Introduction

Reflecting on my twenty-eight years of teaching listening in French, Spanish and Italian—from primary through lower and upper secondary—I notice one thing very clearly: the problems my students faced whilst listening did not simply disappear as they advanced; they changed their shape. Research has found the same (Field, 2008; Vandergrift, 2007): the beginner’s obstacles usually evolve into more subtle, but equally tricky, intermediate ones. In this post I intend to discuss how each area of difficulty typically develops.

Phonological decoding: from “all a blur” to “I hear the words, but…”

At the beginning, students often say things like: “When I listen to Spanish it is just a river of sound.”
They are right: in many languages vowels are reduced or run together; in French, liaison and elision swallow syllables (a phenomenon called ‘assimilation), and beginners cannot yet segment the stream.
By the intermediate stage, they can pick out many individual words but still mis-hear rapid speech or regional accents. Think of a learner who recognises il y a on paper but misses it when it contracts to y’a.
The challenge evolves from total blur to fine-grained perception.

Lexical processing: from panic at unknown words to distraction by low-frequency ones

Beginners often freeze when they meet a single unknown item, as if that one gap blocks all meaning. In other words, their tolerance for ambiguity threshold is very low.
In my experience, they rarely exploit context or cognates—for instance, not noticing that información in Spanish is transparently ‘information’.”

Later, with a larger vocabulary, they stop panicking at every unknown term, yet a new trap appears: they waste time puzzling over rare, low-frequency words and lose the thread of the message.
Research has found that moving from “every word matters” to “ignore the unimportant” is a key milestone in listening fluency (Goh, 2010).

Grammatical / syntactic parsing: from word-by-word decoding to complex-clause confusion

At first, learners decode each word separately and often miss function words or tense endings.
Ask a beginner after a French listening task, “Did you hear the passé composé marker?” or the preposition ‘pour’ and you will likely get a blank look
By intermediate level, they can follow simple sentence patterns, but longer sentences with embedded clauses still derail them.
Even strong B1 students, in my experience, can misread a Spanish relative clause and misunderstand who is doing what.
The struggle moves from basic recognition to higher-level parsing.

Use of top-down knowledge: from little prediction to overconfidence

Beginners rarely activate background knowledge before listening.
Prediction simply does not occur to them.
Intermediates, however, often swing to the opposite extreme: they do predict—sometimes too eagerly to the point that they often hear words they predict where they do not exist…
They often cling to their first hypothesis and ignore evidence that contradicts it, a classic confirmation bias.
So the evolution is from underuse to over-reliance.

Metacognitive control: from passivity to late monitoring

In my experience, novices tend to treat listening as a test: press “play” and hope for the best.
They cannot say where or why they lost meaning.
With experience, learners begin to monitor, but often notice problems only after the key moment has passed.
Research has found that modelling the plan–monitor–evaluate cycle (Vandergrift & Tafaghodtari, 2010) is what gradually turns late monitoring into timely self-regulation.

Strategic behaviour: from bottom-up obsession to risky guessing

Beginners typically chase every single word—classic bottom-up trap.
Intermediates, perhaps tired of that strain, sometimes lean too heavily on top-down guessing, risking mis-hearing when their predictions are wrong.
The difficulty morphs from not seeing the forest for the trees to trusting the forest and missing a tree that matters.

Affective factors: from anxiety to overconfidence

Anxiety at the start is high: “If I miss one word, I fail.”
Confidence grows with competence, but at intermediate level another danger appears: complacency.
Learners overestimate their comprehension and stop refining strategies.
Research has found that both extremes—fear and overconfidence—interfere with progress (Graham & Macaro, 2008).

Interaction and negotiation: from silence to hesitant repair

In interactive tasks—say, a role-play in German or an information-gap in Italian—beginners rarely ask for clarification; they fear looking incompetent.
Intermediates begin to use repair moves (for example Come scusi? or ¿Cómo?), but may hesitate or choose awkward phrasing.
The growth is visible, yet the skill is still fragile: from no repair to imperfect repair.

Table 1: Typical Mistakes in MFL Listening at Beginner and Intermediate Levels (Sources: Field 2008; Vandergrift 2007; Goh 2010; Graham & Macaro 2008)

Conclusions

To my Italian eyes, the path from beginner to intermediate in French, Spanish or German is like climbing a mountain: the scenery changes, but the effort does not lessen.
The first part of the climb demands strength just to keep moving—decoding sounds, catching words.
Higher up, the air is clearer but the rocks are trickier: confirmation bias, complex syntax, and a dangerous touch of complacency.
Our job as teachers is to guide learners through each new landscape and help them understand that progress brings new, different challenges, not an end to difficulty.