What are the things that make good listeners good, and how can teachers help their learners develop their listening skills? Seasoned ESL teacher Hugh Dellar shares examples, insights and practical tips for the classroom.
Several years ago now, I went to watch a colleague of mine teach. He had been at the university quite a long time and had managed to claim the large 1960s-styled language lab as his own private kingdom!
In the lesson I saw, students worked on their own and listened to some sentences on a tape, each of which they had to write down 100% correctly before they were allowed to move on to the next sentence. One poor student must have listened to his first sentence about 30 times and was clearly really struggling. The teacher pointed out his transcription was wrong and kept telling him to listen harder. So he played the sentence yet again – and again – and again!
I put the headphones on myself so I could hear what he was trying to write down. On an old, muffled tape, a voice repeated over and over again:
Tie a knot in your handkerchief in case you forget.
No context, no glossary, no explanation, just that one isolated sentence.
In the end, the student called the teacher over again and asked “What does tire notting mean?” to which the teacher replied “You’re not listening!” again.
At this point, the student snapped and screamed out:
I AM listening, but I just can’t hear!
Now, this experience got me thinking about what kind of problems students have when they listen in English – and I have come to the conclusion that the problems are usually much more to do with HEARING (and KNOWING) than they are with LISTENING.
Just listen – is it that simple?
Our students generally listen and pay attention to listenings in class as best they can, but fail for a number of reasons. They:
- can’t hear words simply because they don’t know them!
- can’t hear the correct words because they can’t distinguish sounds.
- can hear words, but often only individual ones – and can’t group them appropriately.
- can hear words – even chunks / expressions – but can’t process the meaning of what
they are hearing quickly enough.
So there are serious issues to do with being able to process the ‘acoustic blur’ of speech as students listen to it. And yet what actually happens in classrooms when we think we’re helping students get better at listening?
What does “listening” mean anyway?
I once had a teacher on a teacher training course who already had quite a lot of experience, but who was actually struggling on the course a bit. She said it would be all sorted the next day – she was going to “do a listening”. When I pushed her and asked what the aim of the lesson – or the language focus – would be, she looked at me like I was mad and stated that the aim would obviously be to DO A LISTENING!
All too often we do listenings – and our students endure them – because this is what is to be done, because they’re in the coursebook and because, well, we have the idea we should do them, but perhaps we don’t always think why we do them. What are they actually for, from a pedagogical point of view?
There are those who would say that when we do listenings, we are teaching listening skills. But what are these skills and how do we teach them?
Listening skills: a closer look
Believers in the concept of ‘skills’ might point to the following, taken from the Common European Framework:
The CEFR claims that learners should be able to demonstrate ability of the following ‘sub-skills’:
• listening for gist
• listening for specific information
• listening for detailed understanding
• listening for implications
• listening as a member of a live audience
• listening to audio media
But what are these skills? How do we actually do them? How do we improve our ability to do them? How do we teach them? Is doing a gist task or doing a task where students listen for specific information enough? Do they somehow learn transferable skills of ‘listening for gist’ or ‘listening for specific information’ through the process of doing listenings in class – and can they take these skills away and thus deal with other listenings better in future?
The dominant way of thinking about all of this has been SCHEMA THEORY, which stresses what’s called top-down processing. This emphasises students’ prior knowledge and predictions / expectations about what will be said.
Often this means that before we ‘do’ our listening in class, we get students to predict content from pictures, context, etc.
Language processing: How does it actually work?
Now, this is all well and good, but read deeper in the literature on the field and problems soon start emerging, as the following quote makes clear:
“For complex social and psychological reasons, [learners] are less sure they have grasped the topic being spoken of, the opinion being expressed about it, and the reasons for the speaker wanting to talk about it. They are less sure of the relevance of their own experience in helping them to arrive at an interpretation. On top of all that they are less sure of the forms of the language… for all these reasons learners are less able to bring to bear top-down processing in forming an interpretation and hence are more reliant on bottom up processing.”
(Brown quoted in Jenkins, 2001 OUP)
What Brown focuses on is the idea of BOTTOM-UP PROCESSING. In short, this says that what is important is HEARING individual sounds, decoding words, decoding chunks, decoding sentences and so on, and that it is through the process of doing this that learners build up a mental picture of what is being discussed.
If you accept this – and I do – there would seem to be some profound implications for teaching listening.
Bottom-up processing: putting together the puzzle pieces
Firstly, simply getting students to predict or use their previous knowledge – so-called ‘activating schemata’ – isn’t necessary. There might be masses of information we have previous knowledge of when we sit and listen to a conversation and yet there may not be anything at all which comes up that we have predicted or which relates to our ‘schema’. Classroom listenings are perhaps designed to include more predictability, but in the real world, language in use can be very unpredictable indeed – and the only way to deal with this is to listen to it all and understand it all.
