CHAPTER

21
Coursebook Listening Activities
David A. Hill and Brian Tomlinson

Introduction

Despite a variety of publications in the past fifteen years describing and exem-
plifying systematic approaches to developing listening skills in foreign language
learners (e.g., Anderson and Lynch, 1988; Rost, 1990; Rost, 1991; White, 1998;
Field, 1998; Buck, 2001), little has changed in that period in the type oflistening
activity provided in the majority of widely used coursebooks.
According to Field, the typical recent textbook provides the foIlowing stages in
a listening task:

• pre-listening (for context and motivation);

• extensive listening ---+ questions to establish the situation;
• pre-set questions or pre-set task;
• extensive listening;
• review of questions or task;
• inferring new vocabulary/examination of functional language. (Field, 1998:
110)

Field laments that the model used by textbooks is a product model in which
'success in listening is measured by correct responses to questions or tasks', as
opposed to a process model in which teachers would 'foIlow up incorrect
responses in order to determine where understanding broke down and to put
things right'. Buck (2001) comments that most classwork done on listening skills
is 'bottom-up' rather than 'top-down'. By this he means that there is a con-
centration on knowledge of the smaIlest elements of the incoming sound-stream,
such as phonemes or individual words, at the expense of wider issues such as
general knowledge or experience of the world. Buck concludes that:

both research and daily experience indicate that the processing of the different
types of knowledge (involved in understanding language) does not occur in a
fixed sequence, but rather, that different types of processing may occur
simultaneously, or in any convenient order. Thus, syntactic knowledge might
be used to help identity a word, ideas about the topic of conversation might
influence processing of the syntax, or knowledge of the context wiIl help
interpret the meaning. (Buck, 2001: 2)
 21. Coursebook Listening Activities 365

What these two writers suggest, and what Rost (1991) and White (1998)
demonstrate in their 'recipe' books of listening activities, is that it is possible to be
systematicabout teaching listening skills, to develop lists of listening subskills
whichneed to be practised and to find appropriate pedagogic vehicles for such
practice.

What are Textbooks Providing?

In order to understand more clearly what recent textbooks are providing in the
wayof listening activities, three Intermediate level students' books were exam-
ined:L. Soars and J. Soars (1996), New Headway English Course (Oxford University
Press);S. Cunningham and P. Moor (1998), Cutting Edge (Longman); S. Kayand
v. Jones (2000), /nside Out (Macmillan Heinemann). The first 50 pages of each
bookwere studied to discover what kind of activities were being offered related to
therecorded material presented on the audio cassettes, and printed as tapescripts
in the back of the books. In the three books, there were 92 such activities, which
canbe broken down as follows:

Listening for specific information 39/92

Listen and check 19/92
Pronunciation practice 13/92
Cloze 7/92
Answerquestions on the cassette 6/92
Read text and listen to it 3/92
Other 5/92

It canbe seen from this that the majority of activities involved the students in the
traditional listening comprehension activity of extracting factual information
froma spoken texto There is a sense in which the second highest activity type -
listenand check - is related to the first, in that the students complete a written
task,and then listen for the correct answers on the tape - thereby also listening
forspecificinformation, in relation to their answers. The pronunciation activities
werevaried, working on a range of discrete pronunciation areas such as weak
forms,sentence stress and word stress. Cloze activities were largely confined to
Cutting Edge (6/7), as were the listen and answer activities (4/6) where students
wrotea written response to a question asked or statement made on the cassette.
On a few occasions, the students were merely asked to listen to a text being read
on cassette while they followed it in their books. Probably the most interesting
activitytypes occurred in the 'other' category. Headway asked the students to
gaugethe effect ofbald 'Yes/No' answers written in their books, with the question
tag'Ves,1do/No, 1 don't' answers on tape, working in the area ofpoliteness. The
samebook also asked students to listen and decide whether the ' 's' ending (e.g.,
'it's') was'it is' or 'it has', which required understanding of the contexto /nside Out
askedstudents to listen to different pieces of music and relate them to genres of
366 David A. Hill and Brian Tomlinson

