3 Listening and the learner
3.4 Listener independence
The third issue to be considered relates to the listener’s lack of control over the input. As already noted, in a whole-class situation it is the teacher who determines which parts of a recording to focus on. At times, the teacher may dwell overlong on sections of the recording that the individual learner has been able to match and interpret accurately; at other times, the teacher may take for granted areas that the learner finds problematic. The process would clearly be more focused if listeners
could control the pace of the operation for themselves. This would permit them to regress and to check and re-check areas which they had failed to understand, thus compensating for the fact that listening does not normally permit recursion.
3.4.1 Group listening
A suggestion occasionally made is that the teacher should hand over control of the CD or cassette player to a student. That, frankly, is not very practical: it simply transfers to a learner the difficult whole-class decisions that the teacher has to make. A more viable alternative along the same lines is to provide the class with several players and to ask them to work in small groups on the same recording. There are certain practical needs that have to be met: among them, the availability of sockets, the size of the room(s) and the level of noise. Clearly, it is an option that is only open to small or medium-sized classes (up to, say, four or five groups of four). But my own experience suggests that group listening of this kind can be a very productive activity: one in which loyalty to the group fosters patient and persistent listening and where learners respond well to the challenge of assisting each other’s listening skills.
As with any group-work activity, a class needs to be prepared for a session of this kind. The teacher should first play the recording to the whole class for general understanding and then introduce and explain the questions or task. The learners move into groups to carry out the exercise, each group with its own copy of the recording. One member of the group takes responsibility for replaying short sections of the recording on demand, as the group seeks to locate the information it needs, while another serves as secretary and records the answers. There can then be a final whole-class phase where answers are reported back and compared.
3.4.2 Listening homework
There are clearly limits to how much can be achieved through whole-class listening practice. Teachers therefore need to supplement class work by seeking ways of promoting independent listening. Encouraging a learner to listen on her own carries the same benefits as other types of learner autonomy. It ensures that she:
demonstrates the ability to accomplish a listening task without reliance on the contributions of others;
has ample time to achieve the task without having to proceed at the pace of the class;
can replay the recording as often as she needs (achieving the kind of recursion that reading offers) and can focus upon specific stretches of the input which are difficult for her personally rather than for the class as a whole.
It is possible today to give learners much greater access to listening resources than they previously had. CD and cassette players are widely available and relatively inexpensive. In many parts of the world, every learner can be assumed to have one at home, or at the very least to be able to borrow one. It thus seems a practical proposition to provide listeners with individual copies of listening material for personal practice.
CDs are cheap to produce, and, thanks to modern technology, multiple copying is no longer as cumbersome as it once was. In addition, copyright holders (publishers, radio and TV companies) are more willing to tolerate multiple copies of their material than they were in the past.
If teachers have reservations about copying commercially produced material, they can always make use of their own off-air recordings or download recorded material from the Internet. They can even use their own voices. Where there are sufficient computer facilities in the school or in the students’ homes, the possibilities become even greater. Teachers can record sound files from radio to computer and then upload them to students as email attachments. Alternatively, they can give students a set of questions in class, with directions to a website from which a chosen podcast can be downloaded.
One of the best ways of fostering independent listening (and indeed of increasing the time which learners give to this critical skill) is to set listening homework. Each learner is given a copy of the recording on which the homework is based, and allocated a period of (say) seven days to complete the task or exercise that is set. With smaller classes (especially in language schools), teachers can assemble a whole term’s homework on a single CD. In circumstances where some or all students possess MP3 players, the teacher might select a weekly podcast for intensive study.
All students can be asked to download the podcast at the beginning of the week, to listen to it as often as they feel they need to, then to give feedback on it at the end of the week.
This recommendation might seem to be possible only with small classes and in countries with considerable financial and technical resources. In fact, with a little administrative skill, it is also possible to provide listening homework in parts of the world that are less well equipped. If the school’s resources run to a small number of cassettes, the solution is to produce a limited number of copies – say, eight for a class of forty. Each class member keeps the cassette for long enough to achieve the task (say, three days), after which it is passed on to another.
Of course, this assumes that at least some of the pupils will have access to a cassette player.
Even where the opportunities for receiving broadcasts in the target language are limited or the reception is of poor quality, teachers can still record samples of the target language in their own voices, telling a story, recounting an incident in their lives or conversing with colleagues.
Listening homework requires a degree of preparation. The teacher might play a recording for general understanding, then introduce the task that is to be accomplished or the questions that are to be answered, and check that they have been fully understood. When the homework has been done, answers should be collected in and checked. They may be found to include acceptable alternatives to the ‘official’ answers. They also provide valuable evidence about the listening skills of individual class members, enabling the teacher to offer support where needed. Some of the results may come as a surprise: it is by no means always the case that a student with a sound basis of spoken grammar and vocabulary possesses listening skills to match.