Another point to make here is that students often hear words even if they don’t make sense to them. Where failure may occur is when they don’t know a word and or else can’t hear it. As I have already said, part of the reason listening is difficult for students is that they simply don’t know the words they are hearing, but on top of that words which they may know change sounds and bunch up in the stream of speech, making them harder to hear. This, in turn, can lead to difficulties for students hearing new words, because they can’t distinguish them from the general mass of sound around them.
Fostering listening skills through a task-based approach
So let’s go back to the ‘sub-skills’ outlined by the CEFR earlier. What is really happening when we do these things? Well, firstly, when we perform any of these skills in the real world, we’re paying attention. It’s not that we don’t hear things we’re not listening for. Imagine that your plane is delayed and you have to listen to a long announcement to find out what’s going on. You process and understand everything that precedes the information that is relevant to you, but then afterwards you just choose to forget it.
In the same way, after watching a film, you report the gist to friends – not the detail. This is NOT because you weren’t paying attention to or enjoying all the detail. It’s much more to do with what we are able to – or choose to – remember after the event.
Given this, task is important in the classroom. If you want students to remember specific details, you have to make the task crystal clear to students. Listening involves a lot of processing: students have to hear all the words, remember what the words mean and then decide whether or not they will need to remember them.
This is a big ask!
Clear tasks make this process a little bit easier.
In addition, as well as doing listenings in class, we also need to think more about how to teach what Mike McCarthy has called LISTENERSHIP.
Listening in class… and out in the world
One point to bear in mind about listening in class is that in several crucial ways it’s easier than listening outside of the class. For one thing, it’ll be graded better and recorded clearly (usually), without too much background noise. Most importantly, though, outside class, listening is often connected to conversation, which means learners have to listen, process AND think of what to say themselves. In class, they don’t have this pressure. Listenings in class leave more time and space for students to react as they don’t need to participate and add.
As such, it’s easier to learn language from listenings in class. It also means that if students are to cope outside of class, they need language to engage in listenership, which means teaching lots of predictable, typical chunks of language, all of which will both help them process what they hear quicker, as well as also becoming more able to control the conversations they find themselves in. This means learning expressions / chunks to help them manage their discourse.
On a basic level, it means things like:
Sorry. Can you say that again?
Sorry. Can you speak slower?
whilst at a higher level, it means things like:
So going back to what you were saying earlier . . .
So what? Are you saying that you think that . . . ?
and so on.
You start to fully appreciate the importance of using listenings in class as a vehicle for bringing useful language to the students when you look at what it is that good listeners actually do.
Good listeners:
- know nearly all – if not all – of the words that they hear.
- hear the words when they listen to them.
- process sound in chunks.
- understand words / chunks automatically due to repeated OVER-LEARNING in class.
Hearing vs. Language issues
Other good things to do include doing a listening once for gist, then letting students compare answers / ideas; round up their ideas and see what the class as a whole have; then set a more language-focused task and play the listening again; let students compare ideas again, before rounding up. Finally, play the listening a third time, but this time let students read the audioscript. This way, they – and you – can see which parts they couldn’t hear because of HEARING problems and which parts were down to LANGUAGE problems.
If they read the whole audioscript and understand everything, but didn’t get it when they listened, that’s a hearing problem and the real issue is that they need to read and listen more and get more used to the blur of sound that is spoken language. However, if they read and STILL don’t understand things, that’s a language problem and means you need to teach that new language. Reading and listening at the same time helps bridge the gap between the nice, tidy way language looks written down and the messy, fast way it sounds spoken.
It’s also good to ask students to read conversations they’ve listened to aloud, especially if the conversations are full of useful, everyday language. Let them read in pairs and go round whilst they’re reading aloud and correct and re-model pronunciation for them.
Pronunciation: Teaching “problem” sounds
We also need to pay a lot more attention to pronunciation in class – especially pronunciation related to connected speech (elision, assimilation, weak forms, linking sounds, etc.) We maybe need to accept that while it’s nice if our efforts to improve our students’ pronunciation work, the REAL goal of these slots in class is an improved ability to HEAR natural spoken language. As such, we need to help students with problem sounds.
Teach the sounds and how to say them, repeat new words with the sounds in them, and then show how these words say within sentences, so students get to hear – and get to practise saying – the way the words change how they sound once they’re within sentences. For instance, with low levels, you may well often work from sound to work to sentence.
Last week, a Chinese group I was working with had problems saying the word WEIRD, so I drilled like this:
EAR
EEEE-YA
WEIRD
WEIRD
WHAT A WEIRD GUY
WHAT WEIRD WEATHER
and so on.
