3 Listening and the learner
A: The week after next, if possible
4.6 Interactive listening
We now consider how the range of listening types might be expanded by providing classroom activities that promote interactive listening.
Interactive listening will be discussed as a general concept, but we should not lose sight of the fact that, in real-life contexts, the degree of interac-tion varies considerably from one listening encounter to another.
Let us assume that the listener is adequately equipped to participate and feels a pressure to do so. In this case, a two-way exchange entails a very different listening process from a non-participatory one. It is in many ways a more threatening and more challenging experience for the L2 listener than listening to a CD recording. It is certainly not an easier option – though it evidently needs to be practised from the earliest stages of learning a second language.
Consider the differences in the listening process when participation is involved:2
The input is often very short, making a single point.
The input may be oriented towards the listener or closely connected to the listener’s own last utterance.
The listener is under time pressure to extract at least the gist of what is being said. The shortness of the turns does not allow many opportuni-ties for the listener to store alternative meanings in cases of uncertainty.
2 This expands considerably upon the account given by Ur (1984: Chap. 1). She singles out three features as chiefly characterising what she terms ‘real-life listening’:
namely, access to environmental cues, input in the form of short chunks and the need for reciprocity and response from the listener.
The listener cannot wait until such time as the speaker’s intentions become transparent or the speaker repeats or rephrases a point.
The listener has little time to monitor her own understanding. But, more positively, the listener can have recourse to a repair strategy if she feels that understanding has broken down. This might consist of a formula such as Sorry? or an appeal for the speaker to repeat or to rephrase.
The listener has to listen not simply for meaning but also for signals indicating that the turn has shifted and that an immediate response is required.
The listener has to interact with the speaker by shaping her responses to the way in which the speaker’s last turn was expressed. In L1 contexts, it often happens that the listener accommodates to the speaker by echoing the speaker’s words or grammatical patterns. In other words, the language processed by the listener-as-receiver plays an important part in the way in which the listener-as-respondent constructs her next utterance.
Four characteristics emerge from the outline above: the listener is under time pressure; the listener needs to make links between short turns; the listener needs to pay greater heed to the speaker’s form of words; and the listener has the possibility of seeking clarification. Within the conventions of the comprehension approach, there is little scope for practising the kind of processing that is required. Teachers need to consider alternative exercise types, which can take a number of forms.
Some suggestions follow, which might be applied to either scripted or authentic materials.
Modelling. Dialogue material for non-participatory listening provides the teacher with useful models of conversation structure, especially where the recordings are authentic. After checking understanding in the traditional way, the teacher might go on to draw attention to some of the following, with interactive situations in mind:
how changes of turn are signalled;
the links between one turn and another; how changes of topic are marked;
any examples of repair strategies;
any examples of back-channelling where the listener signals that she has understood and is still listening;
any examples of accommodation, where the listener echoes the vocabulary or grammar of the speaker;
any examples of pauses in the conversation where the listener can gain processing time.
Paused practice. Instead of presenting a listening dialogue for overall comprehension, the teacher pauses the recording after each turn of the first speaker and asks learners to anticipate the response of the second. The technique is especially apt where the dialogue follows a consistent pattern of ‘question–answer’ or ‘initiate–respond’. A gentler version of the exercise simply uses the pause to give learners time to work out what was said and to reflect individually upon how they themselves might have replied. They then hear the second speaker’s actual words. A more demanding version attempts to replicate some of the time pressures of a real-life encounter, giving learners a narrow window within which to respond. Clearly, in the early stages there are bound to be long delays while learners construct their replies. It thus makes sense to develop the exercise in a graded way: with listeners first learning to interpret short turns quite rapidly, later going on to discuss possible responses and finally formulating their own responses under time pressure. As learners become more proficient, they should be encouraged to compare their responses critically with those that occur in the recording, checking both for appropriacy and for accuracy.
This type of exercise is especially suitable for listening centre work.
A small amount of editing is required, with the teacher re-recording the text and inserting timed pauses after each turn that is targeted.
Typically, pauses should be about one and a half times the length of the recorded response, allowing the learner rather longer to match the input to words and respond than would a real-life encounter.
Learners should be asked to check their responses carefully against the recording, and to repeat the exercise if they are not satisfied with their performance. It should be made clear, of course, that there is no single
‘accurate’ response and that a range of variation is to be expected. A rather more behaviourist format might, following language laboratory tradition, insert a second pause after the target response in which learners repeat the exact words they heard.
Quick-fire questions. The recording consists of a series of interview questions (possibly about the learner’s own life and interests), to which the learner has to give short and immediate replies within a tightly controlled time frame. This exercise is especially suitable for intensive practice in a listening centre, where the learner can record, check and revise responses.
Rehearsal. Successful L2 learners often anticipate encounters in L2 by constructing in their minds a range of possible sentences that they might need. The process, known as rehearsal, involves a kind of ‘voice in the head’. It can be used to predict both questions and responses,
thus improving performance in person-to-person exchanges. Learners might be given a topic such as ‘your hobbies’, ‘your family’ or ‘travel’.
Working in pairs, they are asked to predict the questions that might be asked about the topic and to formulate possible spoken answers. The teacher then poses a series of such questions, nominating individual learners, who have to respond rapidly and appropriately. Since this is a listening task, speed and relevance are the criteria by which the answers are judged rather than strict grammatical accuracy. A different version of the same task provides learners with a set of written questions to which they have to rehearse oral responses. The questions are then played to them in random order in a recording, and they have to muster the appropriate response.
Jigsaw listening. A simple listening exercise scrambles the turns in a recorded dialogue. Those of the first speaker are grouped together in random order and tagged a, b, c, d; those of the second speaker are sim-ilarly randomised and tagged 1, 2, 3, 4. Learners listen several times.
They first match each initiating turn with its response; they then decide on a likely order for the pairs of utterances they have identified. This exercise works well in sensitising learners to the relationship between turns; but, because the medium is purely an oral one, the number of turns has to be limited to (say) a maximum of ten to avoid excessive demands on memory.
Recording. Video recording is used very frequently to monitor the performance of teachers, but rather less to monitor that of learners.
Any type of language lesson which uses L2 as the medium of instruction provides a good example of the kind of short-turn interaction that the listening teacher needs to practise. It is thus worthwhile recording learners’ performance in a class and replaying short sections for them to discuss (a) moments where their understanding broke down and why; and (b) responses which were inappropriate and why.
Communicative tasks. All too often, the outcomes of communicative tasks are evaluated in terms of either the effectiveness of oral produc-tion or the achievement of a particular target. Too little attenproduc-tion is given to the role of listening, though it is clearly an equal partner with speaking in this type of activity. From time to time, it is worthwhile to set up an information gap task in the listening classroom and (either through video recording or through observation) to monitor:
the extent to which listening skills are successfully used;
the use made by learners of repair and back-channelling;
the causes and effects of misunderstanding.
An important consideration is to choose a task (for example, one involv-ing times, prices or location) where there is little scope for a failure of oral production and the chief onus is on the listener. There is a strong precedent for this type of activity: Brown (1995) used a ‘map task’ as the basis for a large-scale and illuminating research project into L1 classroom listening.