Teaching Listening to Advanced Learners: Problems and Solutions
by Scott Shelton
Teaching advanced learners and preparing them for the Cambridge Certificate of Advanced English examination, I often encounter a majority of students who find the listening section of the test particularly challenging and difficult. In this paper I will attempt to outline a framework of what listening entails, identify some of the more salient difficulties that students typically have at advanced levels, look at possible reasons for this, and propose some activities and approaches in teaching that could enable students to improve in this area.
Defining 'listening'
Listening effectively is a demanding and involved process. One must be able to deal with different accents or pronunciation, unfamiliar lexical items and syntactic structures, competing background noise, and also make a conscious effort to not 'switch off' or become distracted while listening. All of this must be achieved and dealt with more or less simultaneously in order to identify and understand the meaning in any given message.
There is often a difference between what we experience in 'real life' in terms of listening and what students are asked to deal with in the classroom. In 'real life' we are required to listen in many different situations and for different reasons. Penny Ur (1984:2) offers a list of listening sources such as:
• The news on the television or radio
• Friends while having an informal chat
• Others talking on their mobile phones or in a public place
• Songs and films
• Small talk at a party
• Discussing problems at work or at home
• On the phone
• Attending a class or a seminar
The list can go on and on. The point is though, that while we are required to listen to many different 'texts' in real life and for different reasons, these situations are not always present in textbooks and are not always possible to recreate authentically in the classroom. This puts the learner at a disadvantage because ample exposure to a variety of situations where relevant and purposeful listening takes place is an extremely important element in improving aural comprehension and recognition skills. Therefore, the kind of listening we do and the types of tasks we set for learners in class are important. They need to be of a kind that somehow relate to learners' needs outside the classroom socially and academically, as in the case of exam preparation. They should also develop the skills necessary to understand different types of discourse which will in turn help equip them to be more effective listeners in 'authentic' native speaker environments.
How we listen
Richards (1990:50) breaks down the process used in listening comprehension into two distinct types, referring to them as 'bottom-up' and 'top-down' processing. The former is described in Cook's Discourse (1989) as:
'Interpreting the lowest-level units first, then proceeding to an interpretation of the rank above, and so on upwards.'
In other words, we sometimes need to rely on our knowledge of grammar, syntax, and lexis, and apply that knowledge when confronted with an incoming message in order to achieve comprehension. On the other hand, we might apply a top-down approach to aid comprehension. This is defined as:
'Interpreting discourse by hypothesizing about the most general units first, then moving downwards through the ranks below.'
This means applying our background knowledge to aid in understanding the meaning of a message. Richards (1990:51) explains that:
" This may be previous knowledge about the topic of discourse, it may be situational or contextual knowledge, or it may be knowledge stored in long-term memory in the form of 'schemata' and 'scripts' - plans about the overall structure of events and the relationships between them."
Anderson and Lynch (1988:22) argue that research has shown that the assumptions in the 'bottom-up' model are incorrect. They state that:
"Listeners would not be able to perceive speech as successfully as they do if they were in fact engaged in a process of building up the recognition of words solely by attempting to identify their constituent phonemes."
They instead, argue for an interactive process to explain how we listen. Amos Paran (1997) explains in an article contrasting the two models:
'Recent views see comprehension as drawing upon both types of processing, in what is know as interactive processing (Carrell, Devine and Eskey). Some psychologists claim that when the quality of the stimulus is good, bottom-up processing is preferred, and it is only when stimulus quality deteriorates that top-down processing takes over to compensate ( Eysenck and Keane).'
In teaching listening skills, we need to be aware of how these processes work and guide our students, through the use of different tasks, towards using a balanced approach if we are to aid them in improving their listening comprehension. I believe we can help advanced learners by drawing attention to these strategies and overtly practicing these listening skills in the classroom.
Why we listen
Because we listen for many different purposes in and out of the classroom, this has an effect on the way we listen. Yule and Brown (1983) make a useful distinction between interactional and transactional communication. McCarthy, (1991) in Discourse, defines transactional talk (and listening) as communication for getting business done. Interactional communication, on the other hand, has to do with lubricating the social wheels. In Listening (1988) Anderson and Lynch describe them as (transactional) listening when the main purpose is to achieve a successful transfer of information, while interactional listening is defined as listening for social reasons, and to establish or maintain friendly relations between interlocutors.
