Word count: 2062

[Type the company name]

Listening Comprehension and Acquisition

LSA 1 Background Essay

[Type the author name]

[Pick the date]

Table of Contents

1. Introduction.....................................................................................................................................3

2. Analysis............................................................................................................................................3

I. Activating Schemata....................................................................................................................4

II. Top-down Approach....................................................................................................................4

III. Bottom-up Approach...............................................................................................................5

IV. Integrating Bottom-up and Top-down approaches..................................................................5

3. Issues and Solutions.........................................................................................................................7

I. Issues with Cognitive Processing..................................................................................................7

II. Suggested Solutions.....................................................................................................................8

4. Teaching Approaches and Evaluation............................................................................................10

I. Pre-listening skills:.....................................................................................................................10

II. While Listening skills:.................................................................................................................11

III. Post listening skills:................................................................................................................12

Bibliography:..........................................................................................................................................13

1. Introduction

Listening for many learners has been an under-practiced skill, where not much attention

was invested in it through most school settings, mainly in the Middle-East. Assessment

was mostly content-oriented but not skill-oriented and not concerned with the

students’ developmental skills; whether that was in first or second language acquisition.

According to Richards (2008), listening was mainly focused on mastering micro-skills

such as recognizing reduced forms and cohesive devices. Views on listening later

developed and adopted a more cognitive approach to teaching listening, which

introduced methods such as top-down, bottom-up and activating schemata during

comprehension (Brown, 2006). Therefore, it is possible to help second language learners

with developing their listening as a process of well orchestrated skills, rather than a

product.

2. Analysis

Brown (2006) discussed the aspects of the cognitive view of language learning on

listening as a skill. He mentioned that it is possible to develop the learners’ listening

skills through the cognitive approach, even in later stages in life. This can be done

through activating prior knowledge, thinking of the purpose of the listening tasks, which

would serve the purpose of listening for comprehension. Furthermore, to develop

listening for acquisition, the teacher needs to devise well-structured follow-up speaking

tasks, to help expose the learners to interactive listening as well (Richards, 2008). In this

section, the cognitive approach to teaching listening is closely investigated.

I. Activating Schemata

Activating schemata, also known as prior knowledge, is an integral part of teaching

listening. It directly affects learners’ cognition and helps them understand new

experiences. Cook (2008) mentions that “our background knowledge sometimes

overrides the acoustic signals we hear” (p.22), since listening is temporal and cannot be

revisited; therefore, learners rely more on prior knowledge to patch up what they might

miss out from the listening segment. O’Malley et al. (1989) further support that more

effective listeners use prior knowledge to infer meaning rather that working it out from

the text itself. It is therefore considered as a feature of successful and skilled listeners

when they demonstrate their ability to “contextualize their guesses and predict the

script of a given schema” (Brown, 2006).

II. Top-down Approach

The top-down approach is listener-based, where s/ he depends on using prior

knowledge and experiences to process the newly presented information. In other

words, this is what the learner comprehends in mind before the listening task (Wilson,

2008). In this approach, minimal information is sufficient to enable the participants to

understand what happened. When applying a learner’s prior knowledge about things,

the actual discourse heard is used to confirm the learner’s expectations and to fill out

details (Richards, 2008). Examples of top-down tasks would be listening for gist,

inference, and prediction.

III.Bottom-up Approach

Bottom-up on the other hand is text-based, where the learner uses the information

about sounds, words meanings and discourse markers to assemble her/ his

understanding of what s/ he hears one step at a time. Richards (2008) views it as a

“process of decoding”. The learners’ lexical and grammatical competence is the key to

decoding the input. To understand input through bottom up processing, the learners

tend to mentally break down its components into what Richards (2008) refers to as

“chunks”, which guides them to the core meaning of the input. The learners’

competencies in grammar and lexis provide the means to finding the appropriate

chunks. Examples of bottom-up tasks would be listening for details or specific

information such as; cloze listening, multiple choice questions, true or false statements

after listening.

IV. Integrating Bottom-up and Top-down approaches

In real world listening, both top-down and bottom-up approaches are integrated together, where one or

the other dominates depending on the level taught in the classroom, the purpose of the listening task,

the familiarity with the topic, and many more factors upon which the teacher needs to make the

decision on which approach to dominate the listening lesson.

When looking at the staging of the lesson, there are always possibilities to use both approaches and to

integrate them according to the learners’ needs. Pre-listening might include activating prior knowledge

and/ or pre-teaching new lexical items. While-listening can include listening for gist and/ or listening for

details. Post-listening usually focuses on listening as acquisition rather than comprehension, so the

learners have a chance to individualize the topic of the listening and work collaboratively to provide

another chance for interactional listening.

3. Issues and Solutions

As highlighted before, listening is a complicated skill. Understanding the nature of the

skill and choosing the right approach do not eliminate learners’ issues. This section

presents some possible learners’ issues and provides proposed solutions to overcome

them.

I. Issues with Cognitive Processing

Throughout my teaching experience in the Middle-East, I came to find that the most

common issues reported by my students during classes are closely related to the

cognitive processing of listening as a skill. It is worth noting that in the aforementioned

teaching context, learners receive no skills training in first language listening. If they get

any second language listening, it usually takes the form of routine, if not skipped

altogether.

