Listening Myths: Applying Second Language Research to Classroom Teaching

Conclusion

167 Conclusion I’ve given a lot of presentations to teachers, and I think I’m always careful to spell out the implications of the research I talk about. But not infrequently on feedback forms or in face-to-face conversations after, teachers want to know what it means for their classroom, and pointing out that I teach in my classroom, not their classroom, does not seem to satisfy them. In this book, I’ve tried to be as practical and explicit as I can be, but you will need to take these ideas and fit them to your classroom . I haven’t focused on teaching children because there’s simply not a lot of research out there on L2 children’s listening. I haven’t gone into academic listening as deeply as I could have. I wanted to speak more generally about listening. But you’re smart people. I’m sure you can see your students in these pages, and use the book’s ideas to make them better listeners. I began by questioning the idea that reading and listening are identical . While they may share many processes, the fact that speech and writing are different ultimately means that reading and listening are dissimilar. While readers, working with a fixed text, are able to remember more ideas and more details, listeners, working with fleeting sounds, get a more global understanding. They also rely more on background knowledge to make meaning. Background knowledge was the focus of Myth 2. Listeners actively utilize what they know about a topic to help comprehension. Research has tried to find the right kind of pre-listening activity. Several kinds have been found to be effective, but much depends on the proficiency of the students and the task they have to accomplish. Use of schemata to understand what we hear shows that listening is active. Each listener, rather than receiving meaning, creates meaning. Comprehension has been at the center of much listening research, but Myth 3 showed that there is more to listening than comprehension. 168 ~ Conclusion Characteristics of speech like assimilation, elision, and insertion change the sounds of words that students have learned in isolation, often making them unrecognizable. Word recognition is also affected by the processes we use to understand our native languages, processes that don’t work when applied to other languages. Word recognition is one of many factors in listening difficulty. Myth 4 surveyed several. Prescriptions for improving comprehension have included better lexical knowledge, slower speech rates, effective pauses, and elaboration of the message. All except lexical knowledge depend on the speaker, so listeners need ways to take control of the conversation and give the speaker useful feedback. Not all listening is two-way, however, Myth 5 reminded us that students need to hear different kinds of input, including videos and lectures , where appropriate. New kinds of dictation (especially dictogloss, which takes advantage of longer texts) can be effective in teaching language forms and their extended use seems to be effective for developing comprehension skills. Myth 6 looked at the social aspects of listening, from pairs talking together to the constraints that students feel in classrooms and, because of social roles, within society at large. Myths 7 and 8 surveyed two, to my mind, over-hyped answers to the question of how we improve learners’ language. One prescription has been to use authentic materials, but we’ve seen no consensus on defining just what “authenticity” is. I offered another model. Another prescription has been strategy training. While strategy use is one piece of the learning puzzle, it’s not, to my mind, even the biggest piece. I do think that meta-cognitive/meta-linguistic training offers some ideas that are very important, however. Finally, listening is challenging because it is meaning-making, and that’s a process that is difficult to view directly. I noted at the beginning of this book that writers frequently bemoan the lack of research on listening . By now, you’re probably thinking that there’s been too much. We do have more to do to understand listening, but you’ll probably agree that there is much we know, and much of it is relevant to the classroom. It remains for teachers to buck the myths, think hard about listening, and apply or adapt the ideas they find most useful for their classrooms. ...