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 L I S T E N I N G
More
listening
or better
listeners?
John Field believes that learners benefit
from focused practice.
M
uch of what goes on in
second-language listening
classrooms follows a very
conventional format, which
might be termed the ‘comprehension
approach’. There is a pre-listening phase
whose aim is to provide learners with
some kind of context for the recording to
be heard, to motivate them for listening
and to introduce a very few words of
critical vocabulary. There is then usually
a first play of the recording for general
understanding. This gets learners used to
the voices of the speakers and leaves them
with a rough idea of what information is
mentioned where. The main part of the
lesson requires learners to listen again in
order to answer pre-set questions or to
complete a task, such as filling in a form.
The teacher then checks to see if the
answers are correct. Parts of the recording
that have caused problems may be
replayed. More persistent teachers
sometimes go back and play the entire
recording again in short sections, asking
more probing questions. Others offer
learners a final chance to listen, this
time with a tapescript in their hands.
12 • Issue 61 March 2009 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
Pros and cons of the
comprehension approach
The goal of this approach is to elicit
from the learner what is referred to
vaguely as ‘comprehension’. The ability
to provide correct answers is taken to be
a measure of how competently the
learners perform as listeners. The
format is a very manageable one,
though one that can become too
predictable. But we have to ask
ourselves if it actually works. The
comprehension approach brings
undoubted benefits to a group of
learners. These benefits are:
● exposure to a range of voices
speaking in the target language;
● exposure to a range of topics,
situations and contexts for listening;
● exposure to the rhythms of the target
language (always assuming that the
passages are ‘authentic’ or that they
have been competently scripted and
recorded);
● practice in one type of listening in
particular – what one might call
‘auditory scanning’, ie listening for
specific pieces of information (always
useful for passing exams).
On the other hand, the approach has
many faults and limitations, which we
cannot afford to ignore. Here are a few:
● It does not work well with larger
classes, where a few members may
volunteer answers while others say
little.
● It is very teacher-centred, with the
teacher deciding what is to be listened
to and when.
● It relies on the outdated view that
listening involves the simple
transmission of an idea from a
speaker to a listener, so that there is a
single ‘correct’ answer to each
question. In fact, it is the listener who
has to make sense of what the
speaker is saying; and there may well
be more than one possible
interpretation.
● It provides the teacher with
information about the outcomes of
listening but says nothing about the
processes that the learners have used.
We do not know if they have given a
right answer through having
recognised every word or through
having recognised a few and made an
intelligent guess.
Adapting the approach
It is possible to deal with some of these
issues by adapting the way in which we
apply the comprehension approach.
Firstly, the teacher needs to adopt a role
that is deliberately non-interventionist.
Instead of rushing to provide correct
answers, teachers should stand back and
let learners work out the answers for
themselves. This may require multiple
replays of the recording, but there is no
harm in that, since each replay assists
the class to decode a little more.
Secondly, there needs to be much more
emphasis on learners working together in
pairs, as they do in other activities:
comparing their interpretations before
listening again to check. Thirdly, we
need to follow up the answers to
questions (both right ones and wrong
ones) by asking learners how they came
by them. In this way, we gain insights
into the kind of listening they are
doing, instead of judging them as good
or bad listeners.
The need for new
methods
However, when all is said and done, it
has to be accepted that the
comprehension approach suffers from
some intractable flaws. Teachers often
complain that this extended practice
seems to produce relatively little in
terms of observable improvements in a
class’s listening skills; some argue that
this approach appears to test learners
rather than teaching them.
The greatest faults in the approach
lie in the assumptions on which it is
based, and can only be dealt with by
finding entirely new ways of handling
listening in the language classroom. The
approach relies crucially upon the
simplistic notion that listening
necessarily gets better, the more one
hears. That may be the case with some
learners, but many find that their
listening skills are not developing at all,
and become demotivated as the teacher
gradually increases the difficulty of the
passages they are presented with.
Nothing is as boring as listening to a
string of unfamiliar sounds that one
cannot shape into words, and the
understandable response is to tune out
altogether. So we need to do more than
just provide end-to-end practice; we
need a set of methods that enables us to
train better listeners.
