5 A diagnostic approach to L2 listening
5.1 Process versus product
Practitioners and methodologists have often expressed reservations about the effectiveness of the comprehension approach. Perhaps the most frequently aired criticism (Brown, 1986; Sheerin, 1987) is the view that the CA tests listening but does little or nothing to teach it. This is a serious charge: it is an educational axiom that an instructor should not test a skill or a body of knowledge unless it has first been taught.
But the ‘testing not teaching’ assertion does not entirely address the point. The fact is that listening and reading are internalised skills: they take place in the mind of the learner and cannot be studied directly. The only evidence available as to whether listeners are operating successfully is indirect and takes the form of responses to exercises and tasks similar to those that testers favour. One can hold strong reservations about the validity of certain methods adopted from testing contexts (particularly true/false and multiple-choice questions, which demand sophisticated reading skills), but teachers cannot avoid asking questions of some kind if they wish to check understanding.
The problem, it will be suggested, lies not so much in the approach to obtaining information as in the use we make of the answers. Consider this extract from an imaginary L2 listening class employing multiple-choice questions:
T: So . . . what answer did you get to Question 3? Marta?
S1: C.
T: Alfonso – did you get the same answer?
S2: Yes: C.
T: Well done. That’s right. Who else got C? . . . Most of you? Good . . . Now what about Question 4? Dmitri?
S3: A.
T: Er . . . What did you get, Leila?
S4: D.
T: Paolo? Was it A or D?
S5: D.
T: Well done. D’s the right answer. Did most of you get it?
[students nod]
The teacher has established that, in each case, two members of the class managed to achieve the right answer. It is not entirely clear that others have done so (even if they put up their hands to claim success). But what is regrettable is that the teacher has learnt nothing about the means by which the students achieved the answer and thus nothing about their listening processes. Did Marta understand all the words in the relevant part of the listening text? Did she choose the correct answer on the basis of an overall understanding of the text? Or did she make an informed, or even an uninformed, guess? It may be that she managed to match words to 90% of the listening passage; or it may be that she only decoded 10% and relied upon contextual information for support. Nor does the teacher learn anything about the specific problems encountered by those such as Dmitri who had the wrong answer. Without establishing why the errors occurred, we have no means of assisting learners to get it right next time.
This exchange illustrates the most fundamental flaw of the CA. The approach focuses attention upon the product of listening in the form of answers to questions or responses in a task, and fails to provide insights into the process by which the product is derived. It also, of course, adopts the assumption that there is a single correct answer to each question. As we have seen, that belief is very much open to challenge: the listener does not just ‘receive’ the speaker’s message but has to actively reconstruct it. There may well be information in the listening passage, unnoticed by the materials writer, which partly or wholly supports Dmitri’s choice of option A. Or the problem may lie not in his listening skills at all, but in certain ambiguities of the multiple-choice question.
The solution is simple. It is to ask learners to justify their choice of answer. After encouraging a class to explore possible interpretations of a section of a recording, a listening teacher might then go on to ask the sim-ple question Why? The learners’ explanations for their choice of answers are informative, whether the answers themselves are correct or not.
In the case of a correct answer, the teacher finds out how the answer was arrived at, and thus establishes the extent to which it was based upon information from the text as against external contextual informa-tion. The teacher also gains possible insights into the learner’s listening style. Comparisons can be made between the techniques used by this successful listener and those of others who did not answer correctly.
In the case of a wrong answer, the teacher gains an indication of where the learner’s listening difficulties originate. This opens up the possibility of a later session in which these problem areas are prac-tised intensively. A further benefit of following up a ‘wrong’ answer is that the conclusion reached by the learner may sometimes prove to be well founded. She may have drawn upon evidence which the teacher or the materials writer overlooked. In this way, one takes on board Brown’s argument (1995: Chap. 1; Brown and Yule, 1983b: 57) that listening demands ‘adequate’ answers to questions, not answers deemed ‘correct’ by a single listener.
This discussion is edging the reader towards a view of the compre-hension approach not as an end in itself but as the means to an end.
The teacher’s goal should not be to obtain correct answers to questions but to discover more about the techniques and strategies employed by the respondents. By establishing how answers to comprehension tasks are arrived at, we build up a picture of the strengths and weaknesses of a group of learners – one which enables us to contribute construc-tively to their development as listeners. On this analysis, the principal aim of a full-length listening session is diagnostic. It affords insights into where understanding has broken down, which can then be followed up with small-scale remedial exercises that aim to prevent these errors from occurring again.
This approach accords very much with a view expressed by Brown (1986: 286): ‘Until we have some diagnostic procedures, the teacher [of L2 listening] can only continue to test comprehension, not to teach it.
We need to move into a position where the teacher is able to recognise particular patterns of behaviour in listening manifested by an unsuccess-ful listener and to provide exercises for the student which will promote superior patterns of behaviour (superior strategies).’