5 A diagnostic approach to L2 listening
5.4 A diagnostic approach to decoding
Problems of decoding are in many ways familiar territory to a teacher with experience of using the comprehension approach. It is common practice to focus on parts of the recording that the learners have incor-rectly matched to words or failed to recognise. The teacher might replay the problematic section, explain it and ask the class if they now under-stand it better.
The drawback with this approach is that it draws attention to a single instance of the problem. But the feature in question might well take a dif-ferent form the next time the learner hears it. The CA assists the listener in decoding the present listening passage; but that does not guarantee that the learning experience will transfer to other encounters.
If we are to handle decoding problems diagnostically, we need some broad means of classifying error types that enables us to provide reme-dial practice that is not just linked to one example. The best procedure is for teachers to build up their own field notes of frequent breakdowns of understanding that have been observed. They might group them accord-ing to the level of language where the error occurred – i.e. by whether the problem related to the recognition of sounds, syllables, words, gram-matical patterns or features of intonation.
The ‘levels of language’ approach provides a useful general frame-work, but unfortunately the levels are not as watertight as they might seem at first glance. Suppose, for example, that a learner has difficulty
with one of the sounds of the language. What originates as a wrong phoneme might be taken as a word-level error if it leads to the learner not recognising the whole word.
Even when the level of breakdown is correctly identified, there may be more than one reason for it. For example, when a problem of under-standing is caused by a single word, teachers tend to assume that the listener does not know the word, and teach it as a new item of vocabu-lary. However, a listening problem at word level has at least six possible causes:
the learner does not know the word;
the learner knows the written form of the word but has not encountered the spoken form;
the learner confused the word with a phonologically similar one;
the learner knows the spoken form of the word but does not recognise it in connected speech generally or in this utterance in particular;
the learner recognised the spoken form of the word but failed to match it to any meaning;
the learner recognised the spoken form of the word but matched it to the wrong meaning.
What this illustrates is that, in diagnosing problems of word recognition, the instructor needs to be very persistent in establishing precisely where and how the breakdown of understanding occurred.
A similar situation exists with errors that appear to involve grammar.
Some may not relate to grammatical knowledge at all but may be simple errors of perception. Suppose that a learner hears the sentence I’ve lived in Italy for ten years and fails to understand that it implies that the speaker still lives in Italy. The easy assumption is that the learner does not understand this ‘durational’ use of the Present Perfect (a state that continues through and beyond the present moment). In this case, an explanation may be needed. But it might simply be that she has not heard the sound /v/ (in connected speech, often reduced to little more than a token narrowing of the gap between upper teeth and lower lip). In this case, the teacher would take a very different course. It would make sense to expose the learner to a set of similar examples so as to develop her ability to discriminate between I’ve lived and I lived.
The examples just given quite neatly illustrate the difference between two types of problem:
a text problem of decoding, relating to knowledge of the language and dealt with by providing information;
a process problem of decoding, relating to a gap in the learner’s listen-ing competence.
My impression as a frequent observer of listening classes is that teachers tend to fall back on the former as a default assumption; whereas what learners very often need is not an explanation but some kind of practice in a specific aspect of L2 listening that is causing them difficulty.
How do we provide practice once a process problem has been identi-fied? The answer is to expose learners to spoken material that contains multiple examples of the feature they have trouble with. There is abso-lutely no reason why a remedial exercise of this kind should involve a lengthy listening passage; instead, it might take the form of a micro-listening task lasting as little as five or ten minutes. It might involve a set of (say) ten sentences, all of them exemplifying the problem in question.
The best resource at the teacher’s disposal is dictation. By this, I mean not the notorious dict´ee that once featured in secondary-school language teaching, where short sections of a text (usually literary) were read aloud twice, with pauses for learners to write and instructions on punctuation.
Instead, the teacher reads aloud naturalistic spoken sentences as infor-mally as possible, or plays sentences which have been excised from a naturalistic or authentic recording. Learners are asked to write down what they hear or to respond to it in some other way that demonstrates understanding. Spelling is not an issue: the important thing is for learners to demonstrate their ability to recognise words. The sentences employed should share a single listening problem that has been diagnosed in a preceding comprehension session. For example, if learners have prob-lems in identifying the weak forms of function words like of or for, they might be asked to transcribe a series of sentences containing such forms.
Models of the many types of exercise that can be used appear in later chapters. Let us for the moment consider a single example based on a problem of grammar similar to the one described above. Assume a teacher discovers during a listening comprehension session that learners have problems in handling indirect speech. This is not uncommon in L2 listening because of changes in the time frame to which the quoted speaker refers (the speaker says ‘I’m waiting’ but is quoted in the form He said he was waiting). In addition, in English, the single phoneme /d/
can represent both had (he said he’d gone) and would (he said he’d go).
So we need to train learners to draw their time reference from the form of the main verb (gone vs go) rather than expecting a reliable clue in the auxiliary verb ’d.
A solution is for the teacher to devise a set of short sentences to be read aloud along the lines of those in Table 5.1. The pairs of items are arranged in a rough order of perceptual difficulty. Learners might then be asked to listen to the sentences and to transcribe what they
Table 5.1 Exercise to practise processing of indirect speech a) He said he’d write to John.
b) He said he’d written to John.
c) She said she’d found the keys.
d) She said she’d find the keys.
e) He said he’d meet them.
f) He said they’d be angry.
g) They said they’d repair the car.
h) They said they’d repaired the car.
i) She said she’d phone Peter.
j) She said she’d phoned Peter.
(Field, 1983: 82)
hear. Alternatively, a rather more sophisticated approach might not involve transcription at all. Instead, the teacher could give the following rubric:
You will hear some sentences which report what somebody said. When the person was talking about something in the future, write F. When the person was talking about something in the past, write P. For example, if you hear: He said he’d wait, you write F. If you hear: He said he’d waited, you write P.
This then becomes purely a listening exercise, in which the learner has to form a direct link between recognising a syntactic pattern and the meaning that the pattern carries.
The important point to note about these types of remedial dicta-tion exercise, whether they involve transcripdicta-tion or some other type of response, is that they are small-scale. They enable the teacher to focus, over a short period of only five minutes or so, upon a specific listening problem that has been identified. That problem might often be one of perception or it might, as here, relate to the interpretation of what has been perceived.
If, over the years, the teacher has developed a portfolio of pre-prepared exercises to deal with the most common decoding problems, then it makes sense to use them during the post-listening phase in order to give immediate remedial practice when necessary. But very often the teacher may need to prepare new exercises – in which case, notes of learners’
difficulties can be taken during a listening lesson with a view to dealing with them later. Short sessions of intensive listening practice can then
be designed, which provide useful five-minute ‘fillers’ at the end of the teaching day.