
rocket zipping across the sky with smoke
pouring out of it. I thought ‘Good heavens!
How did they get a camera close up like
that?’ But of course they’d forgotten to
show the word ‘simulation’ at the bottom. I
didn’t realise for five minutes that they
hadn’t quite achieved such miracles of
communication yet. This kind of imitation
reality is a danger.