From the list mentioned above in 'defining listening', an example of 'transactional listening' would be taking notes on key information in a class or a seminar, whereas an example of 'interactional listening' would be making small talk or perhaps discussing problems at home or work.
Recognizing the different purposes that listeners have and how these differences affect the way we go about listening has important implications for the language classroom. These implications deal directly with the way we design listening tasks, ask our learners to respond to listening material and how we prepare them to listen. While practice in the areas mentioned above and pointing out how they can overlap is essential, advanced classes preparing for high level exams are required to deal with tasks largely transactional in nature. We therefore need to make them aware of appropriate techniques in order to increase their chances for success with these types of exercises such as listening for key words, or using their background knowledge to aid their understanding.
Potential Problem areas
The majority of advanced learners, in my experience, have many of the same problems that beginners and intermediate learners have. They may understand more as a general rule, but still have gaps in their understanding and experience difficulties in comprehension in less than optimum listening situations. Penny Ur (1984) points out several potential problem areas in her book Teaching Listening Comprehension: See appendix one for examples.
• Hearing the sounds
• Understanding intonation and stress
• Coping with redundancy and 'noise'
• Predicting
• Understanding (colloquial) vocabulary
• Understanding different accents
• (Not) using visual or environmental clues
• Fatigue
Listening to our students
In researching information for this paper, I naturally consulted my current advanced classes. I believe that by listening carefully to our students and involving them at a personal level, we can develop the insight necessary to help them improve their listening skills. By building on what foundation they already have, and raising their awareness of possible pitfalls that could impede their listening comprehension, we can help the advanced learner enormously.
The majority of the comments made by my students were related to the stream of speech (connected speech) and how 'fast' native speakers speak, difficulties in understanding different accents, and not knowing (or recognizing) the vocabulary used by the speaker. It was also mentioned that listening to tapes was difficult due to the lack of a clear context as well as the lack of paralinguistic features such as facial expressions and gestures. Some found it challenging to concentrate on understanding every word while at the same time attempting to understand the whole message. Becoming used to 'teacher-talk', or English spoken too clearly in class, and becoming overly accustomed to the teacher's accent were both mentioned as potentially problematic when later confronted with trying to understand other native speakers and accents.
Looking at problems
One problem that students have is distinguishing individual sounds and word boundaries in the stream of speech. As mentioned, some of my current advanced learners profess problems in this area. Linguistic features such as elision, (a feature of connected speech by which a consonant sound is left out in order to facilitate articulation e.g. the disappearance of 't' in 'last chance'), assimilation (what happens when nearby sounds influence each other causing them to sound more similar e.g. the 'd' to 'b' assimilation in 'good morning')1 and the overall phenomenon of weak forms in spoken English can cause a great deal of comprehension problems, even for advanced learners, if they are not exposed to them regularly through awareness raising, receptive and productive activities.
Because I am a speaker of North American English, and most of what they hear on classroom cassettes is a British accent, my students get pretty consistent exposure to both of the major accents in spoken English today. Penny Ur (1984) points out that:
"We must remember that the English many of our students will need to understand may very well not be spoken in a native accent at all…what we can do is try to give them a reasonable familiarity with the two most useful accents (American and British) and give them some practice in coping with both of them."
I might also add that we should give them exposure to other varieties of English in accordance with their immediate and specific needs as well.
Another problem for learners, whose exposure to spoken English is limited to the classroom, is becoming over accustomed to one type of discourse, whether it be natural conversation or spoken prose. Lacking exposure to different text types, learners may find it more difficult to understand one or the other. I always try to ensure that my classes get both informal conversations between teacher and student and between the students themselves whereas formal spoken prose can be delivered either by myself, or through the use of tape and video. Lacking in cultural knowledge of the target language also presents problems for the non-native listener, as shared knowledge is important in order to be able to carry out effective predictions and utilize a top-down process to aid understanding. McCarthy (1991) states:
"Active listeners, like active readers, are constantly predicting what the message will be, based on the evidence of their real world knowledge and the type of discourse they are engaged in."