The discussion so far has implied that the chief benefit of setting lis-tening homework is to improve the learner’s ability to match the input to words. It gives the individual more opportunity to mine a recording for information, adjusting her ears to the sounds, rhythms and intona-tion patterns of the target language. But, as these skills improve, more varied types of homework can be considered, which draw upon general comprehension skills. For those studying in an English as a Second Lan-guage (ESL) context, the teacher might ask the whole class to tune in to a particular TV programme, radio broadcast or podcast and to report back (perhaps in the form of a summary). Those studying in an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) context might be asked to find a source of the target language (world service radio or TV or the Internet), to make a short recording of their own and then to present the text to other class members. For some inventive outside-class projects, see White, 1998.
3.4.3 Listening centres
Another possibility is to establish a listening centre within a school.
Many of the routine drilling activities associated with language labo-ratories were discontinued in the 1970s as early behaviourist views of language learning became discredited. But the disused labs found a new life in the following decade as centres where learners could practise lis-tening independently. The labs, in turn, have now been supplemented by computer facilities which enable learners to download listening material from the Internet. In some institutions, sophisticated language centres
have been set up, which give access to video recordings of L2 TV pro-grammes and news broadcasts that are received daily by satellite.
For secondary schools with limited resources, a listening centre may seem an extravagance that cannot be afforded. But this perception derives in part from unrealistic ideas as to what a centre requires by way of equipment. Language labs were expensive. They required sound-proofed booths, microphones, twin-track tapes and a central console, because drilling and pronunciation practice required participants to speak aloud and to record their voices. Equipment of this kind is not necessary in a listening centre. All that is needed is a properly ventilated room with space for learners to sit a short distance apart from each other, an ade-quate number of players on desks, headphones for the players to reduce noise levels and an ample supply of recordings in the target language, classified by level of difficulty. Granted, a considerable amount of work is involved in setting up such a centre, particularly in copying and clas-sifying the recordings and in devising tasks, but the costs are not nearly as great as is sometimes assumed.
Listening centres need the backing of clear policy decisions; they quickly become white elephants if they are not sufficiently incorporated into the learning programmes of the school. First of all, the class teacher needs to establish what might be termed a listening culture, reversing the neglect which sometimes attends the skill. The value of acquiring listening competence should be stressed: not least, the way in which a listener with good word-recognition skills is able to acquire new gram-mar, vocabulary and idiom from exposure to target language speech. A brief beginning-of-course diagnostic test might indicate to learners how strong their listening skills are, and which areas of listening would benefit from independent practice.
A clear bridge needs to be built between whole-class listening practice and work in the listening centre. At the very least, learners should be familiarised with the centre on their arrival in the school or college and shown its resources. Some teachers choose to transfer some or all of their listening classes to the centre, with learners working in pairs if there are limited places. Others set listening homework which requires learners to use the centre (and incidentally avoids the need to make multiple individual copies of cassettes).
Some institutions leave it entirely up to the learner to decide whether and how to use the listening centre. This is not entirely satisfactory:
there is a danger that the learner will waste time with recordings at an inappropriate level or with activities that are unproductive. The effec-tiveness of independent work done in a listening centre often depends critically upon the quality of assistance which a learner receives (Holec, 1985). There are two general policies. One is a consultancy approach,
with an informed adviser available in the centre at certain set times of the day. Alternatively, one can adopt a prescriptive approach, where the class teacher provides a listening programme for the individual learner, taking full account of the learner’s listening needs and personal interests.
It is easy to design a form, on the lines of a doctor’s prescription, which recommends certain recordings, certain listening activities and even how long to spend in the centre at any one time.
When advising learners how to listen independently, it is important to recognise that they come with their own, sometimes poorly informed, ideas about what L2 listening entails and about how to improve their own skills. A serious oversight of many listening centres is that they do not ask learners about these beliefs and suggest alternative paths where appropriate. As a result, some listeners spend a great deal of time in fruitless dictionary work while others try to answer a battery of questions after a single hearing, then fall back on the tapescript. Others never get further than following a tapescript word by word. Listeners should be clearly briefed as to how to make the best of their time in the centre; alternatively, the type of exercise set (and in particular the type of rubric used) should be designed so as to enable them to extract the maximum benefit from the text that they are studying.1
3.4.4 Adapting materials for self-study
Some comprehension exercises and tasks designed for use in the class-room adapt well to independent use (whether as homework or in listening centres). Imaginative activities such as those in Doff and Becket (1991) are as productive when used by the single listener as when used by the teacher with a class. Certain exercise types seem particularly suited to independent listening. They include:
form-filling and labelling;
completing a grid;
comparing and contrasting;
putting events in order of occurrence or facts in order of mention;
making notes on specific topics;
filling in gaps in a paraphrase summary or in a paraphrase set of notes
explaining connections between topics or completing a mind-map.
