Marnie Reed, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts, USA

Why Does Listening Matter?

Good listening skills are essential for successful learning and L2 acquisition. Aside from its status as the most fundamental integrated skill, listening is what learners reportedly spend most of their time doing when functioning in a foreign language. Unfortunately, listening is also considered the least understood and most overlooked of the four skills, the one over which learners report feeling the least control, perhaps because it is the skill for which teachers receive the least training (Vandergrift & Goh, 2012).

Why is listening called the neglected skill?

In instructed settings, listening is unidirectional: learners listen to a recording and are expected to answer questions assessing passage comprehension and content mastery. Instructional focus is misplaced on the product of comprehension rather than its process. Mendelsohn (2006) notes, “Much of what is traditionally misnamed teaching listening should in fact be called testing listening” (p. 75). Text-oriented listening instruction may be attributable to the dual influence of instructional materials and curricular guidelines (understand main ideas and significant details) developed for reading pedagogy under the communicative language teaching framework. The inadequacy of these guidelines for Students from Limited or Interrupted Formal Education (SLIFE) populations is evident. With pre-literate learners, there is a recognized need to teach the requisite reading skill: decoding orthographic input. However, when ‘teaching’ listening, there seems to be no corresponding recognized need to teach the requisite listening skill: processing aural input.

What are the learner listening challenges?

Two listening challenges have been reported: ability to recognize known words in connected speech and ability to understand a speaker’s intended meaning (Vandergrift & Goh, 2012). The first challenge requires parsing ability: ability to segment continuous speech to understand what was said. The second challenge requires knowledge of the pragmatic functions of intonation: ability to interpret implications and make inferences to understand what was meant by what was said.

Manifestations of the first challenge, speech segmentation, include poor word recognition strategies, inability to suppress wrong choices even when not supported syntactically and/or contextually, and over reliance on content words. To illustrate, consider results of a dictation task reported by Reed (2022). Accurate transcription of the dictated sentence “Tell her I’ll meet her at the bank” requires knowledge of three connected speech processes (CSPs): words are linked in continuous speech (tell her; meet her); words are contracted (I will -> I’ll); sounds are deleted (h -> ∅ in her). Students who erroneously transcribed “Tell her I’ll meet her at the bank” as “Teller all meter at the bank” matched the incoming acoustic signal to known words, perhaps primed in the first instance by reference to a bank, simultaneously recognizing their transcribed sentence as meaningless while insisting this is what had been dictated.

Manifestations of the second challenge, understanding communicative and pragmatic functions of intonation, include relying on the words in an utterance to derive utterance meaning. To illustrate, consider a common classroom exchange: a student seeks a deadline extension. Asking, “Can I turn in my assignment late?” the student is told, “You can” (italics represent a marked pitch contour), prompting a grateful Thank you!” from the relieved student. Here, the instructor’s words are affirmative, but the message is negative. As Wichmann (2005) explains, intonation “has the power to … undermine the words spoken” (p. 229). The responsible mechanism is an implicational fall-rise pitch contour by which, as Wells (2006) informs us, “a speaker implies something without necessarily putting it into words” (p. 75).

Can listening skills be taught and learned?

The good news is that learners can make effective progress with instruction. A strategic metacognitive approach promises to raise learner and instructor awareness and skills. Action steps include a pre-instruction survey of learner beliefs and strategies, followed by a skill-level assessment to establish baseline diagnostics in advance of instruction. For the first listening challenge, two survey questions address common learner assumptions and listening strategies:

1. Native speakers speak too fast. If they didn’t speak so fast, I could understand them.

DISAGREE     NOT SURE     AGREE

2. When listening, I pay attention to the content words; the little words aren’t important.

DISAGREE     NOT SURE     AGREE

Following this questionnaire with a brief cloze passage need not be burdensome, and provides a basis for semester-end comparison to measure metalinguistic, metacognitive, and skill progress. Rather than delete words at pre-set intervals, design the passage to target connected speech processes. Retain content words, deleting ‘the little words’ students think they can ignore. Replicate authentic listening with authentic sources, and provide context to facilitate top-down processing, allowing learners to tap into world or background knowledge. Number the blanks to facilitate a post-listening debrief, and provide comprehension questions. Short, succinct passages are sufficient to assess skills. One I’ve used is a 64-word introduction to a popular radio podcast; 48 content words are provided. The topic is a young man who was “living at home ^# _____ _____ parents” during the 2008 financial crisis. You will notice that you can fill in the blanks without having heard the broadcast. In fact, suggesting to students that they invite random native speakers to fill in the blanks without hearing the passage can raise awareness of the universal listening strategy: use knowledge of the grammar and the sound system to facilitate processing aural input. Here, using 2-word blanks assesses skill with connected speech processes. During the instruction phase, students can be introduced to YouGlish for technology enhanced listening practice with connected speech. For a select list of connected speech processes with examples, see Reed, 2022, page 91.