film, thus working on the students' knowledge of the world. The same book also
asked the students to write out a nursery rhyme from the words given injumbled
order and then mark the stressed syllables. In one case, in Headway, the spoken
text appeared to be presenting new language. In almost all cases, the longer
taped texts used for listening for specific informatian were monologues or dia-
logues, often appearing in the form of an interview.
It is plain that the cassette-related listening activities in any given coursebook
only represent a part of the potentiallistening opportunities in a textbook-based
lesson. Other opportunities are provided by simple classroom language such as
following the teacher's instructions, or by what are often referred to as 'speaking
activities', where the students are involved in an information exchange (which is
plainly as much about listening as about speaking, which is either prescribed in
the textbook itself, available in supplementary materials or added by the teacher).
However, the fact that textbook authors provide such a limited range of listening
activities points to a lack of a systematic approach to listening skill work.

What could Textbooks be Providing?

Rost (1991) has used a division of listening activities into four broad types:

Name Examples of activities

Attentive Listening: the learners have to give short verbal and non-verbal
responses to the speaker in a real-time interaction.
Intensive Listening: the learners are focused on particular aspects of the
language system to raise awareness of how they affect
meamng.
Selective Listening: the learners concentrate on specific pieces of
information, learning to attend selectively to what they
hear.
Interactive Listening: learners are helped to become active listeners by
working in pairs or small groups with information gap,
problem-solving type activities.

White (1998) categorizes listening skills into five broad areas:

Name Examples of activities

Perception Skills:
Language Skills:
Using Knowledge of the
World:
skills such as recognizing individual sounds,
identifying reduced forms, recognizing
intonation patterns.
skills such as identifying individual words and
groups and building up meanings for them.
connecting words to non-linguistic features to
get clues to meaning, using knowledge of
topie.
 21. Coursebook Listening Activities 367

Dealing with Information: understanding gist meaning, inferring

information which is not specifically stated.
Interacting with a Speaker: coping with speaker variations such as speed
and accent, recognizing speaker intention,
identifying speaker mood.

Both authors then go on to offer a broad range of recipes for activities which
can be adapted to alllevels by grading the texts and/or the tasks. Buck (2001)
cites a number of taxonomies of listening skills which can also be used, or
amalgamated,to provide a principled listening skills syllabus. Were coursebooks
to be written using such systematic approaches to listening, they would be doing
the language learning and teaching community a great service!

Suggestions for Additional Approaches to Developing Materials

for Listening Skills

Sources 01Input

In most coursebooks the main source of spoken input is a cassette or a CD-ROM

onwhichfluent native speakers perform scripted dialogues or monologues. Yet in
reallife the main source of spoken input for most speakers of a foreign language
isface-to-facecontact with other non-native speakers of the language. Obviously
in class learners spend a lot of time interacting face to face with their teacher
(althoughnearly alwayswith the teacher initiating and controlling the exchange)
and in some classes the learners spend time interacting face to face with each
other. However this face-to-face contact is often incidental to (or even despite)
the coursebook and usually takes place during activities in which the main peda-
gogicgoals involve the development of speaking skills. It is rare for coursebooks
to include listening activities which feature interaction with the teacher and/or
other learners. It is also rare for coursebooks to include listening activities in
whichthe speakers are from outside the cassette and the classroom. And yet it is
easyenough in most learning situations for speakers/interactants to be invited
into the classroom or for arrangements to be made for learners to participate in
listeningactivities outside the classroom. For example, in one language school in
Cambridgeteachers from three different classes used to interact live in front of all
three classesat the start of a listening lesson and then the learners would go back
to their own classroom for the follow-up activities. In a school in Jakarta the
students found English-sounding names in the phone book and then rang to
inviteEnglish speakers to visit their class to give a talk on something they were
enthusiasticexperts on. And in a school inJapan the students were taken for their
listeninglessons to the cinema, to the airport, to the theatre and on trains which
had announcements in English.
It would not be too difficult for coursebooks to supplement their cassette-based
listening activities with activities which make use of the following as sources of
input:
368 David A. Hill and Brian Tomlinson

• the teacher
• other teachers
• other learners in the class
• learners from other classes (one language school in Cambridge used to
encourage learners to give prepared presentations to classes at the level below
them)
• invited speakers
• people the learners have phoned
• official speakers in public places
• people interviewed by the learners
• discussion groups outside the school

