Interchange author Jack C. Richards is exploring how we teach listening in a new series of posts. Here, he moves on to looking at listening as acquisition.
Our discussion so far has dealt with one perspective on listening, namely, listening as comprehension. Everything we have discussed has been based on the assumption that the role of listening in a language program is to help develop learners’ abilities to understand things they listen to.
This approach to teaching of listening is based on the following assumptions:
- Listening serves the goal of extracting meaning from messages.
- To do this, learners have to be taught how to use both bottom-up and top-down processes to understand messages.
- The language of utterances – the precise words, syntax, and expressions – used by speakers are temporary carriers of meaning. Once meaning is identified, there is no further need to attend to the form of messages unless problems in understanding occurred.
- Teaching listening strategies can help make learners more effective listeners.
Tasks employed in classroom materials enable listeners to recognize and act on the general, specific, or implied meaning of utterances. These tasks include sequencing, true-false comprehension, picture identification, summarizing, and dicto comp as well as activities designed to develop effective listening strategies. Although what is sometimes called “discriminative listening” (Wolvin and Coakely, 1996) is sometimes employed (i.e., listening to distinguish auditory stimuli), it is generally taught as an initial stage in the listening process, the ultimate goal of which is comprehension.
Activities not typically employed when comprehension is the focus of listening are those that require accurate recognition and recall of words, syntax, and expressions that occurred in the input. Such activities include dictation, cloze exercises, and identifying differences between a spoken and written text. Activities such as these are often discouraged because they focus on listening for words (bottom-up listening) rather than listening for meaning (top-down listening).
Few would question the approach to the teaching of listening just described when the focus is listening as comprehension. But another crucial role has been proposed for listening in a language program, namely, its role in facilitating second language acquisition. Schmidt (1990) has drawn attention to the role of consciousness in language learning, and in particular to the role of noticing in learning. His argument is that we won’t learn anything from input we hear and understand unless we notice something about the input. Consciousness of features of the input can trigger the first stage in the process of incorporating new linguistic features into one’s language competence. As Slobin (1985:1164) remarked of L1 learning:
The only linguistic materials that can figure in language-making are stretches of speech that attract the child’s attention to a sufficient degree to be noticed and held in memory.
Schmidt (1990:139) further clarifies this point in distinguishing between input (what the learner hears) and intake (that part of the input that the learner notices). Only intake can serve as the basis for language development. In his own study of his acquisition of Portuguese (Schmidt and Frota 1986), Schmidt found that there was a close connection between his noticing features of the input and their later emergence in his own speech.
However, for language development to take place, more is required than simply noticing features of the input. The learner has to try to incorporate new linguistic items into his or her language repertoire, that is, to use them in oral production. This involves processes that have been variously referred to as restructuring, complexification, and producing stretched output.
VanPatten (1993: 436) suggests that restructuring refers to:
… those [processes] that mediate the incorporation of intake into the developing system. Since the internalization of intake is not mere accumulation of discrete bits of data, data have to “fit in” in some way and sometimes the accommodation of a particular set of data causes changes in the rest of the system.
Complexification and stretching of output occurs in contexts
… where the learner needs to produce output which the current interlanguage system cannot handle … [and so] … pushes the limits of the interlanguage system to handle that output. (Tarone and Liu 1995: 120–121) In other words, learners need to take part in activities that require them to try out and experiment in using newly noticed language forms in order for new learning items to become incorporated into their linguistic repertoire.
(Dictocomp is a technique for practicing composition, in which the teacher reads a passage, and then students must write out what they understand and remember from the passage, keeping as closely as possible to the original but using their own words where necessary.)
Read other posts in this series at the links below.
Teaching Listening and Speaking – From Theory to Practice: an introduction
Teaching listening #1 – Listening as comprehension
Teaching listening #2 – Bottom-up processing
Teaching listening #3 – Top-down processing
Teaching listening #4 – Teaching top-down processing
Teaching listening #6 – Listening as Acquisition
Teaching listening #7 – Implications