As I have already discussed in a previous blog, foreign language instructors ‘teach’ listening skills through comprehension tasks that mainly involve identifying words or details they need to answer a closed question (e.g. true or false?). In addition, they often model to their students ‘inference strategies’ which involve paying selective attention to keywords in the text in order to, based on their knowledge of the context or para-textual features (e.g. photos), use them to reconstruct or ‘intelligently guess’ the text’s meaning. Although some of the above does address bottom-up processing skills, in my view most of the focus tend to be placed by teachers and textbooks, whether consciously or not, on top-down processing skills (using background knowledge to infer new information).
Whilst the skills just alluded to above are very useful, one important set of listening skills seems to receive very little emphasis in many MFL classrooms, despite being pivotal in the process of reconstruction of the meaning of any spoken text: phonological decoding or parsing skills, the ability, that is, to interpret the L2 sound system, which enables learners to make sense of what they hear – where each word starts and ends, for instance, which is crucial, as one of the reasons why a foreign language sounds ‘faster’ to a beginner L2-learner is that they cannot draw the boundaries between each word they hear and consequently speech sounds like a continuous unintelligible flow.
The ability to effectively decode the phonological level of foreign language speech will hinge on how accurately the foreign language sound system has been encoded in our Long-term Memory. This is because, as we listen, we match the sounds we hear to the most approximate existing versions of those sounds in our brains. Hence, focusing our learners on this level of the language, through listening activities, ‘kills two birds with one stone’: on the one hand, we enhance their understanding of how the target language is pronounced thereby modelling good accent, on the other we enhance their understanding of target language speech.
In fact, our students’ failure to comprehend aural target language input is often due less to lack of vocabulary than to the inability to decode sound; often the students do recognize the word in writing, but not when it is uttered by a native speaker, especially when it seems to ‘blend in’ with the rest of the sentence. Requiring students to engage in comprehension tasks involving the understanding of sentences or short passages without ensuring that they are proficient in the target language sound system is not only pedagogically wrong, but also unfair to our students and may end up engendering low levels of self-efficacy and motivation vis-à-vis listening skill practice.
In previous blogs I have already argued for the importance of focusing beginners on this level of the language and of emphasizing pronunciation as much as possible from the very early days of instruction in order to facilitate speaking and listening fluency development. Thus, I will not elaborate on this point any further.
8 Micro-listening enhancers
I call the activities I use to work on this listening-skills subset ‘Micro-listening enhancers’ (please note that this is my personal jargon, not one used in the Applied Linguistics literature). The following is a list of some of my favourite ‘Micro-listening enhancers’ for use with beginner students. The reader should note that these activities are not always applicable to all foreign languages (I mainly use them in teaching French and English). One particularly useful application of these activities is with students who need remedial pronunciation instruction.It should also be noted that the content of these activities should be semantically related to the lesson focus and not include just random words (as some of my examples below may seem to suggest).
Broken words: the students are given words with missing letter clusters (missing ‘bits’ may be provided aside) . Ideally, the instructor will remove more problematic sounds or sounds which are the focus of a specific lesson. The words chosen should belong to the same semantic field
Example (French) : man_ _ _ ; ch _ _ _ ; _ _ _ mpignon; b _ _ re; v _ _ ;
Options: oux – cha – oi – in – ger – eu – ie – eux
Spot the ‘foreign’ sounds : in this activity, the students are provided with a list of words or a sentence, and as they hear the teacher or the recording, they have to highlight any sound that does not exist in English, by underlining/circling the relevant part of the word. This activity is very useful in order to enhance learner awareness of how the graphemic (written) system and phonemic (sound) one relate to each other in the target language.
Example: sœur ; père; famille; grandparents; moins ;
Spot the silent letters : the students are given a list of sentences like the one below and hear them uttered by the instructor. The task is to highlight the letters that have not been pronounced by the teacher – as they are silent in the target language.
