Listening: a Skill Difficult to Teach!

By Flor de María Vila A.

         You may have overheard your students say: “I love my English classes but when it comes to listening I feel terrified and frustrated!” In fact, this is what many language learners feel or express. But why does this happen?

          It could be argued that they frequently consider that improving their listening skills is like memorizing historical data. When they learn a number of dates, events and the like by heart, they can feel that they could take a test about that information and be successful.  

          Nevertheless, making progress in listening involves more than just memorizing some facts. Listening is a capacity and, because of that, its upgrading depends on a process. In case you want to have a better idea about this method, take a look at the following link from a previous article.

http://languageteachingblogger.blogspot.com/2017/09/the-myths-about-teaching-listening.html

          At any rate, one of the implications your students need to consider is that an ability can only be developed in one way: by practicing. It sounds so simple and yet not so many people do it and if they do it, they don’t do it in the right manner.

          You may ask your students: “Do you practice listening outside your classroom? If the answer is “no”, you may present the following scenario to them: “You want to be a pilot, so you need to study, among other things, the safety rules. You learn them, and pass the test on that. However, you are not yet ready to fly an airplane. You need a certain number of hours of supervised flying experience to qualify for a pilot’s license. The safety rules are somehow like the vocabulary, grammar structure and knowledge of the topic that you need in order to build sentences; that’s the minimum you have to learn. But in spite of knowing that, you are not ready yet to understand all kinds of audio material. You need at least a certain number of hours of exposure to spoken English in order to begin feeling that you can grasp the meaning of what it is being said. Thus, provided that you practice on your own, additionally to what you do in class, your plane will probably never take off.

          If the answer is “yes,” but they still feel that they cannot fully understand or not comprehend enough to feel satisfied with their performance, have them check the following: They already have a schema of how language works in Spanish, a sort of pattern with all the characteristics that this tongue has. For example, Spanish is a syllable-timed language whereas English is a stress-timed language. In the former, every single sound is pronounced; in the latter though, that doesn’t happen. Then, Spanish speakers are expecting to hear every single word and sound and that causes a huge problem. When a native English speaker says: “My sister’s got a terrible teacher. She doesn´t teach her anything.”, a Spanish speaker might hear: “My sisters te robo a t-shirt. She doesn’t teacher anything.” In the first sentence “t-shirt” sounds more logically connected to the verb “steal” (robar) that the Spanish speaker thought he had heard. In the second sentence, a learner may not be aware of word boundaries and how connected speech works in English. Instead of saying “teach her” separately, a native connects the two words and makes them sound like one term, which may lead to confusion since the foreign speaker may not be aware of those differences between the two languages.

          Thus, in essence, what they need to do is to get familiar with those characteristics, especially become aware of the differences, so they can apprehend what they are hearing and comprehend the meaning of the message. The only way to do it is by listening to different kinds of audio material such as podcasts, YouTube videos (many of them come with the audio script on the screen), songs, lectures (Tedx, for example), watch films in English, TV shows, TV series, etc.

          But just “listening” is not enough, they need to listen to English audio every day and at least an average of two hours (might be more depending on their current level of English). Tell them they should take advantage of any spare time they have, or make the most of the moment when they are doing something else, for instance, driving, having lunch or waiting for something or somebody. It is convenient to listen to the same material as many times as possible, until they can recognize without much difficulty what is being said.  Remember, they need to familiarize with the language and build a new schema; and that won’t happen overnight. How many years have they been listening to Spanish? They should not expect to dramatically improve their listening just with an exposure to spoken English of only a few minutes per day. That won’t possibly work!  

          The type of material to be employed will depend on your students’ current level of English. If they are beginners or pre-intermediate learners, podcasts could be the best. For higher levels, the other sources mentioned above would work best. Deciding what type of material, they will listen to is the first step. The second one will be the amount of time they are going to devote to this endeavor. Third, if they are beginners or pre-intermediate students, they will need to try to match what they hear with what is actually being said. I always suggest listening to the audio material while reading the script to start sounding out the written words. Furthermore, that helps them to get familiar with the way people connect words or sounds, as well as rhythm, and intonation. You may even suggest reading after the speaker or shadowing him trying to imitate his pronunciation, intonation, and rhythm. Recording themselves wouldn’t hurt because that would enable them to recognize better how words, phrases and sentences are supposed to be uttered and how they are actually pronouncing them. Remember that they are sort of reconstructing their schemata, and that needs lots of practice. Moreover, input is a must! They need to become passionate about listening to make sure they can start flying! To the great blue yonder!

          Are there any other strategies you have tried to improve your students’ listening skills? Can you share them? Would you challenge them to do something different to find a different result? Let us know the results!

BIOGRAPHICAL DATA

M.A. in Cognition, Learning and Development from PUCP, B.A. in Education with a major in English Teaching. Ms. Vila is currently Teacher trainer, Pedagogic Consultant and Member of the Research Team at Centro de Idiomas de la Universidad del Pacífico. She is Academic Director of International Contacts (test training & foreign applications advisory) and relationship manager for American universities´ MBA admissions officers with International Contacts. She is official Examiner for several University of Cambridge tests, freelance consultant with Universidad ESAN, experienced speaker on diverse English teaching issues for prestigious institutions, and senior international examinations trainer (GMAT, GRE, TOEFL, IELTS).

