TEACHING LISTENING

LISTENING is a receptive skill whose main function is supporting the understanding of spoken input. The spoken discourse is instantaneous, fast, and unplanned, it might contain several coordinated clauses and need a background knowledge between transmitter and receiver. Therefore, there is a need of proper listening skills to understand it.

There are three cognitive strategies that play a role in listening:

1. Comprehension processes, to process linguistic and non-linguistic input.
2. Memory processes, to keep the input in the working memory in order to complete the work and also store in the long-term memory to use it in the future.
3. Retrieval processes, to access the long-term memory, bring the previously acquired knowledge to the working memory and produce output.

These cognitive strategies work thanks to two processes: 

1) BOTTOM-UP PROCESSING. It happens when we already have a large vocabulary and grammatical system understanding and we use it to recognise what we hear. In this case, comprehension is a process of decoding. 

How do we teach bottom up?

The most important thing is taking into account the student’s level in order to provide comprehensible input (like Krashen suggests in his Monitor Model). As mentioned above, learners need a good vocabulary and sentence structure knowledge in order to:

• Discriminate and recognise keywords.
• Recognise clause divisions.
• Recognise transitions in discourse (for example, contrast).
• Recognise grammatical relationship in sentences.
• Retain the input while they process it (not simply decoding in the moment but being able to talk about it afterwards).

2) TOP-DOWN PROCESSING. On the other hand, this processing refers to using background knowledge about the topic to understand what we are listening to. The input we are getting activates previous knowledge and this helps us infer features of the discourse.

How do we teach top-down?

The students need to use keywords to build an outline of the discourse, infer elements like the setting or the roles of participants, and anticipate questions. Some activities teachers can propose to foster this kind of processing are:

• Come up with possible questions given the topic, then listen and check if they were right.
• Brainstorm the background knowledge and then compare to see if it helped them.
• Read or listen to one part of the text and predict the second (one speaker’s intervention, first half of a story, headlines…), and then check if they were right.

THE REAL WORLD: COMBINING BOTTOM-UP AND TOP-DOWN PROCESSING

As mentioned above, the reality is that both processes are activated simultaneously when processing a spoken input. That is why the teaching of listening should include activities that allow a full processing of the audio and improve both routes.

• PRE-LISTENING. Before listening to a piece, students should activate previous knowledge about the topic, make predictions and review key vocabulary. The combination of bottom-up and top-down is clear since activating previous knowledge is part of the top-down process, but at the same time, accessing the vocabulary and grammatical structures will help decoding the message.
• WHILE-LISTENING. As the students listen, they need to comprehend the message, which once again combines both processes (linguistic input + information about the topic).
• POST-LISTENING. There also needs to be a response to that comprehension to check whether the understanding has been successful.

Let’s see a real example of a listening activity…

TEACHING LISTENING THROUGH HORRID HENRY’S DANCE CLASS

My group and I came up with a listening activity related to the Horrid Henry books my Francesca Simon. This series, like many other children’s books, comes with CDs with the audiobook version of the stories. Taking advantage of that, we outlined the following task:

We will be using the first volume of Horrid Henry, which gathers four individual stories. We prepared a context for the activity in which the students have already read the first story, Horrid Henry’s Perfect Day, and they are about to work on the second, Horrid Henry’s Dance Class.

1) PRE-LISTENING: the students are expected to be familiar with the vocabulary related to personality and descriptions of characters through the first story. Before working on the second one, there will be a group discussion/brain storm in order to recall already acquired knowledge (vocabulary, Henry’s characteristics, some actions he did, etc.). This will contextualise the listening activity since it will re-introduce the students in Henry’s universe. Students can also predict what will happen in the second story based on said recalling and on the story’s title, Horrid Henry’s Dance Class. We would be combining the bottom-up and top-down processes since they are recalling and inferring.

2) LISTENING: The students listen to the story. The main aim here is comprehending the story, putting the already known vocabulary and structures to use to recognise and understand the message. They can have the questions they prepared as a guide to focus on whether the events happen the way they thought or not.

3) POST-LISTENING: there can be debates on whether Henry fits the version of him they had from the first story, the new vocabulary or knowledge they get from the second story, whether their predictions were correct,… In order to integrate the listening with other skills, there could also be a reflection on Henry’s behaviour (critical thinking) that leads to a debate about good and bad behaviour and a common creation of a written code of conduct for the class.

REFLECTION

When I was in Primary school, listening was the least practised skill in class. In addition, when we practised listening, we never did anything different than listen to a recording and choose the correct answer out of a multiple choice offer. With years, I have realised this kind of instruction leads children to try to discern in the audio the exact words they see on the paper, not paying attention to the actual sentence or context they are said in. This leads to two main problems: firstly, that they expect to hear the exact words instead of synonyms or different ways of saying something; and secondly, that they don't listen to learn, just to answer the questions. These are both wrong goals regarding the teaching of listening: on the one hand, real-life conversations often paraphrase or re-tell; on the other hand, introducing students to listening through "right or wrong" asnwers that make them focus on suceeding over understanding does not foster the wholeness of listening, only word recognition. 

This is why learning about innovative and practical ways for teaching listening has been quite fulfilling. Apart from word recognition, I now know it is necessary to prepare activities that prompt understanding, like explaining what they heard in an audio, or even re-telling a story told by other classmate. In conclusion, this unit has helped me understand that it is key in the teaching of listening to include all areas: recognition, organisation, memory, etc. In order for children to properly process what they hear instead of staying on the surface of an oral text. This is also what we aimed to achieve with our activity, and it was educating to try to come up with ideas we had never thought of before.