Anderson and Lynch have this to add:
"Gaps in our knowledge of the L2 culture, of the associations and references available to native users, can present obstacles to comprehension."
I have noticed that this lack of 'shared cultural knowledge' is often a source of difficulty for my advanced students especially because the listening texts provided for class work and exam practice are often extremely culturally biased. It is for this reason that they often cannot make appropriate guesses based on key words and contextual situations, such as the weather or gardening, where the lack of shared cultural knowledge sometimes creates a crucial gap between listening and comprehension.
Providing help
In class there are several ways in which we can help advanced learners improve listening comprehension.
Materials can be graded in order to facilitate understanding and pitched at the correct level of difficulty to stretch and challenge comprehension.
Task-oriented exercises should be used to ensure that the learners' listening skills are developed and not simply tested which is what often happens when a procedure is not fully employed. Effective tasks help to engage learners' interest, provide a purpose for listening, and can be supported by visual as well as environmental clues.
"Listening exercises are most effective if they are constructed around a task. That is to say, the students are required to do something in response to what they hear that will demonstrate their understanding"
Wood (2002) describes a basic task-oriented procedure as follows:
1. Provide a lead-in to the task. (Pre-listening introduction to topic, discussion, using visual stimuli).
2. Pre-task work. (Looking through the worksheet, work on key lexical items, developing prediction, and so on.)
3. Set a clear, achievable task. (Check that students understand the task either by demonstrating or concept checking.)
4. Play the tape or offer the material 'live'. (Ensure that the students are aware that they should not be trying to understand everything they hear, only enough to be able to do the specific task.)
5. Task feedback. (Check if the students have been able to do the task and give an immediate response to performance. Do not ask additional, unfair questions at this point.)
6. Could they do the task? If yes, then conclude, lead on to follow up activities, and review what has been done. If not, repeat step four or even go back to step two and listen again. Assess the difficulty of the task for future reference. An example of follow up activities might be a personalized response to the text, relating the theme to 'real world' issues, or using the theme as the basis for a class questionnaire.
Students should be given exposure to a variety of aural input such as everyday conversation, announcements, storytelling, interviews, TV and radio news, English language songs, and so on. I also like to give my classes 'live' listening, which comes in the form of anecdotal asides or prepared monologues with which they are encouraged to interact with through the teller (either another student or myself).
Training students to predict something of the content of the text that they are going to hear is also important. The Cambridge CAE handbook (2000) mentions this and other ideas for preparing exam students. It mentions the need to help them learn to focus on key words and use that information in completing gap-fill questions. It goes on to suggest going through the transcript after listening where a variety of activities can be employed. I like to use transcripts for noticing important language features such as linking devices and discourse markers, linguistic features of connected speech and vocabulary for follow-up work such as differentiating between formal and informal registers, or working on text cohesion by looking at forward and backward references. Jigsaw listening tasks can provide a communicative purpose for listening, give rise to turn taking, and promote negotiation of meaning. Dictation is a favorite as well, providing useful practice in listening for detail as well as features of connected speech. In Grammar Dictation (1990) activities are presented which practice listening for key information words later used as a base for speaking and collective grammar practice while students discuss their notes and attempt to reconstruct the text, maintaining meaning and coherence. I have found this to be an excellent integrated activity that benefits advanced learners in not only listening but in grammar, speaking and writing as well.
It is also important to give extensive listening practice. Making students aware that they do not have to understand every word in order to identify specific information, gist and attitudes between speakers, can build confidence and provide meaningful practice for both exam and 'real life' situations
Conclusion
Listening to and understanding what others are saying, then, is not a passive act as it was long considered to be. It is a vigorous, demanding process, which involves, not only understanding different accents, pronunciation and intonation as well as semantic implications (lexical and grammatical), but also engaging in activating background knowledge and making educated assumptions. In this light, we need to ensure a balance of mediums and task types are used in the classroom. We also need to create and maintain motivation making certain that students have every chance at success with whatever approach or medium is being used.
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar