© University of Reading 2008 www.reading.ac.uk

Rethinking the teaching of listening: from a focus on product to a focus on processes

Suzanne Graham and Catherine Spiers, with thanks to Denise Santos

Background

• Listening widely recognised as fundamental to language learning (e.g. Vandergrift, 2007)

• Language learning for communication - during communication, as much as 55% of the time is spent listening (Emanuel Adams et al., 2008)

• By the time children reach age six, they have listened to their native language for at least 17,520 hours (Asher, 1982)

• Underpins learning of vocabulary and grammar, speaking, reading and writing

Problems?

• Yet in England seems to be neglected as a skill

• Learners find it one of the most difficult skills (Graham 2006) – and increasingly so?

• Listening is a ‘complex, active process of interpretation’ (Vandergrift, n.d.)

• Poorly developed listening strategies, even by Yr 12 (Graham, Santos, & Vanderplank, 2008 and 2011)

Question?

• What difficulties do learners experience in listening in a foreign language?

• Language sounds like an unbroken stream of speech – can’t spot where one word ends and another begins

• Can’t always recognise in spoken form many words that they would probably know if they saw them written down, or if they heard them pronounced on their own

• Can’t cope with unknown words

• Get the wrong end of the stick of what they hear, can only identify a few words

Reasons for these difficulties?

• Teaching and materials that focus on ‘doing’ listening activities; ‘testing’ listening, rather than ‘teaching’ listening

• So, what skills do we need to teach?

• Listen to the following and try to work out what the nonsense words mean. What did you do to help you understand? Furbustuous, lotticks, izzids, happaps, gabonmang

• Need to teach sounds and how they link with spelling and meaning, intonation patterns and ways of overcoming comprehension difficulties

The new National Curriculum

• Overall aim for both Key Stages: ‘understand and respond to spoken and written language from a variety of authentic sources’

• KS2:. ‘listen attentively to spoken language and show understanding by joining in and responding’

• ‘understand and communicate ideas […] , using their knowledge of phonology, grammatical structures and vocabulary’

• ‘explore the patterns and sounds of language through songs and rhymes and link the spelling, sound and meaning of words’

•

Key Stage 3

• ‘listen to a variety of forms of spoken language to obtain information and respond appropriately’

• ‘transcribe words and short sentences that they hear with increasing accuracy’

What strategies do effective listeners use?

Preparation strategies

Getting in the right frame of mind – concentration, calmness

Making predictionsThinking of words and phrases that might be heard, plus synonyms

Making predictionsThinking about the likelytopic and themes of the passage

Preparing to check out the evidence and verify predictions

Strategies used by effective listeners

Strategies to gain an overall sense of the passage

Self-questioning

Comparing early andlater parts of the passage

Looking at thelocal and globalcontext

Controllingmy backgroundknowledge

Bringing it all together

•Does my interpretation make sense?

•Does my interpretation fit the context?

•Does my interpretation fit in with what I know

already?

Evaluatingdecisions taken

Examples of strategies that can be taught

Effective prediction + verification – did I really hear what I thought I would hear?Inferencing / identifying real key words

(using all the clues) Segmentation / sound distinctions

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How could this work in practice?

• Sounds/segmentation – to recap, learners have:

• Difficulties in spotting where one word ends and another starts

• Difficulties in recognising words they probably know

• Possible causes:– Learners’ knowledge of the foreign language sounds is weak– They don’t know how words change when pronounced with

other words– They don’t know how the written and spoken forms of a word

may differ– They have difficulties in identifying word boundaries in speech

Possible activities:

• A song to focus on key sounds in KS2:

Song – Bonjour, ça va?•Task - What do you think this song is about? What French words do you recognise?•What could you do to help you listen more carefully?

•Listen again this time watching my actions.•Children then perform song with a partner , using good facial expressions.•Now hold up words for them to read.

Possible activities – see also handout on Blackboard!

Explicitly making them aware of key sound-spelling links, and giving them practice in differentiating between similar sounds:

Select a recording containing an example of the sound you have been practising. Ask learners to raise their hand when they hear the sound.

Encourage learners to ‘visualise’ the sound they are hearing, without looking at the written form, to try to see the sound representation (for example, in French, ‘-u’, ‘-ou’) in their mind’s eye as they hear it.

Possible activities

Use some of the ‘listen and repeat’ activities in textbooks. After learners have listened and repeated, do the same thing but showing them the transcript. Then ask them to look at similar but unknown words (containing the same sound) and to predict how they will be pronounced. They can do this in pairs. Take feedback from the class on what learners predicted.

Or, give them three possible spellings of a list of words that you read out. Get them to tick which is the correct spelling. Ask them to explain their choice

Possible activities

Explicitly pointing out to learners how certain sounds change in connected speech, and giving them practice in identifying known words within a speech stream

For example:

•Model ‘lone’ pronunciation of a group of words

•Then play an audio containing those words in a larger passage, or read it aloud; learners listen with transcripts and try to identify any changes that occur when the words are used in a sentence rather than on their own.

Possible activities!

Explicitly pointing out to learners clues that indicate where word boundaries are, and giving them practice in identifying these boundaries:

E.g. Ask learners to listen to simple sentences (or dialogues) and give them the audioscript with no spaces between words, asking them to mark the boundaries between the words. Can they identify sound clues (slight pauses, changes in intonation) that help them work this out? 

Possible activities

• Explicitly pointing out to learners features of intonation patterns that give clues to meaning, and giving them practice in using intonation in this way 

• Explicitly pointing out to learners how the intonation patterns of the language they are learning differs from their own

E.g. Record a short passage in the language, read by (1) a native speaker (2) an English speaker, using English intonation patterns.

Can they ‘trace’ the difference?

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Teaching comprehension strategies

Raising awareness;

feedback and discussion

Tick lists of strategies with the tasks/texts;

individualised feedback; teacher prompting

Modelling strategies

Removing the

scaffolding

Monitoring

• Awareness-raising: class given ‘nonsense’ passage to listen to on VLE – how did they work out words?

• Next lesson starter – discussion of strategies used and how they could be used in MFL listening

• Then apply some of these to listening activities used – teacher reminds learners, they keep log, evaluate effectiveness, teacher feedback

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How could this work in practice?

• E.g. at KS2, predicting what you might hear and other strategies:

• Example:Using the song ‘Je me présente’ from Chantez Plus Fort!

• What do you think the title means?

• What things might you be listening for?

• Listen.

• Discuss any French words they could pick out

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How could this work in practice?

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Listen again, using these pictures to help you.

Je m'appelle Mark et j'ai dix ans,J'habite à Leeds en Angleterre,Mon anniversaire est le cinq mai,J'aime le rouge et le violet. Moi, j'ai une soeur et j'ai un frère,J'ai un lapin et un cobaye,J'aime mon vélo,J'aime dessiner,Mais je n'aime pas du tout danser!

An example from KS3 - prediction and verification 

Conclusion

• Work on sounds and meaning important for laying foundations for language learning

• Continued across KS2 and KS3

• See also Listening section and videos on www.pdcinmfl.com