Listening Myths: Applying Second Language Research to Classroom Teaching

Myth 2 - Listening is passive.

17 M Y T H 2 Listening is passive. In the Real World . . . Fast forward ten years. I left Japan and took the Trans-Siberian railroad from Beijing to Moscow and went on to spend some time in Europe. While in Vienna, I went to the national art museum, where I decided to buy some post cards. As travelers do, I added up the purchase in my head to make sure I was giving the clerk a reasonable amount. (You wouldn’t believe how angry you can make a Beijing taxi driver by inadvertently requiring a huge amount of change.) I figured the cost was 16 schillings. I put a 20-schilling bill on the counter. The clerk opened the cash register, looked in, and said something to me in German, which I don’t speak. Without thinking, I reached in my pocket and gave her “a one.” She smiled and gave me a five. My years of buying things had made me aware of the limited possibilities of her response. She had to be saying she was out of change. Of course, this doesn’t always work. You may not know the routine. Coming back late from the airport not so long ago, I stopped at a chain steak restaurant, which I put into the “restaurant” and not “fast food” category. I entered the wrong door and sat without service for quite a while until a server told me I had to pay first and give my receipt to her in order to get something to eat. You may also think you have the right topic, but don’t. I was recently in Pittsburgh to see a friend. It had been several months since we’d talked. As many American academics do, we each have an older house that requires pretty constant upkeep. We often share home improvement conversations. As we were driving to lunch, she asked, “How’s your health?” I said, “I’m thinking of doing some work in the front yard.” She looked at me, laughed, and said, extra clearly, “Health.” In the time I’d last seen her, my health (recovery from an operation) had improved so much that I’d put it out of my mind. On the drive over, I had been planning spring home projects, and my mind was on that, so I answered a question that hadn’t been asked. Sometimes it’s what you’re ready to hear, not what you really hear. What the Research Says . . . One very important idea for teaching listening is that listening courses must make use of students’ prior knowledge to improve listening comprehension (Long, 1989). To make this idea clear, I’ll introduce several concepts from the cognitive view of language learning. We have known at least since the 1930s (Bartlett, 1932) that people ’s prior knowledge has an effect on their cognition. Prior knowledge is organized in schemata (the plural form of schema): abstract, generalized mental representations of our experience that are available to help us understand new experiences (Anderson, 1994). Another way to look at this phenomenon is the idea of scripts (Schank & Abelson, 1977). My Austrian example was part of a “cashier script.” There are all sorts of scripts. For example, everyone who has been to a restaurant knows that there is a predictable sequence of questions involved in ordering a meal. In the United States these have to do with whether you want soup or salad, the kind of dressing on the salad, choice of side dishes, etc. Even if you do not hear a question, perhaps because the restaurant is too noisy, you can guess from your place in the script what the server is probably asking. Unfortunately, this script does not transfer perfectly 18 ~ Listening Myths from country to country because the routine is slightly different in each place. However, when traveling in another country and eating in a restaurant, you can make certain assumptions about the kinds of questions that will be asked. If food has been ordered but drinks have not, and the server asks another question, you might fairly predict that the question is about the choice of drinks, based on your prior knowledge of what happens in restaurants. Indeed, successful language learners can often be separated from unsuccessful language learners by their ability to contextualize their guesses and use their prior knowledge in this way. Many theorists divide schemata into text schemata...