(Co-authored with Dylan Vinales of Garden International School)

0.Introduction

Your students have not done well in their listening mocks. They are demotivated and lacking confidence in their listening skills. With only a few months to go before the actual exam you are panicking. What to do? Past-paper practice? It did not really solve the problem in the past, in fact it further demotivated a big chunk of your class… If this is you, here are eleven strategies that might just do the trick.

1. Caveat: No quick fix

For your students’ listening skills to improve substantially you will need three to four months of systematic work of the kind envisaged below. Listening skills are notoriously slow to develop because they require the mastery of a vast array of challenging micro-skills that must be executed at very high speed in the brain (words lingering in working memory for only about 2 seconds). Hence, you need to be systematic, patient and resilient, mindful of the fact that the improvements your students will be making will be invisible for several weeks to come but will definitely show up in the end.

2.Daily exposure to substantive amounts of aural input

You need to ensure that your students practise listening on a daily basis. One of the likely reasons why your students are underachieving is because they are not processing aural input often enough and/or not in a way that is conducive to learning. Hence you must:

• Increase the amount of target language use both on your part and on your students’. Some minimal-prep teacher-led activities: every beginning and/or ending of the lesson, utter sentences for students to translate on the spot (on mini whiteboards or iPads) ; ask the class questions to answer in writing on mini-whiteboards; give them a gapped text and read out to them the full-text version; do (very short) dictations on mini white boards; radically increase the amount of questions you ask, especially closed questions aimed at modelling (e.g. ‘Is it X or Y? questions) ; Some minimal-prep- student-led activities: oral pair-work activities such as survey, role plays, find-someone-who or speak-and-draw activities ; short paired reading-aloud sessions (student A read short paragraph whilst student B translates orally or summarizes the gist of it);

• Plan tasks which aim at teaching language through listening (L.A.M. = Listening As Modelling). This means less test-like tasks and more tasks of the sort described below (see points 5 to 10 below) which actually focus on developing the core listening micro-skills

Remember: with listening, task variety is key in order not to bore the students but also so as to allow you to recycle the target vocabulary over and over again. Also, keep each task short and sweet and ensure marking is quick and easy.

3.A holistic approach

In order to improve your students’ listening skills you shouldn’t see listening-skills building as separate from reading, speaking, writing and grammar instruction. By ‘holistic’ I mean two things.

Firstly, make sure each listening task does not occur randomly in the instructional sequences you stage in your lessons. For instance, ensure that before the listening comprehension on text ‘X’ the students have received plenty of practice in the unfamiliar language items which occur in that text through plenty of word recognition and pattern recognition tasks. This way your students will come to the listening comprehension tasks more prepared and will have more chances to be successful – this is crucial.

Secondly, focus students on pattern recognition both at word level (e,g.. prefixes and suffixes) and at sentence level (e.g. word order, verb constructions, subordinate clauses) , not only through listening but also through other skills, such as reading.

 

4.Confidence / self-efficacy building

A language learner’s sense of efficacy (i.e. their perception that they are successful at a given task) is one of the most powerful predictors of success in MFL learning. To enhance your students’ chances of succeeding at listening you need to scaffold success in every lesson so as to build their confidence in themselves as successful listeners as much as possible. Give them plenty of opportunities to succeed by (a) pitching the tasks carefully to their level: (b) as mentioned above, by prepping them adequately for each listening comp.; (c) by letting them listen to the texts as often as they request; (d) after playing the track a few times read the transcript to them at a slower speed than in the original recording in order to give them another final chance to get it right.

Remember: you can only truly enjoy what you are good – or perceive yourself to be good – at. There is no chance of getting your students to enjoy listening unless they experience some degree of success at it.

5.Ability to convert letters into sounds and viceversa

Start all over again from the most basic listening micro-skillset : decoding skills, i.e. the ability to convert letters into sounds and viceversa. Focus on the sounds that cause the most serious comprehension issues to your students (e.g. word-endings or ‘eu’ vs ‘u’  in French). Minimal pairs (i.e. identifiying differences between two words that are very similar in sound, such as ‘vous’ and ‘vu’, ‘ship’ or ‘sheep’), rhyming or onset pairs and spot-the-foreign or -silent letters tasks are minimal preparation activities that do work (see this post for more on these tasks). Make sure these sounds are then recycled in any subsequent input they will process (e.g. listening comp) and output (e.g. tongue twisters; role plays) they will produce in the rest of the lesson.

