Introduction

Throughout my experience teaching, I have met students of all ages who feel highly
demotivated after having listened to a listening extract more than three times trying to
understand it unsuccessfully. Ironically, when learning a first language, or a second one
using the natural approach, listening comes before speaking and it is responsible for
offering support at the early stages of language development (Newton, 2009). Apart from
this fact, ‘Neologophobia’ - the fear of coining new words - is more acute in listening than
reading (Byrne, 1980), which might be the reason why learners feel the urge to understand
everything they can in any given listening material.

Since students have regularly asked me about how to improve their listening skills and
because I tend to use mainly ‘top-down’ activities during class, I have decided to provide
my students with additional ‘bottom-up’ processing practice. I completely agree with
Richards (1990) when he argues that fluent listening depends on the use of both.
Furthermore, most of my learners are teenagers and are fond of watching video clips on
YouTube. Nowadays, young people spend more time learning English in online than in
institutional settings (Toffoli & Sockett, 2015). Also, “due to ready availability and cheap
access to internet technologies, the focus of technology-mediated learning has shifted
from teacher- to student-initiated use” (Trinder, 2017, p1). I believe my learners will
benefit from using ‘bottom-up’ processing to help develop their listening skills while
watching videos they truly enjoy.

Analysis

Listening: an active skill

Although listening and reading have often been grouped as receptive skills (Harmer,
1998), the truth is many differences lie between them. Not only predicting a pattern of a
sentence becomes more difficult when listening, but also trying to force one's mind ahead
of the voices to predict (Byrne, 1980). Similarly, listening must be done in real-time and is
ephemeral, unless the listener asks for a repetition (Brown, 2006; Vandergrift, 2006).
Vandergrift (1999) claims that listening is not a passive skill whatsoever, but rather a very
complex task. Experts listeners need to be able to use a set of abilities at the same time to
decode and understand the message.

Thanks to psychologists, phoneticians, and neurologists who have studied the operations
needed to become an expert listener, the nature of the input that reaches the listener’s
ear, and how the brain responds (Field, 2008). These days, nobody denies the amount of
conscious effort needed to successfully understand a listening passage. Not only do
proficient listeners need to use their background and cultural knowledge to establish
meaning (Brown, 2006). As well, they can pick out sounds and words, recognise
prominence and the effect of cohesive devices, understand prosody, filter out any
irrelevant information, and even interpret the speaker’s intention (Bowen, 1994).

Additionally, a good listener comprehends L2 by absorbing the intonation, the rhythms, the
language, the word order, and grammatical patterns (Harmer, 1998). These are all crucial
things to get a holistic meaning when listening to a given extract and often change
drastically in the natural speech certain YouTube clips include, where each native speaker
has a different pitch, speed, and volume. An expert user can normalise all these variables
to recognise changes due to anger, excitement, or perhaps fear (Field, 1995). Listening is
far from being a passive/receptive skill despite traditional beliefs.

‘Bottom-up’ and ‘Top-down’ processing

As mentioned before, listening and reading were thought to be the same. Besides, it was
believed that teaching the former one was unnecessary. Since people are not taught how
to listen in their L1, they should not be taught how to do so in L2 (Brown & Yule, 1983).
Naturally, this is not correct at all. Listening has been consciously studied to help learners
achieve results faster. Two of the more popular views is that listening training can have a
‘meaning building’ nature or a ‘decoding’ one - ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’, respectively
(Field, 2008). Proficient listeners make use of both types of processing to understand the
real meaning of speakers’ utterances.

Conversely to ‘top-down’, ‘decoding’ seeks to build small units into a larger one by
avoiding using schematic and contextual knowledge, which means good listeners use
information in the speech itself to try to unravel its meaning (Hedge, 2000). This turns out
to be useful when differentiating between an unskilled and a skilled listener. The former
needs to rely more on contextual and co-textual evidence while the latter seems to be
accurate and have automatic decoding (Field, 2008). Proficient listeners use ‘bottom-up’
processing, as well as aural vocabulary (Matthews, 2017; Wang & Treffers-Daller, 2017),
to constrain the interpretation of the utterance (Yeldham & Gruba, 2014). Some proficient
users report even using lexical knowledge to retune phonetic perception (Muñoz, 2017).