Listening exercises for the classroom
1. Gap-fill exercises to practise listening skills
It’s great if you can do gap-fill listenings, where the first listening is for gist; then the students listen again and try to fill in the gaps in an audioscript. They compare their ideas in pairs and you play the listening a third time, pausing after each gap and eliciting the missing words. This works best if the gaps are more than one word. When you elicit the answers, write them up on the board and drill them with the whole group and some individual students.
Here’s a conversation from a Pre-Intermediate book I once wrote that works like this:
TALKING ABOUT LIFE IN YOUR COUNTRY
You are going to listen to a conversation between Martin and Alex.
They meet while they are abroad.
As you listen, cover the script below and decide:
1. Why are they abroad?
2. How long are they going to stay?
Listen again and fill in the gaps.
Martin: What do you do back home?
Alex: Well, I was working in a car factory, but it (1) . . . . . . . . . That’s why I’m here, really. I got some money when I lost my job and I decided to go travelling (2) . . . . . . . . to think about what to do next.
Martin: And what are you going to do?
Alex: I still haven’t decided. The economy’s in (3) . . . . . . . . at the moment. There’s a lot of unemployment and people aren’t spending much money, so it’s going to be difficult to find a new job. I might try to re-train and do (4) . . . . . . . . .
Martin: Have you got any idea what you want to do?
Alex: Not really. Maybe something with computers. I might try to find a job abroad for a while, before I do that. What about your country? Is it easy to find work there?
Martin: Yes. A few years ago it was quite bad, but the economy’s (5) . . . . . . . . at the moment. I think unemployment is about four per cent, so finding a job isn’t really a problem. The problem is (6) . . . . . . . . . Prices have gone up a lot over the last few years. Everything is more expensive, so the money you earn goes really quickly.
Alex: Right.
Martin: Sometimes I think I should move to somewhere like here. I’m sure people don’t get paid very much, but the cost of living is so low, and there’s a better (7) . . . . . . . . . People don’t work as hard; life is more relaxed; the food’s great; the weather’s great; it’s just very nice.
Alex: Yes, maybe, but don’t forget that you are on holiday. Maybe it’s (8) . . . . . . . . for the people who live here.
Martin: No, maybe not.
Alex: So anyway, how long are you going to stay here?
Martin: Just till Friday. I have to get back to work. What about you? How long are you staying?
Alex: Till I get bored or I (9) . . . . . . . . money. I don’t have any plans.
As I’m eliciting the answers fro the group and writing things like (9) RUN OUT OF on the board, I’ll draw the links between RUN and OUT and OF and drill RU-NOW-TOV with the group.
2. Listen closely: Dictations
Dictations are also good, especially at lower levels when learners are still developing their ear. Here’s one we built into OUTCOMES Elementary.
A Listen. Write the questions you hear.
B Listen again and repeat what you hear.
C Work in pairs. Ask and answer the questions.
Audioscript
- What are you studying?
- What year are you in?
- Are you enjoying it?
- How are you?
- Are you hungry?
- Are you good at English?
- Where are you from?
- Where are you staying?
3. Hearing – the underrated skill
One other kind of exercises that focus explicitly on HEARING is this, from OUTCOMES Intermediate:
B Decide which words you heard. Then listen and check.
- I’m involved in/on designing what you see on the screen.
- How did you getting/get into that?
- Vodafone were recruiting people so I applied/replied and I got a job.
- It’s like any job. It has its boring moments/minutes.
- It depends if we have a deadline to complete/meet.
- I do something/anything like fifty or sixty hours a week.
- That must be stressed/stressful.
- I sometimes work better under/in pressure.
- They said I would get a permanent/payment contract, but then it never happened.
Final thoughts: So how can we help students get better at listening?
Well, firstly, I think we have a duty to simply teach as much typical language as we can – both as part of listening-based lessons and also at as many other times as we can.
Secondly, we need to ensure we always teach language – both vocabulary AND grammar – in natural contexts and we need to say / model the things we’re teaching, so our students get used to hearing them in context and can recognise them when they hear them again. We need to mark the main stresses on words we teach, show linking between words more and do lots and lots of drilling.
Finally, we just need to ensure that we recycle words, chunks, exchanges and conversations over different classes and across different levels. Thus, we’ll ensure not only language development, but also massively increased opportunities for hearing.
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If you found this article helpful, you may also be interested in re-thinking gap-fill exercises and using the Dictogloss method in the classroom.
Hugh Dellar
Hugh Dellar is the co-founder of the online school and training company www.lexicallab.com. He has co-authored two multi-level General English series, Outcomes and Innovations (published by National Geographic Learning). His first methodology book, Teaching Lexically, came out in 2016. Most recently, he worked on Grammar Nonsense . . . and what to do about it, published by Wayzgoose Press.