6.Ability to break down the speech flow

This is a very important set of micro-skills. Without the ability to break down the speech flow, your students will never be able to ‘slow down’ the aural input in their heads. So you need to train them on a daily basis in the art of identifying the boundaries of the words they hear. A low prep task: get a set of sentences or a very short text and eliminate the gaps between the words. Then read each line out to the class at slower-than-native-speaker speed asking them to draw the boundaries between the words. Finally show them the original version for marking.

Spot-the-intruder is another favourite of mine. Doctor the lyrics of a song or the transcript of an L2-recording by inserting a few extraneous words of your choice, then play the song and ask them to identify the ‘intruders’. The purpose is to get them to listen and focus on phonemic level of the text. The students really enjoy this activity.

7.Teaching vocabulary aurally and in high-frequency chunks

Teach them lots of vocabulary but do it aurally/orally and in phrases/sentences in which they occur more frequently in TL speech. Make sure the students hear each of the words/phrases you explicitly aim to teach in a lesson at least five times. If you do frequent vocabulary mini-tests, as I do, make sure they involve listening.

When testing vocabulary uptake do not simply stage isolated word or chunk recognition; make sure you include the target lexical items in longer sentences, too.

8.Focus on parsing skill

As explained in my post ‘Teaching grammar through listening’, the ability to effectively recognize aurally the patterns that bind words together is crucial to comprehension. Hence, training students in this skill is paramount. Sentence puzzles are a minimal preparation activity which does wonders in this respect (see examples below). I do sentence puzzles or the other similar activities described in this post every day.

9.Inference and predictive skills

I am not very fond of this approach, but training students in the art of guessing intelligently from context has yielded positive outcomes in a number of research studies. Inference: use written texts  for training first and move on to audio texts only when you think they are ready – as applying inference strategies to reading comprehension is easier and less threatening. Model the process to the class in think-aloud demonstrations of how one can use grammar, syntax, key words and knowledge of the world to guess meaning (think-aloud = verbalise your thoughts as you execute the task). Then provide practice by giving them texts with a set number of words for them to infer the meaning of using surrounding context. Prediction: demonstrate approach by think-aloud, then give students jigsaw puzzles or do ‘guess what comes next’ tasks (i.e. students read the beginning of a narrative and have to guess what comes next).

10. Lots of short low stake assessments

Rather than getting the students to sit through a whole past exam paper – which can be tedious and daunting – do only one task at a time with them as often as possible. As I said above, prep them thoroughly beforehand aiming at them coming to the task with a mastery of around 90 to 95% of the words in the target text.

11. Retrospective reports

At the beginning of your intervention programme you may want to elicit as much information as possible as to the problems that your students experience in performing listening tasks. One method that usually yields useful data involves retrospective reports carried out immediately after task completion. Ask the students, as part of a classroom discussion or in writing (e.g. on a google doc) to describe what they found difficult about the task. Do this with more than one task, if time allows it, in order to get as clear a picture as possible of what gaps you need to address. Your findings will inform your subsequent planning. I have always found this a very useful exercise.

12. Task familiarity and task-specific strategies

This is obvious: once identified the exam tasks your students usually lose the most marks in, invest some time going through the past exam papers and identify their most typical features, such as the format, the register, the typical comprehension questions asked, the kind of vocabulary and grammar structures they contain, the syntax (e.g. Is there a lot of subordination? Are they rich in adjectives, adverbs or idioms you do not normally teach?). Your findings will inform your short, medium and long term planning

Conclusion

Anyone aiming at improving the listening skill of a group of underperforming students needs to  plan their intervention in a multi-layered, holistic and eclectic way in the context of an approach which provides extensive practice in the micro-skills which render comprehension possible. This entails addressing all the levels involved in the comprehension of aural input in a systematic way day in day out over a period of at least three to four months before one can see significant results. Finally, drastically increasing the exposure to ‘smart’ aural input which models language use and pattern recognition and recycles high-frequency vocabulary and grammar at will rather than ‘quizzing’ students is key to the enhancement of learner listening skills.

To find out more about my ideas about teaching do get hold of ‘The Language Teacher Toolkit‘ the book I co-authored with Steve Smith of http://www.frenchteacher.net

 

       

     

1. Introduction

In all of my posts on grammar instruction I have made the very important point that for grammar to be fully acquired it must be practised extensively through all four skills. However, this is not what usually happens, grammar practice occurring in most language classrooms predominantly through the written medium. Hence grammar is mostly read and written, but rarely processed aurally and orally.