However, it is incorrect to assume expert users will only use one of these strategies when
dealing with a given YouTube clip. As a result, skilled listeners parse using the ‘input’
perceived instead of the ‘context’, and they build up the sentences bit by bit until they get
the whole sentence (Cook, 2008). Expert listeners are able to retain the language,
discriminate the sounds, recognise the stress pattern and reduced forms, identify
unstressed words, distinguish word boundaries, detect keywords and sentence
constituents, guess the meaning of words, reconstruct situations, predict outcomes, infer
connections between events, and deduce causes and effects from events (Richards,
1985).

Even though the practice is important, I disagree with Ridgway (2000) when he says it is
the most important thing because the micro-skills become atomise simply by exposing
learners to listening. Even though repetition, paraphrasing, and restatement are key
elements in the negotiation of meaning among expert listeners (Berne, 1995). What
proficient listeners do to master such skill is combining small-scale operations into larger
ones and applying them until they become automatic and, ultimately, unconscious (Field,
2009).

Finally, the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) and the National Council for
Social Studies (NCSS) encourage the implementation of technology in the classroom
(Albaddi, 2013). On top of that, some YouTube videos - e.g. extracts from talk shows,
game shows, documentaries, and interviews - are full of features characteristic of a typical
conversation. Basically, this means they include speakers using filled pauses, fillers, false
starts, repetitions, contracted forms, ellipsis, and non-standard grammar (Field, 1998),
whose sole intention is to buy the speaker some time to plan what he/she wants to say, to
save energy, or to sound natural, and which are easily ignored by native speakers (White,
1998) as well as by proficient users.

Learner Problems and Teaching Suggestions

ISSUE 1

Research has shown knowledge of sound-spelling relationships is more important than

experts tend to realise (Field, 2008). This is particularly important in an L2 class because
learners usually are immersed in spoken interactions from the beginning. Therefore, it is
very likely that students first encounter a word in its spoken form (Field, 2008). Learners of
different ages struggle when they are given a new word orally. In my experience teaching,
I have noticed Spanish speakers are puzzled about English pronunciation. Since the
former is a phonetic language and the latter is not, my students rarely manage to
extrapolate spelling from pronunciation.

SOLUTION 1

Aim

To create awareness of different spelling systems in L2

Procedure

Tell students they will watch a video clip on YouTube about ‘Miss USA’, ‘Miss UK’, or ‘Miss
Universe’ where they will be able to listen to contestants from different places introducing
themselves. Ask them to prepare a pencil and a piece of paper since they are going to
take note of the contestants’ names as well as the place they come from. If it is necessary,
make students only hear the video first without watching – many of these videos include
the information written, which should only be shown during the feedback. Be sure to allow
students to pair-check so they can build up their spelling skills together. Play the video
more times and encourage them to identify sound-spelling relationships.

Evaluation

Allowing students to identify and to try writing down words they may not know the spelling
is very useful for them to notice patterns that are evident to native speakers and are often
ignored by non-native ones. Depending on the contest students may work on different
sound-spelling relationships – i.e. spelling systems in American or British English, or
English as a Lingua Franca. This activity could be easily replicated by them at home if they
find a YouTube clip with accurate captions.

ISSUE 2

In my teaching experience, I have encountered many students with certain personalities

and learning styles, who have had a hard time letting new words go. Many lower and
higher-level learners always want to be 100% sure about every single word they hear.
Usually, non-native speakers focus on the actual meaning of the words when they are
listening. By focusing only on the literal meaning and they end up with no time to
understand the conventional aspect of it (Yildrim & Yildrim, 2016). This becomes more
evident when learners are exposed to real-life listening extracts.

SOLUTION 2

Aim

To help learners identify stress content words as well as attitudinal intonation.

Procedure

Find a listening extract that learners will understand only partially. Start the lesson making
sure students will feel comfortable during this exercise. Tell them they will listen to the
audio material and emphasize on the fact that they will not understand most of it because
it is a challenging one. Be sure to let them know they are supposed to focus on words they
think are important, linkers, and pauses. After the first repetition, discuss with the students
about what they were able to understand. Provide students with the transcript for the
listening extract. Remember to board the features named above so that students can
identify them in the script. Play the listening again once the script has been analysed in-
depth for learners to compare.

