Module teaching and integrating language skills lesson 1

Home assighment: Handout 4. 10 min
Handouts

Handout 1. While learning the L2, certainly you have faced the problems with listening. Without doubt, you found out your strategy of improving, whereas each strategy is not exception from the problems. Complete the following table with the strategy that you did in order to improve your listening skill, with the problem that you faced and the solution that you suggest. Strategy Problem of this strategy your solution Listening to music Difficult and different pronunciation To find the lyrics

Handout 2.
Problem 1: Too much faith in first language research
Fourteen years ago, Anderson and Lynch (1988: 21) noted that there was very little research into listening in a second language. Because of this gap in research, applied linguists, textbook writers, and teacher trainers have gone to research in first language listening for guidance. As a result, listening comprehension exercises are greatly (and in my view inappropriately) influenced by what is known about successful first language listening.
First language research has established that successful listening is characterised by:
• listening for a purpose
• making predictions based on contextual information
• making guesses when things aren't clear
• inferring what is meant where necessary
• not listening ('straining') for every word (adapted from Brown 1990: 148)
Teacher trainers and textbook writers have made appropriate use of some of these findings, and inappropriate use of others. In particular they have taken the last of these points ('they don't listen for every word') and have made it an article of faith. They advocate 'top-down' activities and urge the avoidance of any activity which could be characterised as 'bottom-up'. Of course, we should be careful about this particular issue: we don't want learners to strain so much to hear every word that they cannot understand anything. In my view though, it is a mistake to abandon, as we have, bottom-up activities which introduce learners to the essential characteristics of speech.
From first language research comes the teacher's standard advice in a listening lesson: 'You won't be able to understand every word, and you don't need to'. I find this explanation illogical: the 'reasoning' goes something like this:
1. non-natives don't understand
2. natives understand without paying attention to every word
3. therefore, in order to understand, non-natives should not try to pay attention to every word
The first statement describes the problem which all listening classes address in some way; the second is a research finding; the third is the false deduction. It is not reasonable to deduce from the first two statements that 'improvement in listening skills follows from not trying to pay attention to every word'. In acting (as we do) on this illogical deduction, we confuse goals and methodology: we require learners to simulate the goal of native listener behaviour instead of teaching learners how to acquire progressively native-like abilities in perception and understanding. We have made the mistake of allowing the goal to become the method: we should recognise that the skill of understanding without attending to every word is a goal to be reached, not a means of getting there.
Adopting the goal-as-method procedure conveniently allows us to ignore the fact that native speaker listeners have great advantages over non-natives particularly in terms of perceptual ability, it allows us to avoid grasping the nettle of fast speech. Activities which encourage bottom-up processing, which target learners perceptual abilities, have become taboo.
Problem 2: Too much hope in listening out for 'stresses'
Listening exercises are also characterised by the hope which often appears in the following words of encouragement: 'Just listen to the stresses, they'll be in the most important words, then you'll understand'.
There are three problems with this view: first, very often, 'important' words such as negatives are often unstressed, and so-called 'unimportant' grammatical words such as prepositions and pronouns are stressed; second, research indicates that it is difficult to pick out stressed words in a language which is not your own (c.f. Roach, 1982); third, the concept of stress is loosely defined and fails to distinguish between word-level stress, and stresses associated with higher order phenomena such as tone units.
Problem 3: Too much help
Although many listening comprehension recordings boast that they are 'natural', few of them are truly so. Many (though not all) are scripted and artificially slow. The reasons for this can be found in statements such as the following from Penny Ur:
Students may learn best from listening to speech which, while not entirely authentic, is an approximation to the real thing, and is planned to take into account the learners' level of ability and particular difficulties. (Ur, 1984: 23)
I myself find nothing wrong in what Penny Ur says here but I would argue that listening comprehension materials are often over-charitable in leaning towards 'the learners' level of ability' and not taking account of the level of ability required to understand spontaneous fast speech. The gap between the learners' level and the target level (fast spontaneous speech) is a gap that we as teachers and materials writers must help learners bridge. But we cannot help them bridge this gap if we continue with our charitable focus on what learners can manage at their current level.
In recent years, listening materials in main course textbooks at upper-intermediate and advanced levels have featured spontaneous speech, and this move is a good one. However, the methodology (crudely, give the answers, and move on) has remained much the same, and teachers are not trained to explain what the features of fast spontaneous speech are.
We have to help learners cope with speech which is above their current level, and to arrive at a description of 'above current level', we need a description of the topmost level - a description of the features of 'difficult' (fast spontaneous) speech. We need such a description for use in teaching so that we can have an equal focus on both where our learners are, and where they have to get to: this description should form part of teacher training - it should be part of every teacher's tool-kit.
Problem 4: Rushing to the follow-up
We offer too little help in the post-listening phase. My impression is (and this is backed up by research by Field 1998) that of the four phases of a listening lesson it is the post-listening phase which has the least amount of time devoted to it. The first - warm-up - phase (with contextualisation and personalisation) and the fourth - follow-up - phase (often a discussion or writing task) have the most time devoted to them. It is at this point that avoidance is at its most obvious worst, and the reasons for it can be found in the standard training of communicative language teachers.
Our training predisposes us to obey a communicative imperative which demands rapid movement to the next activity to keep the variety, interest, and motivation high: we are anxious to see and hear learners enjoying social interaction in English. We prefer this high level of social 'buzz' to staying with and helping learners through the difficulties of a recording: when there might be silent private struggles to perceive and understand the acoustic blur of speech.