Listening Myths: Applying Second Language Research to Classroom Teaching

Myth 3 - Listening equals comprehension.

M Y T H 3 Listening equals comprehension. In the Real World . . . One of the many joys of working for the University of Pittsburgh English Language Institute was working with new teachers. There was a strong classroom observation program in place, and we supervisors would visit classes several times a semester. I was the supervisor of speaking classes at the time and was sitting at the back of a basement classroom watching a new graduate assistant teach a lower-intermediate class. A student asked her, apropos of nothing in the lesson that I could see, “What does cheat on mean?” The teacher reddened and start to explain what she thought she heard—a much less polite term. The student had mispronounced two out of three of the sounds, and I could see what the teacher thought she heard, though I was pretty sure I heard cheat, which turned out to be the intended meaning. Perhaps I should have intervened, but people learn from difficult situations. People mishear all the time. Children have limited vocabularies, and they fit what they hear into what they know. A child in John Irving’s The World According to Garp (1978) is warned about the undertow in the ocean and imagines the Under Toad, a monster that 35 snatches swimmers. Sylvia Wright (1954) named these misunderstandings mondegreens after a line in a poem she heard as a child. The original was: They have slain the Earl Amurray And laid him on the green She heard: They have slain the Earl Amurray And Lady Mondegreen In other words, two homicides, not one. (Aren’t old children’s poems strange?) Entire websites are dedicated to collecting mondegreens, especially for rock lyrics. My point here is that listening is not all about background knowledge. Other language skills—those we characterize as bottom-up—are implicated in listening. This chapter and the next address bottom-up skills. What the Research Says . . . For many years, almost since we began teaching listening, researchers have made the distinction between teaching and testing, and many of those researchers have criticized the dominant trend in listening instruction as doing nothing to teach students how to listen. They claimed that playing audio and asking comprehension questions, or even playing audio and asking students to complete tasks, is merely testing. In recent years, there have been challenges to what might be called “the comprehension approach” to listening from several directions , the first concerned with teaching bottom-up skills in addition to comprehension skills (for example, Field 2008a) and the second concerned with teaching strategy use, especially metacognitive strategy use (for example, Goh 2008 and Vandergrift 2003a). A third position is 36 ~ Listening Myths that of Jack Richards (2005), who notes that we have ignored activities “which require accurate recognition and recall of words, syntax and expression that occurred in the input” such as “dictation, cloze exercises , [and] identifying differences between a spoken and written text” (p. 87). Given our current knowledge of second language processes, Richards argues, we should have a second step in our listening classes, one that focuses on “listening as acquisition” (p. 90). After listening as comprehension, we should work with the input in written form (vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation) and utilize spoken activities like role plays and dialogues to help students acquire the language they have heard. In this chapter, we will look at the first approach. We will continue the theme of bottom-up listening in the next chapter as well. For purposes of presentation, this chapter will concentrate on the processes involved in bottom-up listening, while the next organizes the material in terms of what makes listening difficult. Bottom-Up Processing —— Let’s review the process that we use to listen. Conventionally, as we’ve seen, researchers talk about the process as consisting of decoding and comprehension (Wolff, 1987). Speech comes at the listener in an unbroken stream. To make sense of it, listeners must break that stream into groups of sounds, recognize the groups as words, recognize the meanings of the words, and understand how the words are related to each other. Listeners use their knowledge of the language, the world, and the immediate context to clear up the ambiguities. The immediate context, the conversation up to that point, sometimes called the “co-text” (Brown & Yule, 1983), helps the listener guess words in context and influences the interpretation of mispronounced words and words with multiple...