For the second challenge, two brief survey questions address common learner assumptions and listening strategies:

1. If I can understand all the words in a sentence, I can understand the meaning of the sentence.

DISAGREE      NOT SURE      AGREE

1. English intonation is merely decorative; it cannot change the meaning of a sentence.

DISAGREE      NOT SURE      AGREE

Following the questionnaire, administer a contextualized skill assessment. For academically oriented programs where students take or are preparing to take credit-bearing courses, a presentation about the role of teaching assistants to do first-pass grading of course assignments provides a context. Students are directed to listen to a sound file, circle their response to the accompanying question, and explain their choice. Italics represent the pitch contour.

Sound File: The teacher didn’t grade the papers.

Question: Have the papers been graded? YES      NO

Explanation: _________________________________

Students who refer to the words ‘didn’t grade’ to account for choosing the negative response are demonstrating insensitivity to the marked intonation and/or its implicational function.

As Levis (1999) notes, while many textbooks address syntactic functions of intonation, such as signaling grammatical structure, and discourse functions, such as turn-taking or differentiating question types, relatively few address its pragmatic functions, for example conveying emphasis, contrast, or implications. A 3-part metacognitive strategy is recommended:

1. detect marked (different from neutral) intonation: listen for a pitch change

2. locate the source of the marked intonation: exaggerated content or function word(s)

3. interpret the marked intonation: attribute speaker intent

When used for emphasis, intonation highlights new information as distinct from given or old information, as in this exchange (bold indicates new information):

A: I’ve got an assignment.

B: What kind of assignment?

A: A homework assignment.

Emphasis can also be used adverbially to indicate degree, as illustrated by this exchange:

That was a difficult assignment. (standard intonation)

That was a difficult assignment. (emphatic intonation)

When used for contrast or correction, intonation signals the locus of the information the speaker wishes to highlight, as in the exchange below where attention is directed to the correct digit:

A: Is the zip code 02115?

B: No, it’s 02215.

The 3-step metacognitive strategy, applied to implications in the instruction phase, is illustrated.

In Step 1, students listen to a sound file containing two sentences, and are asked to circle their choice in the accompanying question. Italics represent the pitch contour.

Sound File 1: She’s not a teacher.

Sound File 2: She’s not a teacher.

Question: Do the sentences sound: The Same      Different

In Step 2, students are directed to listen again to the sound files and this time to locate and describe the source of the difference between the two sentences. Sample correct responses:

In sample 1, ‘teacher’ has extra pitch.

In sample 2, ‘She’ has extra pitch.

In Step 3, students are directed to listen to sound files 1 and 2 and, for each, to choose from two possible options to finish the sentence:

Option a: she’s an engineer

Option b: he’s a teacher

For post-instruction summative skill assessment, students are directed to listen to sound files containing two versions of the diagnostic assessment and determine if they sound the same or different and, if different to locate the source of the difference, and to answer the comprehension question.

Sound File 1: The teacher didn’t grade the papers.

Sound File 2: The teacher didn’t grade the papers.

Question: Have the papers been graded?

Sample correct responses: The sentences sound different. The word ‘teacher’ in sound file 2 has extra pitch. The papers have been graded, but not by the teacher. Someone else graded them.

What are the lingering challenges to effective listening instruction?

Replace curriculum guidelines such as ‘understand main ideas’ with operationalized, observable learning outcomes that address the question ‘as measured how?’. Determine evidence of learning by means of pre- and post-instruction metalinguistic, metacognitive, and skill assessments. Finally, plan instruction and contextualized learning of connected speech features and intonation to improve learner ability to understand utterance content and speaker intent.

References:

Levis, J. (1999). jIntonation in theory and practice, revisited. TESOL Quarterly, 33(1), 37-63.

Mendelsohn, D. (2006). Learning how to listen using learning strategies. In P. Gorden (Ed.), Current trends in the development and teaching of the four language skills (pp. 75–89). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Reed, M. (2022). Sources of mishearing: Identifying and addressing listening challenges. In M. Reed and T. Jones (Eds.), Listening in the classroom: Teaching students how to listen (pp. 75-91). Alexandria, VA: TESOL Press.

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

Wells, J. (2006). English intonation: An introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wichmann, A. (2005). The role of intonation in the expression of attitudinal meaning. English Language and Linguistics, 9(2), 229–253.