Listening Myths: Applying Second Language Research to Classroom Teaching

Myth 8 - Listening can’t be taught.

150 M Y T H 8 Listening can’t be taught. In the Real World . . . This story is from my friend Dorolyn Smith (she of the health/home story in Myth 2): The new car I bought a year ago came with a free trial of satellite radio. Flipping through the stations, I discovered Radio Quoi de Neuf, a French Canadian news station. My background: My French study consisted of two years in high school, a year in college (French 2 & 3), and a couple of visits now and then to France—over the past 30 years. Although my study was more than 40 years ago, I can “get by” as a tourist in France. However, I am a fairly sophisticated language learner: I am an ESL teacher with an MA in linguistics, speak good Spanish and Portuguese, and have studied or speak a couple of other languages in varying degrees of proficiency. I’m a language-learning geek. I started to listen to Quoi de Neuf every day for a few minutes when I first got my car. What fascinated me was that I didn’t understand a single thing—although I can speak conversational French OK. I could tell it was French but couldn’t segment words. In fact, I didn’t even realize that they were repeating the same three-minute news cycle over and over! But after about a week of just letting Canadian French wash over me, I caught the words la presse canadienne, so I Myth 8: Listening can’t be taught. ~ 151 started to listen for that. Two days later, I caught les informations de la presse canadienne. Now I had something to hang onto, and two days later I caught this phrase: Voici les informations de la presse canadienne. I realized that if that was a beginning, there might be a closing with something like c’etait . . . , and sure enough, that day I listened for and heard C’etait les informations de la presse canadienne. I was so excited because now I knew what I was listening to and for: a short news cycle with a beginning and an end. The next time I listened, I heard the announcer’s name: Ici Claude de Fornier. Voici les informations de la presse canadienne. Now I was making a new discovery each time I listened. The very next time, I heard the real clue to the beginning of the cycle, the greeting: Bonjour Mesdames et Messieurs, ici Claude de Fornier. Voici les informations de la presse canadienne. A few days later, I heard the expression dans le monde de sport . . . and came to learn that sports was always the last item of the cycle. Soon I was able to distinguish different news items even if I didn’t understand the topic. I continue to tune in every day to Quoi de Neuf, just to see what I can understand. I can always segment news items, and I know when someone is being interviewed for a report. Sometimes I understand only a detail, sometimes I get the main idea; often I get the topic but not the main idea of the topic. I understand much of the sports news. I know most of the announcers by name. I know the different ways of varying the pronunciation of Voici les informations de la presse canadienne by changing the intonation, stress, and pauses. I often imagine myself as an announcer on Quoi de Neuf and practice introducing myself and the news. It is one of my minor dreams in life to be on radio and able to say “Bonjour Mesdames et Messieurs, ici Dorolin Smeet. Voici les informations de . . . la presse canadienne.” Dorolyn was applying strategies she has acquired as a life-long language learner. This chapter is about strategies and the debate over their use in language teaching and learning. If you’re new to the field, you might want to consult the What We Can Do section (pages 161–64) for an overview of stategies. 152 ~ Listening Myths What the Research Says . . . Strategies help organize learning. They also allow learners to out-perform their current competence, to compensate for things they don’t know. O’Malley and Chamot (1990) presented what has come to be an influential way of looking at strategies, dividing several different kinds of strategies into three broad categories: cognitive, meta-cognitive, and social/affective strategies. Cognitive strategies, like...