Anderson and Lynch (1988:33) describe the kinds of knowledge we need in order to understand a spoken message.
KNOWLEDGE OF THE WORLD: Objects, events, topics, places, etc.
KNOWLEDGE OF SCHEMA: Scripts for familiar series of events
PROCEDURAL KNOWLEDGE: The way discourse is organised
KNOWLEDGE OF CONTEXT: Situation, setting, participants, co-text (past and future)
KNOWLEDGE OF LANGUAGE: Knowledge of the language system (semantic, syntactic, phonological)
Many language researchers consider as a ‘skill’ in listening the ability to use the ‘schematic’ ‘contextual’ and ‘systemic’ knowledge of the world to achieve understanding of a spoken message. For teaching purposes, we often choose to focus on the ways in which our students use particular aspects of these types of knowledge and try to help them extend and develop this understanding of the world. The particular aspects are the ‘sub-skills’ in the overall skill of listening.
There is an enormous number of sub-skills which go to make up the overall skill of listening and individual writers all seem to describe them in slightly different ways. Most experts distinguish between ‘bottom -up skills’, which involve the recognition of small bits of language, such as sounds and words, and ‘top-down skills’, which involve using larger scale clues, such as knowledge of the topic a speaker is talking about and the setting s/he is speaking in, in order to make deductions about what is being said. Sometimes these are called ‘micro’ and ‘macro’ skills and we use a combination of both types of skill to process and understand spoken messages.
Spoken text authenticity: The use of ‘naturally occurring’ materials
In many EFL teaching environments, students have limited exposure to L2 input outside the language classroom. For effective learning to take place, it is therefore important to ‘feed’ our learners with useful, meaningful, authentic input and not just stick to coursebook material. When we enrich our lesson with authentic materials we do not only expose our learners to real life language use, but we also expand their knowledge on the target culture, the people, their lifestyles, beliefs and values. When carefully selected to match our students’ level and needs, such materials can add variety to the lesson and trigger learner interest.
Carefully selecting the materials:Will the materials support our teaching objectives?
What do we want to achieve with the authentic materials we introduce our students to? Do we want to focus on a specific topic? Do we want to direct their attention to a particular grammar structure or to introduce new lexis? Or do we simply want to provide extra input and promote listening for pleasure?
When selecting authentic materials to include in our EFL lesson we always need to take into account the authenticity of the language used and whether or not the lexis and grammar included match our students’ level and specific needs. We first of all need to examine whether the information they contain is up to date and is going to enrich our students’ knowledge of the TL culture. Our students do not only need to find the material motivating and interesting, but they also need to extract linguistic information that will be useful for the development of their interlanguage.
Rehearsal for real-life situations
The language in the texts/audio/video should reflect spoken usage (i.e. examples of ‘natural’ English, with a variety of genres, idioms etc.). We must verify that the materials provide examples of common, natural language use and that they serve real life communicative purposes in the target language. With listening texts, too many different accents can be confusing for our students. We also need to check whether the new lexis our students will encounter will be useful for their future and whether they will be able to incorporate it in their active vocabulary and use it in real life situations.
Towards classroom authenticity: Listening as a purposeful activity
Should we focus on the way listening is traditionally being taught in the language classrooms or should we make the teaching of listening closer to the kinds of spoken texts that go on in real life while still maintaining an element of ‘grading’ of the task and text difficulty?
In real life, listening mainly serves functional purposes. When we listen ‘naturally’, we listen for a reason, for a purpose. We then either retain (or skip) the information, we use it to interact with others or we take some other sort of action. Our listening tasks must serve these same functions. We must design these activities with a ‘purpose’ in mind, that will trigger our students’ interest and make them ‘tune in’ and focus on the listening task in order to achieve something. This sense of purpose will greatly enhance their motivation levels and will make them eager to participate in the lesson.
Communicative tasks need to come with a real purpose. In order to engage our learners and make them more involved in the listening task, we first of all need to keep in mind what happens in real life conversations and what the communicative purpose of the task is.
