Sharon Tjaden-Glass, University of Dayton, Dayton, Ohio, USA

If you’ve ever taught a class in which you’ve needed to teach students’ listening comprehension, you are probably familiar with the tried-and-true comprehension approach to teaching listening:

1. Students listen to an audio or video clip and take notes.
2. Students answer comprehension questions about the prompt.
3. You and your students review the answers together.
4. You and your students may discuss the reason that students didn’t get the answers right.

When your students inevitably ask you for more specific advice about how they can improve their listening, your best advice may be to “just listen more.” You might direct them to websites for English learners, or TED Talks, or certain learning apps. But perhaps you’re wondering what else you could be doing in your class to help students improve their perception of spoken English, not just their exposure to spoken English.

Now, of course, your students should be “listening more.” In fact, in his book Listening in the Language Classroom, Field (2008) affirms that an extensive listening approach is one key element of a balanced approach to teach second language (L2) listening in the classroom. However, you should also incorporate a process approach—which favors repeated listening of a prompt and a close examination of the sounds of a spoken text (Field, 2008, pp. 111–112)—as well as a diagnostic approach, which takes note of the common errors in listening perception that your students make (Field, 2008, p. 84).

In practical terms, a process approach in the classroom incorporates explicit bottom-up listening instruction, which provides practice in segmenting authentic connected speech. In his research, Field (2008) found that only 25% of participants, who were intermediate learners at approximately CEFR B1, were able to accurately recognize known words in a string of connected speech during a paused transcription activity (p. 289). In other words, “L2 listeners succeeded in decoding far less of the linguistic input than their teachers assumed…it appears that the ability to recognize known vocabulary and syntax may fall well behind the ability to produce it” (Field, 2008, p. 289). In fact, as Vandergrift and Goh (2012) point out, L2 listeners often have difficulty recognizing known words when those words occur in connected speech.

So what should you do? How can you incorporate bottom-up listening activities and ear-training skills to help your students improve their ability to understand connected speech? In this article, I’d like to draw your attention to three digital technologies that you can use for such purposes: Lyricstraining, Kahoot!, and Youglish.

Lyricstraining.com

Imagine watching an episode of Friends or watching the music video to Ed Sheeran’s “Perfect” on your computer. At the bottom of the screen is the transcript. However, there are some missing words. As you listen, you enter the words based on what you hear.

That’s Lyrictraining.com. It’s a website and an app that allows students to engage their bottom-up listening skills. Students can use Lyricstraining individually as an app, or you can display an exercise that the class completes together. Although the website does not yet have the functionality for teachers to assign exercises to students individually, you can challenge students to log on at home and practice their listening by selecting any number of songs, movies, or TV shows. It’s a free website, so give it a try!

Kahoot!

Kahoot! has become wildly popular in language education because it offers a streamlined way for teachers to gamify any class. Listening is no exception. In Kahoot!, you can add a segment of a video clip from YouTube and create questions about that clip. To test bottom-up listening skills, you will need to strategically choose where you start and stop the video. This is why interactive transcripts of videos, such as those that are available with TED Talks, can help you save time in looking for teachable moments in videos. Once you find a segment that represents the specific challenge in listening perception that you want to focus on, you can click directly on the TED Talk transcript, and you will be redirected to that moment in the video.

One common perceptual challenge that Field (2008) points out is linking between a consonant-final word and a word that begins with a vowel, such as made over, which can sound like may dover. In one of my games, I linked a question to a segment that included the words, it’s based on a sense of false security. My distractors were based on a sense of fall security and base dawn on a sense of fall security. You might also choose to create questions that focus on students’ ability to recognize known vocabulary in a video clip or hear word endings that indicate plurals or certain verb tenses.

Youglish.com

Youglish is a search engine that allows the user to find a specific word or phrase in thousands of YouTube videos, making it a perfect tool for students to increase their exposure to specific known vocabulary. After entering search terms, the website automatically queues thousands of videos in which that word or phrase is spoken. By simply pressing the forward button, the student can quickly hear and compare how that word or phrase sounds in many different contexts through the voices of many speakers, making it a particularly useful tool for self-study.

If you’d like to see a demonstration of these digital technologies in action, please take a look at the instructional video that I’ve created on this topic.

I think it’s important to point out that teaching L2 listening can be particularly challenging because there is a dearth of research into the actual processes that L2 learners use to make sense of the target language (Vandergrift, 2007). In TESOL teacher training programs, methods for teaching skill-based speaking and listening classes tend to more heavily emphasize preparation for teaching speaking and pronunciation. As a result, when new teachers enter the ESL/EFL classroom, they often rely on the approach that their textbook dictates, perhaps because they are unfamiliar with any other way to teach listening. However, as digital technologies continue to advance, more and more opportunities are emerging for gamifying the classroom and encouraging autonomous learning.

References

Field, J. (2008). Listening in the language classroom. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Vandergrift, L. (2007). Recent developments in second and foreign language listening comprehension research. Language Teaching, 40(3), 191–210. doi:10.1017/S0261444807004338

Vandergrift, L., & Goh, C. (2012). Teaching and learning second language listening: Metacognition in action. New York, NY: Routledge.