Example: je suis étudiant dans une école internationale en Malaisie
Listen and re-arrange : This activity is for absolute beginners. Students are provided with series of four or five words or short sentences. The teacher will read the words in a different order to the one given to the students who need to rearrange the words accordingly.
Example: (student’s series) Chambre, Lit, Armoire, Tapis, Mur
(teacher’s series): Mur, Armoire, Chambre, Tapis, Lit
Spot the mistake: students are provided with series of words like the one above. The teacher pronounces all the words correctly but one. The task is to spot the mistake in each word series
Minimal pairs: This is a classic. The teacher pronounces two words containing very similar sounds or which students may mistake for homophones and the students need to spot the correct spelling.
Example: moi / moins ; bon / bonne ; achète / acheté
Rhyming pairs: The students are given a list (on paper/whiteboard/google classroom) of five words all with different endings, chosen based on their difficulty or simply because they contain sounds they may need to pronounce during the planned lesson. The teacher then reads out six or seven words (the extra one or two are distractors), five of the words rhyming with the five words provided initially (see example below). The task is for the students to identify which words rhyme with which.
Example: (student’s words) moi – ville – famille – travailleur – brillant
(teacher’s words – which the student cannot see) bois – mille – peur – soleil – ailleur – dur – jouet – cédille – mer – souriant
Gapped sentences with multiple choice: this is a classic word recognition task. The teacher utters sentences and the students need to fill in selecting the correct word from a choice of three or four provided aside. Using tongue twisters for this kind of activities can make it more fun. Songs can be used too, as motivation enhancers
In conclusion, working on the phonological level of the target language can help learners across two dimensions of language acquisition: speaking, by promoting better pronunciation and listening, by developing more effective bottom-up processing skills (the ability to decode sounds). The above activities can be fun and should be staged before the students engage in listening practice or conversation to ‘warm them up’, so to speak, and/or to go over problematic sounds which may affect the intelligibility of the aural input they will be processing or of the oral output they will be producing. I have used them over the years with success and my students reported benefitting greatly from them. Teachers should ‘get creative’ and come up with as many activities as possible, which, like the above ones, enhance students’ L2 phonological awareness. (For more listening enhancers: https://gianfrancoconti.wordpress.com/2015/08/18/more-micro-listening-enhancers-for-the-foreign-language-classroom/ ).
hi
John Field also uses the term micro-listening – “examples of the same word/phrases in different voices and contexts”
your readers may be interested in one way to get such micro-listenings here – https://eflnotes.wordpress.com/2014/09/26/easy-micro-listenings/
ta
mura
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Great! Thanks! Interesting and useful stuff!
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[…] Micro-listening tasks you may not be using often enough in your lessons. […]
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Reblogged this on The Language Gym.
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Thank you for this, it is very interesting! Do you know of a website with already made resources? Thanks
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Sadly, no. But I am building one 🙂
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Excellent thank you. May I also say that your resources on TES are fab!
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Thank you Betty. Your comment made my day! 🙂
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[…] on enhancing phonological awareness. In a previous post on ‘Listening micro-skills enhancers’ (https://gianfrancoconti.wordpress.com/2015/06/16/seven-micro-listening-enhancers-you-may-not-be-usin…😉 I indicated several examples of very-easy-to-set-up activities that students enjoy, which focus […]
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We did this sort of thing a. Lot in our department. Taking transcriptions of listenings, scoring out words and getting students to pick out words. A bit crude but it seemed to work. our listenings scores in public exams were always high and so I assumed it was a practice worth continuing.
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Excellent! Thanks again 🙂
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I think one of the many great things about this list is that it is a great way to teach students to become active listeners. Too often kids just sit back and listen/view with nothing to ensure that they are engaged. Thanks for sharing!
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I so agree with you!.Active listening and listenership are two aspects of listening skill acquisition which are two often overlook. Thanks for your insightful comment.