Listening strategies and the EFL classroom
Field (1998) describes listening strategies as efforts to compensate for uncertainties in understanding. These could include making inferences, realizing where misunderstandings have occurred and asking for clarification. L2 listeners should need these strategies less and less as they get more familiar with the language and more competent at listening skills, although even very proficient native speakers will need to rely on them occasionally. If we are going to use authentic materials in the classroom, strategy teaching becomes even more important as there will be more gaps in understanding, since students will be dealing with listening texts and tasks which haven’t been carefully graded for their level.
Listening strategies come under the bigger heading of communicative strategies which include speaking strategies as well. It is important to remember that many of these happen internally and are difficult to access. Vandergrift (1996) considers listening strategies as ‘conscious means by which learners can guide and evaluate their own comprehension’. He divides these strategies into metacognitive (selective listening, monitoring), cognitive (making deductions, using one’s own knowledge on the subject) and socio-affective (asking for clarifications, cooperating with others). Keeping these in mind, it is important to make sure that the listening tasks we give to our students are designed to help them use such listening strategies and will consequently boost their overall communication skills.
Accompanying the ‘authentic’ TL input with suitable tasks: Focus on learner creativity
Our main aim should not be for our students to merely notice new lexis or grammar through the linguistic input of the authentic listening materials. The key is to turn this noticing into active knowledge. To foster this language awareness, we need to provide them with authentic tasks and opportunities to use and produce the TL patterns both in writing and in speaking. The tasks that we will decide to accompany the materials need to be carefully selected in order to satisfy our learners’ needs and different learning styles. It is also important to always remember the effectiveness of accompanying real life TL materials with authentic, communicative tasks that promote learner involvement and boost their creativity. The more opportunities our learners have for language production, the more they will begin to notice and try to produce certain structures in order to negotiate meaning in the TL. Students become more conscious with regard to particular language features and this promotes language awareness and acquisition.
Our students also need to receive adequate practice in order to be able to listen to authentic language usage both for gist and for specific information. We need to train them on making accurate predictions about the information they need to extract. They need to be able to get the general picture, to successfully grasp the main points and to be able to effectively deduce meaning from context. They also need to be able to ‘interpret’ the language and use a variety of clues in order to find out what the speaker is suggesting/implying.
Boosting intrinsic motivation
We should never forget the role that motivation plays in successful language learning. If our students do not feel the need or the enthusiasm to pick up new knowledge then language acquisition will be too hard to be achieved. Teachers need to find ways to transfer their love for languages in the classroom and to be raw models for their students. Diversity and authenticity in the tasks, using topics that are relevant, meaningful and interesting to our learners and giving them the opportunity to freely express themselves and participate in the lesson play a key role in boosting our learners’ motivation levels.
When selecting authentic materials we should always ask ourselves whether they will trigger learner interest. Our students find the topic interesting, meaningful and relevant to their age and preferences. Nobody wants to read or listen to something they do not find interesting. Harmer (2001) emphasizes the “need” for our students to be “engaged with what they are reading”. We need to trigger their curiosity and build interest in the topic. The challenge will be to make our students want to explore the authentic materials for themselves, not because they have to, but because they want to.
References
Anderson, A. and Lynch, T. (1988) Listening. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Field, J. (1998). ‘Skills and strategies: towards a new methodology for teaching listening’ in ELTJ 52/2, pp. 110-118
Harmer, J. (2001). The practice of English language teaching. Longman.
Scrivener, J. (1994). Learning Teaching. Oxford: Heinemann
Ur, P. (2012). A course in English language teaching. Cambridge University Press
Van Dijk, T. A., & Kintsch, W. (1983). Strategies of Discourse Comprehension. New York: Academic Press.
Vandergrift, L. (1999) ‘Facilitating second language listening comprehension: acquiring successful strategies’ in ELTJ 53/3, pp 168-176
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