Of the four language skills, the one that is always neglected in grammar instruction is definitely Listening. In the typical grammar lesson, the target grammar structure is hardly ever practised through the aural medium.This may not only negatively impact acquisition of that structure, but also listening proficiency development at large. Why? The answer refers to the so-called parsing phase of listening comprehension.

The parsing phase is the stage in the comprehension of aural input in which the listener recognizes a grammar pattern in a string of words and fits it to the surrounding linguistic context. This important stage is paramount not simply to listening comprehension but also to acquisition, because pattern recognition facilitates the chunking of new L2 items and their assimilation in the learner’s existing L2-system.

In this post I intend to show how grammar can be modelled and practised aurally through highly impactful L.A.M. (Listening As Modelling) activities requiring relatively little preparation which I use regularly in my lessons.

2.L.A.M. grammar activities

2.1 Sentence puzzles

Sentence puzzles like the one in Figure 1 below are a very effective way to teach grammar and syntax through listening. The students are provided a set of jumbled-up sentences  to unscramble whilst the teacher utters them in the correct order. The task is for the students to re-write them correctly in the table/grid provided, placing each element of the sentence under the right heading. After completing the transcribing task, the students are charged with inductively working out the rule. The example in Figure 1 focuses on the use of key negatives in English.

Whilst writing the words under each heading in the table the students build an awareness of how word order works, at the same time learning what word class each item belongs in, and all this through the aural medium, thereby combining three skills (listening, reading and writing) together. When the meaning of each word is provided in brackets, new vocabulary is also learnt.

2.2 Sentence builders

Sentence builders take a bit more time to make, but they can be exploited in so many ways that their surrender value is more than worth the effort. The teacher makes and utters sentences using the various chunks of language in the table to demonstrate how the target structure works. Whilst the teacher models the sentences, the students write down their meaning on mini whiteboards. As a follow-up, the students are tasked with working out the rule inductively. Since you are modelling, not testing comprehension, the sentences should be uttered at moderate speed. The example below focuses on the use of negatives and can be used as a follow-up or as a precursor to the sentence puzzle in Figure 1.

2.3 Sorting tasks

The teacher utters a number of sentences each containing a specific structure that s/he wants to draw the students’ attention to. As they listen, the students are tasked with categorizing the structure using a grid or table. In the first example provided in Figure 3, below, the task requires the students to categorize the different verb forms employed in ten sentences uttered by the teacher to reinforce phonological and grammar awareness. Students enjoy sorting tasks; I do them in every single lesson of mine, often exploiting songs.

2.4 Listening hunts

In listening hunts the teacher reads a short narrative and the students are asked to spot and write down as many instances as possible of the target structure(s) contained in the text. I usually tell the students in advance the number of occurrences of the target items in order to enhance their focus.

2.5 Interlingual comparisons

This technique is particularly effective when the word order in which the target structure is deployed in the L2 is markedly different from the L1. As the example in Figure 5 below shows, erroneous versions of target structure use are provided resulting from word-for-word translation from L1 to L2. The teacher will dictate the correct version of each sentence which will be written right under the flawed version. The students are then charged with figuring out the differences between L1 and L2 usage and inductively work out the rule.

2.6. Find your match

This activity serves two purposes. Firstly, to practise decoding skills and pronunciation; secondly, aural processing of the target structure. The students are provided with cards containing simple sentences featuring the target structure(s). Each card contains four pieces of information about a person; each piece information on the cards has a match in four of the other cards. The task is to go around the classroom interviewing people in order to find the four persons whose cards match one’s own. This tasks is useful in that it elicits a lot of production and receptive processing of the target structure.

Fig 7 – Find your match (French negatives)

2.7 ‘Find someone who’ with cards

Each students is given a card with fictitious details and a grid with the details to look for. The task is to find the people with those details on their cards by asking questions in the target language. Although it may appear as a speaking task, this activity is actually mainly a listening one as the students read out aloud details in response to questions.

Fig.8 – Find someone who with cards (grid to fill in by students as they go around interviewing)

2.8 Partial dictations

Partial dictations are extremely easy to prepare and are very effective in focusing learners on the target structure. All one has to do is (1) create texts packed with instances of target structure use: (2)  gap the texts  where the target structure has been deployed; (3) read out the text whilst the students fill the gaps. Easy and highly effective. Tip: do not use one long text, use several short ones; it keeps the students more focused.