Not so suitable are conventional multiple-choice and true/false ques-tions, where independent listeners sometimes devote excessive amounts
1 However, this recommendation comes with the rider that advisers must take care not to be over-directive (see the Hong Kong studies of self-access support
under-of time to trying to establish why a particular proposition is wrong rather than focusing on those that are right. They might be replaced by more productive exercises where listeners have to read a text and then cor-rect it in the light of the information in the recording. Also useful are exercises where listeners have to decide which topics or points on a list are mentioned in the recording, and then (on a replay) to note briefly what is said about each one. Exercises that ask listeners to anticipate what comes next have their purposes, in that they oblige the listener to summon up a meaning representation of what has been heard so far.
Some classroom material may need to be adapted quite radically. Most obviously, the teacher in the classroom usually provides pre-listening contextual information, whereas, in a self-study context, the same infor-mation (including any critical items of vocabulary) has to be given in the rubrics. One also has to bear in mind that more can be demanded of the independent listener: she has more time to listen to the recording and the opportunity to handle it recursively. In addition, the listener’s atten-tion can be directed towards specific areas of difficulty where intensive and repeated listening will assist in the development of word-recognition skills. The aim of self-study work should be to encourage the learner to listen more effectively and not simply to test general understanding.
One way of achieving this in a listening centre session is to design exer-cises and tasks that require listeners to ‘narrow in’ on a listening passage along the lines described in Chapter 1; then finally to consider global meaning and the argument structure of the text as a whole. The panel below provides an example of the kind of worksheet that is appropriate for listening centre work (adapted from classroom materials in Field, 1983, Unit 24). It indicates the type and extent of rubric that needs to be provided, and illustrates a relatively comprehensive sequence of activities. Note the simple and user-friendly language.
Sample worksheet for a self-study listening activity
Stage 1. Play the whole recording. You will hear two people talking about a journey. Where do you think they are? What is the purpose of the journey? Which of the two people is going on the journey?
Who is the other person?
Stage 2. Below you will see a form about two hotels, which has been partly completed [Task sheet taken from coursebook]. Study the form carefully. Make sure you know what goes on each line and where to put each piece of information. Listen carefully to the recording. When you come to an important piece of information,
stop the recording and fill in the form. Note that the information in the recording may not be in the same order as it is on the form.
Stage 3. Replay the recording and check what you have written.
Stage 4. Play the first part of the recording as far as afraid. Listen carefully when you come to the following words and fill in the gaps.
A: I want to ______________________ a short holiday.
B: _________ you want to go?
A: I _________________. ______________ sun.
B: And ________ you want to go?
A: ______________________, if possible.
B: Well, you’ve _______________ late. We haven’t _____________, I’m afraid.
Stage 5. Listen carefully to the next part of the recording, as far as swimming pool. Can you guess the meaning of these words?
brochure vacancies southern fancy well placed
Stage 6. What does the female speaker seem most concerned about?
a. Comfort b. Price c. Size of hotel d. Time e. Number of stars
List the similarities and differences between the two hotels.
Stage 7. Turn this worksheet over and check your answers. Replay any sections of the listening passage where your answer seems to be wrong.
Stage 8. Listen to the recording again. This time, listen with the tapescript. Listen carefully (two or three times) to any parts that you find difficult to follow.
Stage 1 corresponds to the extensive listening phase of a classroom listening session, enabling the listener to sample the gist of the recording.
Stage 2 constitutes the ‘intensive’ information-gathering task. Note that the listener is free to stop if she wishes to. There is no reason why, under self-study conditions, the listener should have to operate under the time constraints of a test or have to deal with the difficult cognitive demands of writing and listening at the same time.2While the rubric does not say as much, the listener should feel free to replay and check information that is being written down. Note too that, in these conditions, one can dispense with the tradition of always asking comprehension questions in the same order as the information occurs in the passage. The great advantage is that, if the listener misses a piece of information, she can
2 Unless, of course, the listener is training for a particular exam.
roam at will throughout the recording, seeking it. She can handle the text just as she would a book.
Stage 4 targets a small section of the recording, giving practice in word-recognition skills. The pieces omitted in the exercise are not very prominent (and thus quite difficult to identify) or are idiomatic. They represent, in short, the kinds of word cluster that real-life L2 listeners might have trouble in processing or might need to respond to.