A dedicated programme of listening
training can adopt three main lines of
attack. We can:
● expose learners in a focused way to
aspects of spoken English that they
are likely to find difficult. This
includes the ways in which phonemes
and words vary when they occur in
connected speech. It also includes the
characteristic rhythm of the language,
and the features that distinguish
natural everyday speech from the kind
of scripted material that listening
courses often provide.
● model the processes that first-
language listeners use. We know a lot
about these processes because they
have been investigated by cognitive
psychologists. They fall into two
types: those that enable the listener to
decode the sounds that reach the ear
(by turning them into words and
clauses) and those that enable the
listener to build larger-scale meaning
out of the words that have been
recognised.
● enable L2 listeners to make as much
sense as possible of connected speech,
as early as possible. This entails
training them in compensatory
strategies that counter the limitations
that arise from an incomplete
knowledge of grammar and
vocabulary and from unfamiliarity
with hearing connected English speech.
These three priorities constitute an
approach to listening training that is truly
developmental. They need not replace
the comprehension approach entirely,
but they should certainly be used in
preparing learners for comprehension
work and in following it up with remedial
exercises whenever we discover that they
have specific difficulties.
Nothing is as
boring as listening to
a string of unfamiliar
sounds that one
cannot shape
into words
Focused practice
The lines of attack just identified demand
a type of practice that is much more
targeted than anything that goes on in
the comprehension approach. It is
practice that focuses on a single feature
of the input, a single process or a set of
strategies for coping with a single
problem of understanding. Instead of
coming across a listening difficulty
sporadically and by chance, the learners
are confronted with multiple examples of
it in an intensive ten-minute session. The
session could be part of a listening lesson
or just a ‘filler’ at the end of the morning.
Listening practice activities need not
be complicated. One of the most
effective techniques is to dictate a set of
short sentences to learners and to ask
them to transcribe them. The teacher’s
voice is all that is needed, though it is
perhaps more challenging to excise
sentences from a recording of natural
speech. The sentences should exemplify
just one feature of English that learners
find hard to recognise. For example,
they might contain multiple examples of
the weak forms of function words like
a, the, at and to; or they might all have
an unusual word order or be difficult to
• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 61 March 2009 •
divide into separate words.
With other types of problem, the
teacher can ask learners to interpret
sentences rather than transcribing them.
Learners might explain the meaning of
an ambiguous sentence, decide what
pronouns like it or they refer to, guess
how to respond to a particular
intonation pattern or indicate the
significance of hearing He said he’d
phoned as against He said he’d phone.
They may give their answers in L2, but
there is no reason why they should not
give them in L1 if it is easier. So far as
strategy use is concerned, the teacher
might provide examples that throw up a
particular problem of understanding:
pairs of sentences without clear links
between them or sentences containing
unknown vocabulary items. The class
could then discuss how to deal with
these eventualities.
This, then, should be the heart and
soul of the listening lesson – a set of
techniques that aim to encourage more
effective listening behaviour instead of
simply providing more and more
listening.
Some examples of
focused practice
Here are a few suggestions for exercise
types.
Exposing
Problem: Faced with a complicated
string of consonants, speakers of natural
English often miss out at least one of the
consonants. Classic examples are the way
didn’t becomes /dânt/ and sixth becomes
/sâkC /. This can badly confuse an L2
listener who is not familiar with it.
Solution: Make a list of examples and
put them into sentences that provide
minimal contextual clues. Record the
sentences and play them to the learners.
Ask the learners to transcribe what they
hear. Give the answers, and then get the
class to listen again.
Examples of elision
nex(t) spring  neck spring
nigh(t) club  nigh club
firs(t) three  firse three
arm(ed) guard  arm guard
blin(d) man  bly man
ol(d) people  ole people
fi(ve) pm  fie pm
lea(ve) school  lee school

13
 More
listening
or better
listeners?
 Modelling
Problem: There are very few pauses in
connected speech, so a listener faces the
difficulty of working out where one
word ends and the next begins. An
expert listener to English works on the
assumption that a stressed syllable will
often mark the beginning of a new
word.