2.9 Songs with gapped lyrics to fill in

Songs with gapped lyrics to fill in as you play them are a great way to model and practise target language use in authentic contexts. Think about the song ‘Once I was seven years old’ by Lukas Graham; how useful for any teachers wanting to hammer in the past tense in English. The only issue, of course, is finding a song which contains a sufficient number of occurrences of the target structure. Once found one, all one has to do is to gap the song (do put the gapped words on display for less able students).

2.10 Interactive oral tasks

Any interactive oral task designed to elicit use of the target structure will obviously provide the students with plenty of aural processing as well as production practice. It is not the scope of this post, but I reserve to deal with ways to provide oral production practice in target structure use in a future post

2.11 Concluding remarks

Grammar must be heard, read, spoken and written by our learners if we want them to fully acquire it. This multi-sensorial approach to grammar instruction is rarely implemented in language lessons. The skill that is most neglected in grammar instruction is undoubtedly Listening, regardless of the fact that the brain is naturally wired to acquire grammar acoustically. More effort must be put by teachers in this area of grammar teaching by integrating traditional activities with skill-based approaches to instruction which provide extensive receptive oral practice through Listening-As-Modelling activities (LAM) and oral interaction.

For more on my ideas on listening, get hold of the book co-authored with Steve Smith ‘The language teacher toolkit’ available on www.amazon.co.uk

(co-authored with Dylan Vinales) 1.Introduction The present article is a sequel to the post ‘Eleven reasons why your students underperform in Listening’ published a couple of days a…

Source: How to enhance your students’ chances of succeeding at listening (part 1)

(co-authored with Steve Smith and Dylan Vinales)

1.Introduction

The present article is a sequel to the post ‘Eleven reasons why your students underperform in Listening’ published a couple of days ago. I ended that post stating that in a follow-up article I would suggest practical ways to address the issues in the provision of listening instruction identified as common causes for L2-learner underperformance. Here it is. Please note, however, that since the original version of this article was quite long  I have decided to split it up in two. Hence this post only concerns itself with six of the issues listed below. I reserve to post the second part of the article over the next few days.

2. The issues

Here is a reminder of the issues identified in my previous post:

1. Teachers are not sufficiently aware of the cognitive challenges that L2 learners face when they try to comprehend L2 aural input;
2. Listening skills are only a peripheral concern; consequently,
3. not sufficient time is devoted to listening practice in the classroom;
4. Teachers do not teach listening skills, they quiz students through listening comprehensions, which are tests through and through;
5. They usually do not train students in the mastery of bottom-up processing skills (decoding, parsing, etc.);
6. They often do not teach students effective top-down processing strategies;
7. Students do not perceive Listening as crucial to their learning;
8. Teachers do not usually actually plan listening activities, and how they would best fit in the instructional sequence they are implementing. They typically follow the textbook or play recordings haphazardly at random points in the lessons;
9. Many of the listening texts adopted do not contain comprehensible input, which makes listening become sheer guesswork;
10. Students do not enjoy listening tasks;
11. Students are not self-efficacious, i.e. their expectancy of success at listening tasks is low. Teachers do not plan for or scaffold success in listening adequately;

In the present post I will lay out my approach to listening instruction discussing the ways in which I addressed the above issues with my KS3  (1 to 13) and KS4/IGCSE (14-16) students.

2. A skill-based approach

Being based on Skill-theory, my approach is based on the principles below:

(a) Listening is a form of expertise which is acquired like any other skills, e.g. driving, playing chess, tennis or boxing;

(b) becoming an expert requires extensive practice in important processes so that they become more and more automatic;

(c) achieving any type of expertise requires the novice to adjust their performance slowly but steadily to the way in which an expert listener behaves. Hence, teachers needs to understand expert-listener behaviour if they are to induce it in novices.

This brings us to the first issue.