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[…] I just found the blog the Language Gym and have been reading tons of articles! It is fabulous and research based! Two of my favorites are Six things I do in every FL lesson I teach and this one on micro listening activities. […]
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Thanks! Very happy you enjoy the blog! And guess what: those are my favourite articles, too!
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[…] enhancers (for more microlistening enhancers see my two posts on these at: https://gianfrancoconti.wordpress.com/2015/06/16/seven-micro-listening-enhancers-you-may-not-be-usin… ; and […]
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Thank you for posting. I’m going to try these micro-listening activities with my year 7. Looking forward to read more of this.
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[…] A possible solution: when one is using word-lists and writing mats one may want to model those words extensively through lots of listening and micro-listening tasks. As far as listening is concerned, the easiest zero-preparation way to do this is to utter short accessible sentences and ask the students to write their meaning on MWBs or even micro-dictation/transcription tasks. Narrow listening tasks require more preparation but yield excellent results. As for the micro-listening tasks, please refer to this post: https://gianfrancoconti.wordpress.com/2015/06/16/seven-micro-listening-enhancers-you-may-not-be-usin… […]
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I completely agree with this post! Pronunciation is so often overlooked. The beauty of Spanish is that it is quite phonetic once you know the rules. I start the very beginning of Spanish 1 with very explicit instruction on the alphabet and pronunciation, letter combinations,etc. I use a short paragraph about how many Spanish speakers there are in the world and where and we practice it in class and around the 2nd or 3rd week of class they record themselves reading it for a pronunciation grade. This works very well!
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[…] awareness tasks (see my posts on listening micro-skill enhancers and on transcription tasks: here ) […]
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[…] ‘Listening – the often mis-taught skill’, ‘So…how do we teach listening?” and “Micro-listening tasks you may not be using often enough in your lessons”) I have been flooded with e-mail, Twitter and Facebook messages from Modern Language teachers […]
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[…] brain. Hence, listening instruction ought to concern with automatizing those skills first (read here why and […]
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[…] brain. Hence, listening instruction ought to concern with automatizing those skills first (read here why and […]
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[…] find more problematic, as way to prep them. Examples of these activities can be found at these link. Here are four types of MLEs that I use a […]
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[…] Micro-listening enhancers (MLEs) (see examples of MLEs here) – these are of great help when working with highly inflected languages such as French, German or […]
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[…] might cause them issues in processing the text-at-hand; for this purpose I use a range of my MLEs (Micro-listening […]
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[…] more tasks of this sort, read here or here […]
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[…] pairs and spot-the-foreign or -silent-words tasks are minimal preparation activities that do work (see this post for more of these tasks). Make sure these sounds are then recycled in any subsequent input they will process (e.g. […]
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[…] presenting one or more phonemes and doing much receptive work (like the one envisaged here), the teacher writes a number of words (10-12?) containing that (those) phoneme(s) on the board. […]
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[…] M.L.E. (Micro-Listening Enhancers) such as minimal pairs and syllable-completion tasks and others (see here ). […]
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[…] have read a lot about these on Gianfranco Conti’s website. I have found myself using them quite a bit recently as my speakers are kaputt. The pupils did […]
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Thanks for the shout out 🙂
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[…] used some of Gianfranco’s micro-listening practices to help with listening skills. This helped my students identify sounds much better. I used a […]
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[…] obvious and consistent with what I argued in many posts of mind. Instruction in decoding skills (read here), the ability to convert letters into sound and viceversa , reading aloud (see point 9 below) and […]
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[…] Exploit listening activities to model language (e.g. for speaking or writing) and use the process to teach listening skills rather than simply test comprehension. It can potentially be demoralising for students just to pluck an odd key word amongst what may be, to them, a soup of target language and this can lead to them simply opting out of trying a question and lead to demotivation. Complete pre- and post-listening tasks to scaffold student understanding, making extensive use of transcripts and try some of Gianfranco Conti’s micro-listening enhancers. […]
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