5 A diagnostic approach to L2 listening
6.2 A sub-skills approach
6.2.1 Skill training
An alternative approach draws upon a procedure that is standard in many kinds of skill training. It examines the final goal that one wants a trainee to achieve (i.e. expert use of the skill) and attempts to divide that target behaviour into a number of smaller actions that contribute to it.
It then provides practice in each of the actions in turn, before the trainee goes on to combine them. Thus, in training somebody to drive a car, one might demonstrate and practise pedal control, gear changes and mirror routines, before combining them into more dedicated routines that relate to starting off, turning corners, reversing, etc. In guiding a karate novice, the trainer demonstrates each of the movements independently and asks the learner to copy them, before linking them into a larger sequence of gradually increasing fluency.
This is sometimes represented as a move from what is called declarative knowledge (information stored in the mind) to procedural knowledge (the ability to perform a sequence of actions, with minimal attention given to setting up the sequence). In point of fact, in the case of many skills it does not begin with novices thinking intellectually about the skill but with them imitating and practising a single part of the skill, which later becomes absorbed into a larger operation.
Applying a similar principle to listening, some commentators have chosen to regard it not as a monolithic skill but as a complex of many contributory abilities or sub-skills. They suggest that a language learner wishing to develop listening competence needs to acquire a command of as many of these abilities as possible. Following the classic skill-training model, the trainer focuses on one sub-skill at a time: enabling the learner to build up local routines first, before using the sub-skills in conjunction
with each other. An approach of this kind to L2 listening makes three important assumptions: that sub-skills can be identified; that they are capable of being practised independently; and that, once practised, they can be recombined in a way that enhances overall performance in the target skill.
The potential value to the instructor is obvious. By providing practice in individual components of the skill, the approach takes an important step towards teaching L2 listening rather than simply providing oppor-tunities for practice. It thus addresses the principal criticism levelled against our current methodology: that it provides a variety of recorded material but does nothing to ensure progress over time in the way in which learners process the material.
The skill-training solution also goes some way to resolving a further weakness of the comprehension approach that has so far been little commented on. The CA makes no real provision for development. It marks progress in listening competence purely in terms of the ability to understand recordings that gradually become more and more complex in their language and content. The assumption is that simple exposure to the language will enable the learner to advance in this way.
By contrast, identifying a set of discrete abilities that the novice listener needs to acquire enables an instructor to devise a programme that is structured and progressive. Admittedly, it is difficult to grade sub-skills in relation to each other, to the demands they make or to their importance to the learner. But using them as the basis for a point-by-point syllabus introduces an element of development into listening training. It even allows the teacher to set targeted progress tests to establish how well learners have mastered the particular operations that featured in their most recent period of instruction.
What the approach demands of a programme designer is to find a systematic way of dividing listening into smaller components, each of them capable of being practised on its own. This requires some thought: as we shall see in due course, it is not quite as easy as it might seem.
6.2.2 A precedent in L2 reading
The idea of teaching listening as a set of sub-skills finds a strong prece-dent in current approaches to the teaching of second language reading.
Reading methodology has moved on from a tradition based solely upon asking and answering comprehension questions in a way that listen-ing has not. For some 25 years, and thanks to the influential work of, among others, Franc¸oise Grellet (1981) and Christine Nuttall (1996) in the UK, and Carr and Levy (1990) in the USA, reading in the second
language classroom has been treated as comprising a set of distinct sub-components, which can be practised separately and intensively. Reading materials commonly feature tasks which provide experience in skim-ming, scanning, making anaphoric connections, inferring word meaning from context and so on. It is generally recognised that some of these sub-skills are already employed by the learner in first language contexts;
but the goal is to ensure their transfer to the novel circumstances of read-ing in a second language. The L2 reader is said to need assistance in (a) acquiring a new set of skills that are appropriate to the target language and (b) applying existing skills to new conditions.
It is evident that a number of the sub-skills which feature in L2 reading materials (e.g. developing expectations, recognising words, using word order, understanding pronoun reference, recognising patterns of argu-ment) have equivalents in the demands imposed by L2 listening. Given this and given the historic links between the way in which the two skills are practised, it seems surprising that teachers and materials writers have been so slow to extend the skills approach to the teaching of listening.1 One reason may perhaps be the difference of form. Spoken material lacks the tangibility of written; so there is a perception that it is more difficult to design listening exercises along sub-skills lines.