3.1 Teachers are not sufficiently aware of the cognitive challenges that L2 learners face when they try to comprehend L2 aural input (issue 1)

For listening instruction to be successful one needs to be fully aware of and/or consider in one’s planning the cognitive challenges that processing aural input poses to the novice-to-intermediate learner. Let us look at what makes Listening difficult:

1. Listening is transitory; any sound stays in the brain (in Working Memory’s Phonological store) for one or two seconds and any incoming information will overwrite it;
2. Hence, students have a very short time-window in which to analyse anything they hear and make sense of it and to carry forward what they understood in the mind in order to understand what comes next;
3. When listening to a recording, the speech rate is not under the listener’s control (one cannot say ‘speak slower’ as one would do in real life to an interlocutor).

If we consider what a listener needs to do in order to comprehend any speech signal and build meaning, the picture becomes even more complex; comprehension of aural input goes through the following phases (Field, 2014):

1. A decoding phase, in which she needs to ‘translate’ input into the sounds of the language
2. A lexical search phase, in which she searches her brain (Long-term memory) for words which match or nearly match these sounds. This helps her break the speech flow she hears further and make sense of it (in a movement that goes from phoneme to syllable to word to phrase)
3. A parsing phase, in which she must recognize a grammar pattern in a string of words and fit a word to the linguistic context surrounding it
4. A meaning-building phase in which, having ‘broken’ the speech flow, identified the words she heard and how they fit grammatically in the sentence she finally makes sense of it
5. A discourse-construction phase, in which the understanding of each unit of meaning (e.g. sentence) is connected to the larger context of the narrative. In this phase, one’s background knowledge will help enhance comprehension by using (a) using world knowledge; (b) knowledge of the speaker; (c) experiences of similar speech events; (d) knowledge of the topic; (c) what has been said so far. For less competent listeners this phase is very important as it compensates for gaps in understanding.

To make things harder, research evidence indicates that listeners do not wait until the end of an utterance before working out its meaning. They appear to analyse what a speaker is saying at a delay of only about ¼ second, or the length of an English syllable (Field, 2014). This means that listening is an on-line process which relies on automatic predictions by the brain which occur at very high speed in the brain.

Because listening is on-line, test-takers often form a first-pass hypothesis and cling to it – difficult to blame them in view of the very limited time-window they have to interpret the input. This entails that if one or two key words at the begining of a sentence or other important meaning unit are misunderstood, the knock-on effect on what follows may be disastrous and unlikely to be corrected during the second take when the audio is re-played.

Implications for teaching and learning – Firstly, effective listening instruction must concern itself with the mastery of each and every one of the above processes, with a special focus on Phases 1 to 3.

Secondly, although all of the above is crucial to effective comprehension, Decoding skills are obviously the most important set of skills, as without the effective identification of the boundaries of the words we hear, the aural input we process will sound as an unintelligible speech flow and the whole comprehension process could not even start. Ironically, though, this is also the most neglected set of skills in L2 instruction.

Since they are so important, Decoding Skills should be addressed explicitly in  any long-, medium- and short-term curriculum planning. I will  discuss how in section 3.4, below.

Thirdly, students must be taught masses of vocabulary through the aural medium, not as isolated items but across as wide a range of linguistic contexts and topics as possible. Important: no point teaching vocabulary only through the written medium as the lexical search phase is activated by its sound. Students must hear the words many times over whether through (a) peer read-aloud sessions; (b) jigsaw listening; (c) dictations (keep them short and snappy not to bore them); (d) gapped dictations; (e) songs or texts with gapped transcripts; (f) narrow listening and any other L.A.M. (listening-as-modelling) activities discussed here.

I feature three or four L.A.M. activities in every single lesson of mine and it has paid enormous dividends in terms of enhanced aural comprehension, decoding skills and pronunciation.

Fourthly, students must be trained in recognizing words fast, under time pressure. This will involve lots of practice which starts with the students being exposed to  aural input uttered at a slower speech rate and gradually increasing in speed of delivery.

For instance, at the beginning of a unit of work you may utter model sentences (for students to translate or transcribe on mini-whiteboards) at a moderate speech rate; as the unit progresses and students will have processed those or similar sentences several times aurally, you will increase the speed of delivery until their listening fluency will allow them to understand near-native talk.

Similarly, do use past exam papers for practice, but at the early stages of the GCSE course you will read them out to them at a slower rate pitched to the level of listening fluency of your students; as the year progresses you will gradually increase the speed until they will be ready for the exam recordings. During the early stages of this process, do repeat chunks of texts if the students ask you to do so – these requests will provide you with a valuable insight into their decoding and parsing issues.