Evaluation

Exercises as the one described above seem to motivate learners. Despite its difficulty,
they feel that they understand little but real language. Certain YouTube videos contain
both challenging accents and big amounts of unknown vocabulary/expressions. Channels
like ‘Veritasium’, ‘Minute Physics’, ‘ASAPscience’, ‘Kurzgesagt’, ‘BBC sport’, ‘Football
Daily’, ‘Geography Now!’, ‘CBS news’, ‘Cracked’ are some which could be easily used for
this. With this authentic material, learners have to reconcile themselves to the fact that
they will not understand everything (Field, 1997).

ISSUE 3

Learners at my current workplace are not very much exposed to different accents and
claim to be unable to understand native speakers. This might be because as Yildrim &
Yildrim (2016) claim ‘in EFL context students are used to hearing L2 from their teachers
who speak English as a foreign language’. However, it might also be because many
coursebooks are filled with only one type of pronunciation – i.e. British or American –
throughout all early and most of the intermediate stages of their learning process. By not
providing learners with practice on this, coursebooks also contribute to their inability to
recognise words they know when pronounced differently. This has been a shared feeling
among many of the people I have taught to. Some of them have even expressed their
frustration after having travelled to English speaking countries since they feel they can
communicate, but they also feel as if proficiency were still too far.

SOLUTION 3

Aim

To provide students with practice identifying and distinguishing differences between

minimal pairs that contain /r/ and /t/.

Procedure

Since students in my school are used to the American accent, I will start by eliciting some
of the aspects they consider are different between Australian and American accent. I will
then make a list of examples within sentences that provide minimal contextual clues (Field,
2009). For example, ‘water’, ‘weather’, ‘guitar’, and ‘butter’ are words that may be useful
for them to spot the sounds or letters we will be focusing later. I play the video extract and
tell students to transcribe as much as possible. Then I write on the board minimal pairs
containing the target sounds (Field, 1997) – I will only choose /r/ and /t/ to be my target
feature. We play the listening again paying attention to the difference in pronunciation.

Evaluation

With this kind of practice, students focus on a single feature of the input while being
confronted with multiple examples of it. Using sentences from a recording of natural
speech, such as the interview from YouTube Channel ‘Team Coco’ titled ‘Conan learns
Australian slang’, is more challenging for learners than just having the teacher read the
sentences out loud (Field, 2009).
ISSUE 4

My students often regard their book as not having very realistic listening tasks compared
to those online. They feel their coursebook does not prepare them for real-life listening.
They argue the audio materials in the coursebook are a lot simpler. This might be because
coursebooks use audio materials that often have a specific target language and are
recorded in professional studios. Native speakers in more natural settings have control of
many features of connected speech – e.g. word liaison, reduced function words,
assimilation, and elision. Because of this, students often cannot tell where one word ends
and the next begins (Field, 2009), which may obscure the meaning.

SOLUTION 4

Aim

To allow students to notice the various aspects of connected speech in a given extract with
native-native interactions.

Procedure

I use videos on YouTube like the one called ‘QI Nature’s Biggest Gangsters’ where several
native-native interactions take place. After showing the video once, I choose an extract
from the clip making sure the interaction is evident. I play the listening material again, and I
ask my students to write all the words they understand in a piece of paper. They compare
their answers with their peers and try to reconstruct the sentence together. Once feedback
on the different features of connected speech has been provided, I play the listening again
and ask them to continue adding more words. We repeat this until they have managed to
segment most of the sentence (Field, 2009).

Evaluation

Students can see the number of words that native speakers say in relatively short periods.
Also, they notice the specific features present in native people’s speech. They usually feel
highly motivated after having decoded the message. They usually feedback they feel as
though they were improving their listening skills. It also provides learners with elements
they can practise outside the classroom.

CONCLUSION

Nowadays, not only should teachers provide students with both ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’
processing, but also with different purposes for listening as well as styles. In my opinion,
YouTube TV shows video clips include transactional, pleasurable, and intensive listening
for my learners. Even though many curricula still see listening as a ‘black box’ that can
only be improved by practising ‘more’ (Rost, 2001), training students in the best uses of
the kind of input discussed above is very important. This 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.