Types 01Input

In 'reallife' it is rare that we have to listen to other people's conversations or to

strangers on cassettes telling us about their hobbies, plans or ambitions; and 1
cannot remember ever needing or wanting to do this in a foreign language. Yet,
listening to other people's dialogues and listening to short monologues from
strangers are the most frequent sources of spoken input in most coursebooks. We
would like to see more consideration given in materials development to the sorts
of listening events that speakers of a foreign language are likely to need or want to
participate in, and much more thought given to the roles that the foreign lan-
guage speaker might have to play in these events. Only then will we be able to
help learners to develop usefullistening skills. We would also like to see much
more time given in materials to sources of input which have the potential to
facilitate language acquisition. This means, for example, making a greater effort
to find or develop listening texts which have relevance to the learner, which have
affective appeal and which have the potential to engage the learner both cogni-
tivelyand emotively. It also means involving the learner actively in the listening
event either as an interactant or as a listener with a need and purpose.

Additional Types 01 Relevant Input

Here are some listening events which speakers of a foreign language are likely to
need or want to participate in, and which do not often feature in coursebooks
(for example, none of the listening events below are included in Inside Out Upper
Intermediate (2001):

• being taught to do something which they need or want to do

• being taught about something which is useful or interesting
• teaching somebody else to do something and listening to their questions and
requests for clarification
• teaching somebody else about something and listening to their questions and
requests for clarification
• taking part in discussions with friends about topics of interest and concern
 21. Coursebook Listening Activities 369

• taking part in phatic communion (i.e., small-talk situations where the main
point is to establish social contact rather than communicate information or
ideas)
• listening to questions about what they need or want (e.g., in a bank, at a ticket
office,in a travel agent)
• listening to announcements (e.g., at airports, at stations, at sports events)
• listening to information (e.g., to train information on the phone, to weather
forecasts,to recorded road travel information)
• listening to advertisements (and separating information from persuasion)
• listening to radio programmes for enjoyrnent and/or information
• listening to music for enjoyrnent
• watchingTV and films for enjoyment

lntake-rich Activities
Listeningactivities which have potential for achieving rich intake of language
couldindude:

• listening to the teacher reading poems, short stories, extracts from novels, etc.
• listening to a group of teachers acting a scene from a play
• listening to the teacher telling jokes and anecdotes
• listening to other learners reading poems, telling jokes and anecdotes, etc.
(but only if they have prepared and practised)
• listening to other learners reading aloud texts which they have enjoyed
studying
• listening to other learners doing a prepared presentation on something which
reallyinterests them (especially if the listeners have a choice of presenters to
listen to)
• watchingsports events, news events, documentaries, etc., with commentaries in
the target language
• engaging in discussion with their peers on controversial topics

Ways oi Facilitating lntake

Just as when we read in our L1, we listen to our L1 in multidimensional ways

(Masuhara,this volume; Tomlinson, 2001). That is, we do not only decode the
words;we use sensory imaging (especially visual imaging) to represent utterances,
weuse inner speech to repeat some of the utterances we hear and to talk to
ourselvesabout what we hear, we connect what we hear to our lives and to our
knowledgeof the world and we respond affectively to what we hear. In other
words,we create our own multidimensional mental representation of what we
hear,which converges with the representations of other L1listeners in relation to
the literal meaning of the spoken text but diverges in relation to our own needs,
wants,experience and attitudes. In this waywe maximize the possibilities of rich
and relevant intake and of the retention of features of the input which are salient
370 David A. Hill and Brian Tomlinson

to usoObviously, it is impossible to achieve equally effective representations in an

L2 but helping learners to try to do so can increase their chances both of
becoming effective listeners and of maximizing the potential of listening situ-
ations for language acquisition.
Ways of helping learners to achieve multidimensional representation of what
they listen to include:

• not using listening texts to test understanding of micro-features of the texts

(this encourages unidimensional processing of listening texts)
• not concentrating on short, simple listening texts at lower levels (this
encourages the habit of micro-pracessing)
• building up listening confidence by using a Total Physical Response (TPR)
appraach with beginners (Asher, 1977; Tomlinson, 1994) in which the learners
respond physically to instructions spoken by the teacher
• building up listening confidence by not testing learners at lower levels on what
they have not understood but giving instead opportunities to make use ofwhat
they have understood (e.g., retelling a story to someone who has not heard it)
• getting learners to analyse what they do when listening experientially in the L1
and then encouraging them to try listening in the same wayswhen experiential
listening is appropriate in the L2
• including extensive listening of potentially engaging texts fram the earliest
levels (and resisting the urge to set tasks to check comprehension)
• facilitating experiential listening by praviding whilst-reading tasks which
encourage sensory imaging, the use of inner speech, personal connections and
affective response (e.g., asking the learners to visualize the main character as
they listen to a story, to talk to themselves about how an announcement relates
to them, to think of similar situations in their own lives while they listen to an
account of the prablems of a teenager, to focus on how they feel about a
pravocative statement, etc.)
• giving instruction on how to listen experientially prior to a listening task (e.g.,
'When listening to the description of Betu make sure you try to see pictures
and that you think of places that it reminds you of)
• encouraging the teacher and the learners to tell anecdotes about their own
experiences in relation to the topic of a lesson
• setting homework tasks which involve learners listening experientially (live or
to recordings) to texts which appeal to them (one class in ]apan were
encouraged to record potentially interesting texts for the class and soon had a
thousand cassettes for students to select fram for homework listening)

Ways of DeveloPing Listening Skills

Fortunately, the best wayof helping learners to develop listening skills is to ensure
that the learners are exposed to a wide variety of listening text genres and text
types and to provide whilst-listening tasks similar to those suggested above for
 21. Coursebook Listening Activities 371

facilitatingintake. In addition, it is useful to make use of a combination of the

followingapproaches:

• Teaching learners about a particular listening subskiIl (e.g., listening for gist;
listening for specific information; listening in order to infer a speaker' s atti-
tude) and then providing practice activities.
• Gettinglearners to do a listening task in which they listen for a specific purpose
and then teaching them about the skiIls they used before providing practice
activities.
• Gettinglearners to do a listening task in which they listen for a specific purpose
and then asking them to think and talk about the skills they used before
providingfurther practice activities.
• Givinglearners a listening task in which they listen for a specific purpose and
getting them to think and talk about what skiIls and strategies they wiIl use
before they begin the activity.
• Givinglearners a listening task in which they listen for a specific purpose and
getting them to think and talk about what problems they had with the activity
before providing guidance and setting them another similar activity.

An Example of Multidimensional Listening Skills Lessons

Lesson 1

1. The teacher teIls the class an anecdote about her first day at schoo1.
2. The teacher invites the learners to think about their own first day at school.
3. The teacher reads aloud the poem 'First Day at School' by Roger McGough.
4. An invited speaker (either a teacher from another class or a guest) teIls the
class about his/her first experience of a particular activity (e.g., mountain
climbing, appearing on stage, driving a car).
5. The learners ask the speaker questions about the experience.
6. The teacher teIls the class that they are going to visit a country in Africa cal1ed
Betu. As this wil1be the first time that any of them have visited Betu, the
teacher is going to play ther;, a cassette which gives information about the
country. They should listen to the cassette and note down anything which
theythink is useful or interesting. They are told that they wil1al1travel to Betu
together but that after the first day there they wil1split up into smal1er groups
who wil1go off to different parts of the country.
7. The teacher tel1sthe learners to look at the photographs of different parts of
Betu in their coursebook (some are of the beaches, some of the mountains
and some of the game parks).
8. The teacher plays the cassette.
9. Eachlearner decides where they want to go in Betu and want they want to do.
10.The learners walk around the classroom teIling each other their decisions in 9
above.