Fifthly, limited grammar is not an option, as it is crucial for the parsing phase. Consequently, to begin with, one must ensure that the core grammar points in your Examination Board’ syllabus are covered thoroughly; secondly, students must process each grammar structure through the aural medium as often as possible – this is the most neglected dimension of L2-teaching and one of the main reasons, in my opinion, why students often struggle to acquire grammar.

Why? Firstly, because part of the challenges that L2 grammar poses to L2 learners refer to pronunciation and or to decoding skills. Secondly, because modelling and practising how grammar works solely through the visual modality clashes with the way our brain is wired. Thirdly, it is evident that learning the same concept through a synergy of modalities (listening + reading + speaking + writing) is likely to be more effective than simply doing it through one or two as usually happens. Finally, whilst listening the students need to focus harder and recruit more attentional resources which may result in greater cognitive arousal and increased Working Memory span

A zero preparation activity to achieve this consists in simply uttering sentences containing the target structure and ask them to translate on mini-boards – I do this in the first and last part of every single lesson of mine, uttering model sentences with high surrender value, i.e. sentences which can be used across several topics, contain core vocabulary and key grammar structures. Another very useful minimal preparation activity involves: (1) showing the students a sentence in which the target structure has been used incorrectly, then (2) uttering the correct version of that sentence and finally (3) asking to notice the difference and amend the initial sentence.

An activity requiring more preparation that I carry out in every single lesson of mine involves the use of sentence builders and sentence puzzles like the ones in the pictures below. I read out sentences putting together the different chunks in the sentence-builder/ sentence-puzzle to model the use of the grammar structure in context and students write translation on mini-board. This activity kills several birds with one stone because it addresses the decoding, lexical and parsing level all in one go and creates connections between a specific grammar structure and several lexical items. Figures 1 and 2 shows 2 sample activities. More techniques for enhancing parsing skills are suggested  below, in section 3.4.

Fig.1 Sentence puzzle : teacher pronounces  the jumbled-up sentences below in the correct order as the students re-write them in the table

Fig. 2  – Sentence builder.  (Typo in column 4 – it should read ‘à present’)

3.2 Listening skills are only a peripheral concern (issue 2); consequently not sufficient time is devoted to listening practice (issue 3) and students do not perceive the importance of listening (issue 7)

In most Modern Language classrooms listening is grossly neglected, despite the fact that it is the most crucial skill in first language acquisition, as it is through the aural medium that humans learn to speak in the first place. According to a number of studies in naturalistic/immersive environments around 45% of language competence is obtained through listening, 30 % through speaking, 15% from reading and 10% only from writing (Renukadevi, 2014).

The human brain is wired to learn languages through listening; hence, by not using the aural medium to teach, we miss out on a daily basis on an extremely important opportunity to enhance our students’ learning. Both my article here and in Smiths and Conti’s (2016) – the Language Teacher Toolkit –  I suggest a range of minimal preparation / high impact listening-as-modelling activities which teach language through listening.

Moreover, even when we read we activate L2 words phonologically, which means that even when interpreting written texts we use the way it sounds to make sense of it. This means that if students do not distinguish clearly between words that sound similar their reading comprehension may be impaired.

Teachers need to recognize that Listening must be a priority not just because 25 % of the exam includes listening, but because learning a language through Listening greatly enhances acquisition. The teaching and learning in my lessons has been hugely enhanced by increasing my focus on listening in the last three years or so.

Finally we need to consider that, in view of the importance of Listening in the language learning process, by not emphasizing it in our lessons we are sending our students the message that listening is not important; this perception is unlikely to motivate them to work on it in class and to pursue it autonomously at home.

Implications for the classroom – First of all, I strongly recommend investing 40 to 60 % of each and every lesson into: (1) listening activities which consist of Listening-as-modelling activities or L.A.M. (this may include work on decoding skills); (2) oral interaction tasks (which includes listening); (3) critical listening (student listening to a peer’s oral output to evaluate or translate it) and (4) listening comprehension. I usually devote around 30 % of a typical lesson to listening, 30 % to speaking, 30 % to reading (mainly as a follow-up to the listening tasks) and only about 10 to writing (of the interpersonal sort).  As for vocabulary learning, I mainly flip it  (students do it at home in the run-up to the lesson as homework) unless we do vocab games or builders as a pre-reading or speaking task.