The Myths About Teaching Listening

By Flor de María Vila A.

One of the most difficult skills to improve is listening. This is true for both the teacher and the students. For the former, it is necessary to find a way to guide students to achieve their objective and, for the latter, they need to find a plan that suits their needs.  Definitely, everybody has tried to facilitate the task in class; however, so many times it has met with failure.

 “Why is it so difficult to teach listening comprehension? How can we teach it if that´s kind of a “personal” action? Why my students find it so hard to develop this skill?” These are some of the questions I have frequently heard from some of my colleagues. Here are some ideas that could help you to go through this journey.

First of all, we need to stop believing some myths that have been living with us for a long time, probably many years.

MYTH # 1

Listening is a task performed on your own. This is usually thought considering just the act of hearing. It is true; nobody can do that task for you. However, listening is not only hearing; this notion does not reveal the magic of the work involved. Did I say “work?” Yes! You understood well. Work implies a process and that´s the main subject matter here.

Many times we overlook several important facts. We hold the idea that we should provide a lot of material to practise. That´s good! Still, we usually provide a lot of links, exercises and so on to hear. But students are already able to hear without our help!

When listening, two types of processing take place: Top Down and Bottom Up.

Top-down processing happens when we use background information to predict the meaning of the language we are going to listen to or read. That means, that all our experience with the world, all our knowledge and, in this case, our prior knowledge of English and our own language are also used to hypothesize and infer. Metaphorically speaking, we use our “Spanish brain and its background data” to interpret what we listen to in English. Most of us take this processing into account when we have our students predict, do brainstorming, or give us the gist and specific information. Nevertheless, we fail to notice that when listening naturally our students will use any resources available, that is what they know in Spanish. They use their Spanish schemata to understand, to listen in English. This reality  takes us to instances in which students misinterpret one word for another.

For example: Real sentence: “We’re not gonna take it” from one of Twisted Sisters´s songs. People learnt the song as “Huevos con aceite.” Take a look at this video. https://youtu.be/35PocLHx534

If you need more examples, just take a look at this: https://youtu.be/_6DD1CU8ltE

Even though this may be hilarious, this is not so much when we, as teachers, do not consider this a fact.

We need to understand what problems arise when students do a listening comprehension exercise. Transferring their Spanish schemata without considering the differences between the two languages is one. We should help students become aware of the similarities as well as of the differences.

Bottom-up Processing: It happens when someone tries to understand language by looking at individual meanings or grammatical characteristics of the most basic unit of the text (e.g. sounds) and moves from this to trying to understand the whole text. We use our linguistic knowledge and ability to process acoustic signals, which we first decode into phonemes, then words, phrases, and finally sentences.

Unfortunately, bottom-up processing is hardly taken into consideration when “teaching” or working on the development of listening skills. We scarcely work with listening sub-skills. How frequently do we propose exercises that enable students to recognize and understand connected speech, word boundaries, weak forms, contractions and so on? For instance, have you ever taught how “of” is pronounced? Have you done that in different contexts? Check this and you will see if your answer is right:

https://youtu.be/2l0GuRgRIKw

We are so preoccupied about providing the “new vocabulary” that we forget these sub-skills. Again, we need to evaluate what happens (process) when a person tries to understand what they hear, that is, when they try to “listen.” Do you think they just “hear”?

MYTH #2

Listening is a receptive skill, but that does not mean it is passive. When we consider listening a process, we are aware that it involves work and that implies a productive activity. Many times we see ourselves presenting the exercise, giving the instructions and playing the audio until it is over. If we always do that, it will disgracefully be called a passive exercise.

Do brainstorming, for example, before the listening exercise, but do not stop there. It is necessary to help students find the connection of that information with the one they are about to listen to by creating a gap. To do so, make them produce hypotheses of what might happen for instance. Create the need for listening. While listening, students should be asked to show that they are in fact listening. Have them respond to the listening exercise by doing, drawing, choosing from a list, matching, following a route etc. Stop the audio and ask questions about it; you do not have to wait until the audio is over to have them “produce.” A listening exercise must not look like a test in which we want to know who has the right answer, right?

We need to monitor what is happening.

Is there another myth about teaching listening?

Share your expertise with us!

BIOGRAPHICAL DATA

M.A. in Cognition, Learning and Development from PUCP, B.A. in Education with a major in English Teaching. Ms. Vila is currently Teacher trainer, Pedagogic Consultant and Member of the Research Team at Centro de Idiomas de la Universidad del Pacífico. She is Academic Director of International Contacts (test training & foreign applications advisory) and relationship manager for American universities´ MBA admissions officers with International Contacts. She is official Examiner for several University of Cambridge tests, freelance consultant with Universidad ESAN, experienced speaker on diverse English teaching issues for prestigious institutions, and senior international examinations trainer (GMAT, GRE, TOEFL, IELTS).