In the beginner and elementary levels, learners tend to depend expansively on bottom-

up skills, depending on the poor formation of the chunks due to their limited lexical,

grammatical and phonological proficiency. Goh (2002) highlights several issues that I

find true with most learners that I have taught over the years. Some of these issues are:

Learners quickly forget what is heard.

They don’t recognize the word they know.

They understand the words, but not the intended message.

The neglect the next part when thinking about the meaning.

Unable to form mental representations from words heard.

Rost (2011) attributes some of these learner difficulties to the following factors:

Elision, assimilation and intrusion: each has its own independent definition, but

they are mostly interpreted when the learner knows the word individually but

cannot recognize it within such features of connected speech, because they are

used to seeing the word rather than listening to it in real aural input.

Chunking: a learner who is highly proficient in grammar, lexis and phonology can

easily form proper chunking of the listening input to serve the purpose needed

from the tasks at hand. It is an issue when the learner does not have good

command of those systems, which leads her/ him to form chunks that are mostly

confusing rather than serving the right purpose for the task delegated.

Orthography versus sound: some languages have an opaque relation between

orthography and sound, and others are quite transparent on the other hand. It

depends mainly on the transfer of this relation from the learner’s first language,

which helps her/ him overcome it.

II. Suggested Solutions

Richards (2008) advises that it is never late to train adult learners to listening skills to

provide them with the ability to communicate effectively in a second language. He

proposes that a successful learner does not only focus on the content of a text, but also

considers how to listen. This highlights on the importance of training the learners on

metacognitive as well as cognitive strategies to master the listening skill.

During planning, a teacher needs to consider the listening task and the development of

strategies when determining the objectives of a lesson. Goh (2000) proposes two

teaching strategies that would address the issues previously stated. She suggests that

we could help learners directly by providing them with training of selected sounds,

pronunciation and content words that might appear problematic while listening, and

might hinder comprehension. In addition, learners also need to be aware of listening as

meaning not only as perception and recognition of sounds and intonation. For the

purpose of enhancing listening comprehension, three groups of strategies need to be

learned – cognitive, metacognitive, and social-affective. As stated by Goh (2000)

“Cognitive tactics act directly on the input to make sense of it;

metacognitive tactics manage cognitive processes and difficulties during

listening; social tactics involve other people in achieving understanding;

affective tactics manage unproductive emotions during comprehension.”

(p.71)

4. Teaching Approaches and Evaluation

Based on the approach to teaching listening proposed by Brown (2006), the following

presentation integrates his ideas to provide an effective and well structured listening

lesson.

This section presents the required skills for each listening stage guided by the interactive

model for low learner students. Each stage covers the aim of the stage, the required

skills, the teacher role, the students’ role and the importance of the stage. The listening

skills can be divided into three main areas; pre-listing, while-listening and post listening.

I. Pre-listening skills:

The pre-listening stage exists before listening and it requires using of students’

background information and prediction skills. The aim of the stage is to give students a

chance to prepare for the listening task, and understand the task aim (listening for aim).

A big part of the listening success depends on the organization of this stage. The teacher

introduces the learners to the listening task using visuals or exercises (e.g. opinion gaps

or information gaps). Students have a good chance to explore and gain better

understanding of the task during this stage. This is the most crucial stage, as they should

gain information as much as possible during this task to fill in their linguistic gap

(grammar forms, vocabulary etc).

II. While Listening skills:

While-listening stage starts after playing the listening for the first time, and it requires

extensive and intensive listening skills. The aim of the stage is to give students an

opportunity to listen for gist-extensive listening (e.g. the main idea) and listen for

details-intensive listening (e.g. specific information). This stage is important because it

helps the students raise their confidence and enhances their enthusiasm. The teacher

sets the task and monitors the students’ performance. Students can listen to the

passage more than one time according to the number of tasks they are asked to

perform and according to students’ need, as long as they get different task for every

listening. There are other factors that decide the number of opportunities to hear the

passage like; reducing students’ anxiety, difficulty, length and pedagogical focus.

Teachers need to be careful not to get students bored, though. During this stage peer-

teaching and peer-correction is required, and they may listen again to check answers.

Peer teaching and peer correction is good for learners, although some researchers do

not advise to do it not to spread mistakes among students. Sometimes students learn

from each other more than they learn from the teacher, though. The learners may get a

chance to see the text while listening in this stage, to recognize the written form of

words and notice the difference between the written and spoken forms of words.

III.Post listening skills:

This is the typical last stage of a listening lesson, where the lesson transitions from

listening for comprehension to listening for acquisition. The aim of the stage is to

consolidate students understanding of the passage through comparing answers with

colleagues or the teacher do this in plenary (with the whole class). Also, in this stage,

the unknown vocabulary is discussed and the responds to the content of the passages

are done (they could be orally or written. The aim of the stage is to give students a

chance to reflect on what they have learnt. This stage requires summarizing and passage

mining for grammatical aspects or new language expressions. Students are expected to

perform some role-play or group discussions based on the listening.

Bibliography:

Brown, S. (2006). Teaching listening. Cambridge University Press.

Goh, C. (2000). A cognitive perspective on language learners' listening comprehension

problems. System, 28(1), 55-75.

O'MALLEY, J. M., Chamot, A. U., & Küpper, L. (1989). Listening comprehension strategies

in second language acquisition. Applied linguistics, 10(4), 418-437.

Richards, J. C. (2008). Teaching listening and speaking. Cambridge University Press.

Wilson, J. 2008. How to Teach Listening. Longman.