A culture of listening ought to be created in the classroom whereby (1) the students understand the importance of listening for their development as language learners; (2) they learn new language items from it; (3) they experience listening to appreciate the culture of the target language country (e.g. through videos, songs, movie trailers); (4) they are encouraged to practise listening autonomously (e.g. for personal, enrichment, fun, consolidation work).

Carrying out directed-critical-listening activities three or four times per term, in which the students evaluate oral output from their peers with a focus on specific sounds, intonation patterns or the correct deployment of a grammar structure helps me foster this culture of listening by bringing a metacognitive edge to the process.

An even more effectve way to bring Listening skills into the students and teachers’ focal awareness is by exploiting the exam ‘washback effect’. In other words, give more weighting or prominence to Listening in the exams so that you and your colleagues will be putting more effort into it and the students will focus on it more actively. I reckon that if Examination boards did this, the quality of teaching and learning in the UK will greatly improve.

Finally, another important implication for teachers is that they should not limit their listening activities to comprehension tasks – which brings me to the next point.

3.3   Issue 4: the vast majority of the listening activities staged in lessons consist of comprehension tasks

Listening tasks should be considered as tests through and through and, as I argued here, students do not learn much from them. Tasks like these do not explicitly train your students in decoding skills, do not teach new vocabulary or foster the noticing of new grammar/lexical structures – as the students are focusing on picking out details or establishing if certain statements are true or false and are not encouraged to focus on other levels of the text.

Implications for the classroom – Think about the five phases of listening outlined in paragraph 2.2, i.e.:

1.Decoding

2.Lexical search

3.Parsing

4.Sentence Meaning-construction

4.Whole Discourse construction

When teaching a specific topic or sub-topic, (1) ensure you have first trained your students to handle each of the above levels, especially the first three. (2) Do a lot of work on the decoding/pronunciation of the target vocabulary in that sub-topic, especially the words containing the most challenging phonemes (see in the next point how); (3) provide them with plenty of opportunities for processing the target vocabulary and the target grammar aurally. (4) When you are confident that they are ready to understand most of the text in the listening comprehension and all they need is a bit of inference and guesswork using context and their knowledge of the world, then, and only then, carry out one or more challenging comprehension tasks.

One useful tip: before you and/or the class mark the listening comprehension, put up on the screen the transcript and ask the students to explain why they gave the answer they came up with; it is a bit time consuming but will give you an insight into how much they really understood and into what they found most problematic. If you can, as a follow-up task, gap the transcript where the most interesting words and grammar structures are and do a partial dictation.

3.4.  Teachers do not train students in the mastery of bottom-up processing skills (decoding, parsing, etc.)

This is a point I have touched in paragraph 2.3 above and made in many previous posts of mine (e.g. here, here an here), so I will go straight to the implications for teaching.

Implications for teaching and learning

1.Decoding skills – Your Schemes of Work ought to include work on pronunciation and decoding skills (how to turn letters and combination of letters into sound) from the very early stages of instruction. Primary is the place where this is systematically done for the first language – why is not systematically done for the second language too?

So, first of all brainstorm with your colleagues the decoding issues which in your experience (both as a learner and a teacher) hinder your students’ understanding of the target language. In French, for instance, you will focus on things like liaison, the difference between ‘e’ and ‘é’, ‘je’ vs ‘j’ai’  and any other words or phrase that may sound similar (e.g. ‘mere’ and ‘maire’). When you have identified the core items, embed micro-listening enhancers (MLEs) like the ones below in your long-, medium- and short term planning. Make sure you recycle the core items across all units.

MLEs take little time to prepare, the students like them and learn a lot from them.

1. Minimal pairs – two near homophones (e.g. ‘mere’ and ‘maire’) are provided in writing but you will pronounce only one of them; student to identify the one you uttered. This is a very useful activity because of what we said about listening being processed online, at very high speed; students lack flexibility in their interpretation of what they hear, hence, once they interpret a word wrongly they are not likely  to change their mind (Field, 2014). Since many weaker learners will often base their interpretation on one or two key words they hear to build meaning, they can be easily misled by near homophones;
2. Focus-on-word-endings activities – these are  very useful when it comes to highly inflected languages like German, Spanish, Italian and French. Minimal prep activities: (1) gap the ending of words, utter the words and ask students to fill the gaps; (2) Write five or six words you are teaching as part of the current unit and utter five or six words you taught previously that rhyme with them; students to match the rhyming words; (3) Write 3 or 4 set of letters or combinations of letters (in French: ent, in, ont, ant) and utter ten words which contain those letters in their endings; students to identify which words contain the target letter-set.
3. Spot the error – Give the students a list of sentences containing a given target item that you have just practised through minimal pairs (e.g. em). Then read them out loud making sure that you read the target item wrongly.
4. Spot the liaison (in French) – write 8 sentences containing instances of liaison, read them out loud and ask students to identify where the liaison occurs
5. Spot the intruder – Write a sentence on the board but when you read it out loud add in an extra word or sound. Students to write the extra word on mini-board or repeat the extra sound.

