1 Listening then and now
2.1 Weaknesses of the comprehension approach
2.1.1 Reading versus listening
It seems reasonable to ask where the established view of how to teach listening originated. The most likely answer is that the approach, and the assumptions that go with it, was carried over from the teaching of reading. As noted in Chapter 1, the dedicated listening lesson came quite late, at a time when there was already a set of established methods for L2 reading. Small wonder if perceived similarities between the skills (especially the need to test performance indirectly) led to a transfer of methodology from one to the other. Today, we continue to apply to both listening and reading the assumption that correct answers to questions provide evidence of achievement, and we employ similar exercise types to check understanding in the two skills. But listening is in many ways a very different skill from reading; and we should not let conventions of methodology distract us from recognising the important differences between the two.
Consider first the differences in the raw material that readers and listeners have to handle. A reader has the advantage of a standardised spelling system. By contrast, a listener is exposed to speech sounds which vary considerably from one utterance to another, and from one speaker to another, and which even blend into each other. A reader benefits from blank spaces between each of the words in a written text. There are no such regular gaps separating words in connected speech; and the listener largely has to decide for herself where one word ends and the next begins. One might conclude from this that listening is a rather more demanding skill than reading. That is certainly my own view. But the main point at issue is that the signal which the listener has to deal with requires an entirely different kind of processing to that demanded by reading. Teaching programmes need to give much more attention than they do at present to the features that make listening distinctive.
A second important difference lies in how permanent the text is. The reader retains evidence on the page of the words that have been read, whereas listening relies upon information that is transient and unfolds in time. So reading can be recursive, with the reader going back to check word recognition and to check overall understanding in a way that the listener cannot. The transitory nature of listening appears to be a major cause of L2 listener anxiety, leading to the often-expressed conviction that native speakers ‘speak too fast’ or ‘swallow their words’.
Of course, it cannot be denied that the two skills have certain meaning-building elements in common. They both draw upon the same compre-hension processes (extracting ideas, relating the ideas to what has gone
before, interpreting what the speaker/reader has left unsaid, making con-nections to world knowledge). But this resemblance should not be over-stated. Because of the temporary nature of the speech signal, a listener has to carry forward in her memory all the ideas that have been expressed so far if she wishes to build a complete account of a conversation. By contrast, as we have just noted, a reader can always look back. So even at the level of comprehension the processes are distinct.
Similarly, it could be argued that both skills demand the ability to
‘bundle up’ words into phrases and grammar structures. But there are marked differences in the patterns of language that are involved. Con-sider the circumstances under which writing and speech are produced.
Most writers have time to plan what they say with some care, to pol-ish their sentences, to choose exactly the right words and to structure what they say in a tightly organised way. By contrast, speech has to be assembled under the pressure of time. Speakers produce shortish clusters of words, often loosely linked by and, but and so. They may mispro-nounce, hesitate, rephrase, repeat and even lose track of what they are saying. Clearly there is a gradient from very informal conversation at one end to very precise and careful writing at the other. But in many circumstances, the patterns which a listener is called upon to trace in a speaker’s words will be very different from the patterns which a reader identifies in a piece of writing. Not least, the listener has to allow for pos-sible repetition and has to supply some of her own connections between ideas.
Yet another cause for concern lies in the methods used to check under-standing, which have been adopted from reading but may not be suitable for listening. Take the use of multiple-choice questions in listening exams and published materials. It quite often happens that written multiple-choice options are more difficult to interpret than the recording that is supposed to be the focus of the exercise. If the learner fails to get the right answer, it is as likely to be due to inadequate reading ability in handling the questions as to inadequate listening ability in handling the recording. Admittedly, this type of question represents an extreme case, but teachers need to be cautious about relying too heavily upon exercises in written form and upon test methods originally designed with reading in mind.
To summarise, the present approach to teaching listening misleads us by drawing close parallels between listening and reading on the grounds that both result in something loosely termed ‘comprehension’. It directs the attention of the teacher away from many of the features which make listening distinctive. These features are precisely the ones which cause most difficulty for the learner and the ones that we need to focus on if we wish to promote more effective listening.
2.1.2 More practice versus better listening
Our current pedagogy is also open to criticism for its lack of clarity about the goals of the listening lesson and its failure to consider whether the methods it prescribes are the best way of achieving those goals. A detached look at the comprehension approach suggests that it is founded upon some very questionable thinking.
The approach centres upon exposing learners to a series of spoken texts. The emphasis is on repeated encounters rather than on the quality of the listening that takes place. A large assumption is thus made: that learners become more competent listeners as the number of L2 listening experiences increases. With some learners, this may indeed happen, but there can be no guarantee that it will. Instead, somebody who is a weak listener at the outset might well become increasingly demoralised by their lack of perceptible progress.
The chief problem with an approach based upon ‘one text after another’ is that the learning that occurs is localised and may not extend to future listening experiences. Learners are given feedback on whether their answers are correct or not; they are sometimes allowed to hear problematic passages again. But that does not mean that they take away from the experience the kind of generalised technique that will enable them to avoid a similar problem of understanding if one occurs in future.
A learner might come to realise that a sequence that sounds like might-adun in the voice of a male taxi driver corresponds to the grammatical pattern might+ have + done. Learning has taken place in respect of this sample of speech, and the knowledge will assist the learner if she ever hears the same recording again. But it may not assist her in deconstruct-ing shouldadun or mightathought, encountered in a different context and in the voice of a female academic.
Conventional listening courses often claim to be progressive; but they do not in fact develop learners’ competence in any systematic way. They are progressive only in the sense that the passages are graded by linguistic difficulty or that the tasks are graded by the demands they are said to make of the learner. This smacks of an obstacle race in which the organiser keeps raising the height of the barriers without ever showing the runners how to get over them. As the barriers get higher, some listeners will find their own ways of dealing with the increased challenge;
others will simply decide that what is being demanded of them is too difficult and withdraw their cooperation. It is very difficult to persuade somebody to lend attention to a piece of speech if they believe that they are incapable of making any sense of what is said.
Even the notion of ‘comprehension’ as the goal towards which lis-tening strives is quite misleading. Comprehension is certainly the end
product of listening, and achieved by an expert listener with minimal apparent effort. But the concern of a novice listener surely has to lie with the means as well as the end. To form another analogy, we might say that safe handling of a vehicle is the goal towards which driving instruction strives. But nobody would suggest that the learner driver can get by without a great deal of hands-on, step-by-step guidance along the way.
The emphasis on comprehension has had an unfortunate effect in that it has led many commentators to focus their attention on how listeners construct wider meaning and away from the nuts and bolts that enable the operation to take place. It has led to a received view that difficulties in recognising sounds and words in the input are of a lower order of importance, and that many of them can be resolved by the use of ‘context’. This is demonstrably not the case. In fact, one could say that the opposite is true in that many problems of understanding have their origins in low-level mistakes of perception.
2.1.3 Answering questions versus showing understanding
Even the use of conventional comprehension questions does not achieve what it appears to. Here, the gross assumption is that right answers demonstrate a high level of listening competence, while wrong answers or silence show that the learners fall short of what was expected. But we must be very careful of jumping to easy conclusions. For a start, just because a learner succeeds in identifying isolated points in a recording, it does not mean that she understands how the points contribute to the overall message intended by the speaker (e.g. which are major topics and which are examples or explanations). In addition, learners often achieve correct answers by using testwise strategies that draw heavily upon the wording of the questions. As for the supposedly weaker listener, silence may not show incomprehension; it may just mean that the listener is not 100% certain about what she has heard.
Of particular concern is the way in which current practice fosters the idea that answers are necessarily ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. What appears to be an incorrect answer might actually be supported by evidence which the listener has drawn upon but which the teacher or materials writer has overlooked. This happens more often than one might suppose.
Perhaps the greatest criticism of answers to comprehension questions is that they are uninformative. They enable us to pass a rather superficial judgement on a learner’s listening proficiency, but they do not say what has enabled the learner to perform successfully or where her weaknesses lie. They enable us to say to the learner, ‘Try harder next time’ – or perhaps more realistically, given the serendipitous nature of the exercise,
‘Better luck next time’. But they give no hard evidence as to why things went wrong – of the kind that might help us to assist learners to improve their listening. They enable us to judge but they do not enable us to remedy.
2.1.4 Comprehension approach versus communicative language teaching
Less fundamental, but nevertheless problematic, is the way in which the comprehension approach impacts upon the classroom. The teacher sets the questions; the teacher passes judgement on the correctness of learner responses; the teacher makes decisions about which parts of the record-ing to replay. The CA thus embodies a very teacher-centred method-ology, of the kind that good practice in other areas has generally left behind.
It also fits rather oddly into a pedagogy that sets great store by commu-nication in the classroom. Granted, listening is a very individual activity in terms of the processes employed and the interpretations reached; and we cannot change that. But, by emphasising methods associated with testing rather than teaching, and requiring each student to report her own set of answers, the CA tends to isolate learners. The atmosphere in a listening class often approximates more closely to that of an exam centre than to that of a forum for communicative practice of the second language.
2.1.5 Classroom versus outside world
A further weakness of the CA lies in the lack of fit between the types of activity that take place in the language classroom and the listening that a learner might expect to do in the real world.
One factor is the question-based format of the CA lesson. Pre-set ques-tions provide the listener with more information in advance of hearing the speaker than she would normally possess in real life. The questions also restrict the tasks that are undertaken – with the result that certain important listening functions (e.g. deciding which pieces of informa-tion are important and which are not, or building informainforma-tion from the speaker into an overall line of argument) are rarely performed by the classroom listener.
It is sometimes argued in defence of comprehension questions that it is good listening behaviour to approach a speaker with a set of enquiries in mind. That may be true for a very limited number of real-life listening events. But, even so, the questions would be very different in form from those that feature in the CA. They would concern major ideas rather
than details and certainly would not have been invented by the listener in exactly the same order as the speaker is going to mention them.
The CA also imposes restrictions on the relationship between listener and recording. Typically, listeners are asked to eavesdrop on a two- or three-way conversation. That type of listening happens in real life – but there will also be many situations where listeners are direct participants in a conversation and have to form an immediate response to what the speaker says. Practice in interactive listening is accorded relatively little importance in the comprehension classroom.
A further concern is that the CA does not provide learners with survival techniques that equip them for real-world encounters. Early language learners are quite heavily dependent upon their ability to compensate for gaps where they have been unable to recognise words in a piece of connected speech. The CA makes no effort to develop the use of listening strategies that enable them to deal with this situation. Indeed, it often does the opposite: reducing the extent to which strategies are required by simplifying the language of the passages that are used or using slow speech. Small wonder that some learners achieve quite a high level of listening success in the classroom but find that they are ill equipped for the demands of the outside world.