10=
372 David A. Hill and Brian Tomlinson

11. The learners form groups who want to go to the same place and do similar
things.
12. The groups plan their trip to Betu using the headings provided in the
coursebook (e.g., Clothes to Take, Other Things to Take, Health Precautions,
Other Things to Do before the Trip, Things to Do in Betu, Things to be
Careful of in Betu, The Itinerary in Betu).
13. The teacher plays the cassette again.
14. The groups make revisions to their plans in 12.
15. The teacher tells the class that for homework each one of them should
imagine their trip to Betu. She warns them that some of the information on
the cassette is not completely reliable.
16. The teacher reads the poem 'First Day at School' again and tells the class
where they can find it in their coursebook so that they can read it for
homework.

Lesson 2

1. The learners sit in their groups from Lesson 1 and tell each other about their
imagined trip.
2. Each group decides on a group version of the trip (ideally with lots of
interesting and unanticipated events) and prepares a presentation on their
trip.
3. Each group gives a presentation on their trip to the rest of the class (or in a
very large class to groups who have been to different places).
4. New groups are formed and each group is given the task of writing the script
for a more reliable and useful 'Introduction to Betu'.
5. The teacher plays the cassette on Betu once more so that the groups can spot
all its deficiencies.
6. The groups write their scripts (and, if possible, record them).
7. Each group reads (or plays) its 'Introduction to Betu' and the other groups
are told to listen to it carefully so that they can evaluate it afterwards.
8. After each presentation one group is invited to give a constructive criticism of
it and all the groups give it a grade out of 20.
9. After all the presentations, the scores are added up and a winner is declared.
10. Each group is asked to go through the activities in Lessons 1 and 2 above in
their minds and to list all the listening skills they needed to use in these
activities.
11. The teacher lists listening skills on the board (or OHT) from plenary feed-
back from the groups on 10 above.
12. Each group is allocated a different listening skill from the list and is asked to
prepare a presentation on that skill for the following week in which they:

• describe the skill;

• give examples of when it is useful;
• give advice on how to develop and use the skill;
 21. CoursebookListening Activities 373

• give the other leamers a listening task which involves using the skill.

(The teacher could provide the class with a preparation period in which she is
availableto help the groups in the preparation of their presentations.)

Note

1. The main point of these lessons is that the learners gain a lot of experience of
different types of listening from different input sources.
2. The main role of the coursebook in these lessons is to provide:

• relevant and stimulating illustrations;

• cassette input;
• supporting materials (e.g., suggested headings, print versions of texts);
• a lesson plan and advice in the Teacher's Book.

Conclusion

Themain point about materials for developing listening skills is that leamers can
onlydevelop these skills if they do a lot of listening. Therefore, they should spend
considerabletime in listening lessons actually listening. Teaching and discovery
activitiescan facilitate the development of listening skills too, but spending most
of the listening lesson answering comprehension questions after listening to a
text (still the norm in many coursebooks) has very little beneficial effect on the
developmentof listening confidence and skills.
Let us spend much less time testing our learners on their recall and compre-
hensionof discrete features of a text (a task beyond many native speakers) and let
us spend much more time helping our leamers to enjoy listening.

References

Anderson,A. and Lynch, T. (1988) Listening. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Asher,]. (1977) Leaming Another Language through Actions: The Complete Teacher's
Guidebook.Los Gatos, CA: Sky Oak Productions.
Buck,G. (2001) Assessing Listening. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cunningham, S. and Moor, P. (1998) Cutting Edge. Harlow: Longman.
Field,]. (1998) 'Skills and strategies: towards a new methodology for listening'.
English Language Teaching]oumal, 52 (2), 110-18.
Kay,S. and Jones, V. (2000) Inside Out Intermediate. Oxford: Macmillan Heine-
mann.
Kay,S. and Jones, V. (2001) Inside Out Upper Intermediate. Oxford: Macmillan
Heinemann.
Rost,M. (1990) Listening in Language Leaming. Harlow: Longman.
Rost, M. (1991) Listening in Action. Hemel Hempstead: Prentice-Hall Inter-
national.
374 David A. Hill and Brian Tomlinson

Soars, L. and Soars, J. (1996) New Headway English Course. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Tomlinson, B. (1994) 'TPR materials'. Folio, 1 (2), 8-10.
Tomlinson, B. (2001). 'Connecting the mind: a multi-dimensional approach to
teaching language through literature'. The English Teacher, 104-15.
White, G. (1998) Listening. Oxford: Oxford University Press.