6.2.3 Identifying sub-skills
Though instructors have been slow to accept sub-skills into listening methodology, commentators have argued for some while (see, e.g., Field, 1998) that this kind of componential approach offers the best prospect of teaching listening in a structured way rather than relying entirely upon comprehension work. Some have attempted to list the components that make up listening expertise. Their aim has been to provide a framework for teaching, even if not necessarily a programme for instructors to fol-low. The reader will find examples in Munby, 1978: 123–31; Richards, 1983: 228–30; Lund, 1990; Rost, 1992: 152–3; Weir, 1993: 98; and Rost, 1994: 142–4.
One of the most detailed of these lists is also one of the earliest.
Richards (1983) produced two sets of sub-skills, one relating to conver-sational listening and one to academic listening, but with the proviso that they should be treated as examples and not as a definitive list. The first group, which appears in Table 6.1, has been widely quoted. It consists
1 It may be significant that, in discussing language skills training, writers tend to refer to reading skills but to listening comprehension.
Table 6.1 Sub-skills of general listening
1. ability to retain chunks of language of different lengths for short periods
2. ability to discriminate between the distinctive sounds of the target language
3. ability to recognise the stress patterns of words 4. ability to recognise the rhythmic structure of English 5. ability to recognise the functions of stress and intonation to
signal the information structure of utterances
6. ability to identify words in stressed and unstressed situations 7. ability to recognise reduced forms of words
8. ability to distinguish word boundaries
9. ability to recognise typical word-order patterns in the target language
10. ability to recognise vocabulary use in core conversational topics
11. ability to detect key words (i.e. those which identify topics and propositions)
12. ability to guess the meaning of words from the contexts in which they appear
13. ability to recognise grammatical word classes
14. ability to recognise major syntactic patterns and devices 15. ability to recognise cohesive devices in spoken discourse 16. ability to recognise elliptical forms of grammatical units and
sentences
17. ability to detect sentence constituents
18. ability to distinguish between major and minor constituents 19. ability to detect meaning expressed in different grammatical
forms / sentence types
20. ability to recognise the communicative function of utterances, according to situations, participants, goals
21. ability to reconstruct or infer situations, goals, participants, procedures
22. ability to use real-world knowledge and experience to work out purpose, goals, settings, procedures
23. ability to predict outcomes from events described 24. ability to infer links and connections between events
(cont.)
Table 6.1 (cont.)
25. ability to detect causes and effects from events
26. ability to distinguish between literal and applied meanings 27. ability to identify and reconstruct topics and coherent
structure from ongoing discourse involving two or more speakers
28. ability to recognise coherence in discourse, and detect such relations as main idea, supporting idea, given information, new information, generalisation, exemplification
29. ability to process speech at different rates
30. ability to process speech containing pauses, errors, corrections
31. ability to make use of facial, paralinguistic and other clues to work out meaning
32. ability to adjust listening strategies to different kinds of listener purposes or goals
33. ability to signal comprehension or lack of comprehension, verbally and non-verbally
(Richards, 1983)
of 33 items covering a range of levels of processing (phoneme, word, syntax, etc.). The list has two entries (at 32 and 33) which might be described in the present book as strategies rather than skills (see Chapter 15). But, as we shall see, Richards’ suggestions conform quite closely to what we have learnt over the past 25 years about the nature of skilled lis-tening. The only entry which might no longer be categorised as amenable to training is the first one. Our current state of knowledge suggests that the capacity of an individual’s phonological working memory is not easy to extend.
Some commentators have expressed reservations about the prospect of basing listening programmes upon lists like these. Rost (1992: 150–1) is concerned that it might lead to fragmentation, with instructors spending too much time practising individual sub-skills. It would certainly be pointless to move from one type of product-led approach, based on answers to questions, to another, based on a checklist of isolated targets for practice.
It is here that the conventional comprehension approach has a part to play. Listening instructors adopting a sub-skills approach need to support focused small-scale practice with general comprehension work
involving longer recordings and featuring more global demands. By com-bining the two, the teacher helps the learner to integrate newly acquired behaviour into a larger set of routines.2The comprehension work itself might perhaps be made more focused than it usually is. In designing it, the instructor can include items which elicit the most recently practised sub-skills.