Solution: Play a recording of a sentence
excised from a piece of natural
connected speech. Ask the learners to
write down the words they understand.
Replay the extract and get the learners
to write down more words until they
have managed to segment most of the
sentence. Point out how many words in
the extract begin with a stressed syllable.
Enabling
Problem: The most important strategy
in listening to a foreign language
consists of constructing a hypothesis
about what has been heard based on
partial evidence. Many listeners clutch
at straws: they understand a word or
two (often a verb) and form a guess
about what the speaker is saying. But
the trouble is that they don’t go on to
test their assumptions against what
comes next.
Solution: Design some sentences that
are ambiguous until halfway through
and record them. Play the ambiguous
part of each sentence and ask the
learners to anticipate what will come
next. Then play the whole sentence and
ask them to revise their assumptions
accordingly.
Resolving ambiguity
The lawyer questioned … The lawyer questioned by the judge was dishonest.
The house was built by … The house was built by a river.
The rescuers found … The rescuers found they were lost.
She gave the cat … She gave the cat a name.
He hit the man with … He hit the man with the beard.
14 • Issue 61 March 2009 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
Rethinking the listening
lesson
I have suggested that much of the
solution to the problems of second-
language listening lies in small-scale
localised practice. This kind of work
might seem trivial, but it is critically
important – especially in assisting
learners to decode what they hear as the
basis for building an understanding of
meaning. It is simply not true to suggest,
as some do, that most low-level problems
of word recognition can be resolved by
the use of ‘context’. Using context to
compensate for sections of a recording
that have not been understood does
indeed provide an excellent strategy for
handling second-language listening.
However, the learner needs to be able to
decode a minimum number of words in
order to construct that context in the
first place. Furthermore, if the learner’s
decoding is inaccurate, there may be quite
serious knock-on effects in the kinds of
A disturbingly large
number of larger-
scale problems of
understanding actually
have their origins in
small-scale errors of
word recognition
guess that are made about what is being
said. Hearing the word burst as birth or
invent as prevent or the phrase the church
where she was buried as the church where
she was married may lead the listener to
construct expectations that are entirely
inappropriate. A disturbingly large
number of larger-scale problems of
understanding actually have their origins
in small-scale errors of word recognition.
There are also strong parallels
elsewhere. The approaches I have
suggested treat listening as a type of
expertise and they correspond very
closely to models of how expertise is
acquired. We would not allow a driver
on the road without first demonstrating
a series of small-scale actions (turn on
the ignition – put the car into gear –
look in the mirror – take off the
handbrake – depress the accelerator)
which the learner needs to practise. The
trick of mastering this and many other
kinds of expertise (eg chess playing,
skiing) lies firstly in combining small-
scale operations into larger ones and
secondly in applying them until they
become automatic and demand minimal
conscious attention. The driver/chess
player/skier then has attention to spare
for the many unexpected incidents that
may occur – just as the listener becomes
more capable of dealing with unusual
topics, meanings and words.

So here is a new role for the
comprehension approach: not to provide
unstructured practice for which the
learner has not been trained, but to
provide opportunities for engaging,
combining and refining processes that
have been acquired in more focused
sessions. It should extend the listener’s
exposure to various voices and types of
listening; and give experience of handling
the challenges that real-life second-
language listening holds for the unwary.
In particular, comprehension work
provides the opportunity for more
systematic training in the use of
strategies. What is important about
strategy use is not how many strategies
a listener commands, but how
appropriately a particular strategy is
matched to a particular problem of
understanding. One of the best purposes
to which the traditional comprehension
lesson can be put is thus to explore the
ways in which learners compensate for
gaps in their understanding and to assess
whether they are effective or not. ETp
John Field has written,
spoken and advised
on second language
listening for over 25
years. In his latest
book, Listening in the
Language Classroom
(CUP), you will find
many more examples
of focused listening
practice. He currently
teaches at the University
of Reading and at the
Faculty of Education,
Cambridge University.
j.c.field@reading.ac.uk