For more tasks of this sort, read here or here .

2.Parsing skills – First of all, make sure than when you introduce and practise a new grammar point you do so through the oral/aural medium; in my post on grammar teaching (here) I have given many examples of how this can be done. In sum, make sure that through sentence builders, partial dictation, L2-to-L1 translation on mini-white-boards (as you utter sentences containing the target grammar structures) the students ‘hear’ the grammar structure and process it orally.

A low prep/ high impact activity involves directed attention to specific grammar features. Whilst listening to the recording (or you) the students need to identify the occurrence(s) in the text of specific items (e.g. how many irregular adjectives/ perfect tenses/ if clauses did you spot? Songs add a bit of enjoyment to this type of activity ; get the lyrics from www.lyricsmania.com and identify any interesting grammar features you may want to direct your students’ attention to.

Inductive learning activities through listening are also very useful in this respect. For instance, provide the students with ten sentences in the first language containing the new grammar structure(s), e.g. the use of ‘rien’ in French. Then read out to them the translation of each sentence and ask them to infer the rule in groups of two or three.

Another task requiring minimal preparation involves giving students a first language sentence and then utter two translations of it, one grammatically correct and one wrong. Students to tell you which one is correct and why.

All of the above activities direct students’ attention to grammar through the listening medium training their ear to process grammar aurally and not simply through the visual (reading) or grapho-motor (writing) modality as far too often happens in the ML classroom.

Moreover it is also important to make sure that in every grammar lessons students employ the core grammar structures in the context of oral interaction. Stage work on decoding skills prior to the interaction and ask them to pay particular attention to specific sounds involved in the production of the grammar structure (e.g. Spanish: do not pronounce ‘h’ in pronouncing ‘Hacer’ ; French: focus on pronunciation of ‘je’, ‘ne’ ‘me’ as opposed to ‘j’ai’, ‘n’ai’, ‘mais’).

3. Lexical recognition skills – As already mentioned above, you ought to ensure that students process the core vocabulary over and over again through the aural medium and across as many linguistic contexts and topics as possible. Sentence builders come handy in this respect because they present words in several combinations with other parts of speech.When you are dealing with high frequency words which in your experience occur often in the listening exam papers, make sure the students can distinguish them clearly from their homophones or near homophones. Use minimal-pair activities to reinforce such differences.

4. Concluding remarks

Listening instruction and sound curriculum design ought to always keep in sight the full scope of the processes involved in the comprehension of aural input, the challenges they pose to the L2 learners and the abilities exhibited by expert listeners as they make sense of what they hear. In the above, I have outlined the main challenges and suggested ways in which teachers can address them in the classroom through minimal preparation / high impact activities. The main points I made:

• Listening must be given more prominence in ML lessons;
• Teachers must see the development of listening skills as a core concern in their practice and pass on this perception to their students whilst encouraging them to practise listening autonomously;
• Listening activities should be used to model new language not simply to test students;
• Decoding and parsing skills should be focused on in every lesson, especially at the early stages of instruction;
• Listening instruction based solely on listening comprehension tasks is likely to be ineffective and to engender disaffection is less-able-to –guess students.

In the second part of the article I set out to explore how we can promote top-down processing skills (e.g. predictive strategies and using context to infer meaning), plan effective instructional sequences as well as affective issues referring to motivation and self-efficacy

In previous blogs on the topic of listening skills pedagogy (e.g. here) I noted how in UK secondary schools the methods used to teach this pivotal skill are often inadequate. My criticism centred around the following points:

1. There is little focus on practising phonological processing micro-skills. Yet these are essential as listening involves first and foremost bottom-up processing skills; hence, to develop learners’ ability to effectively and efficiently process the L2 sounds and match what they hear to the mental representation they have of those sounds in Long-term memory is paramount. To facilitate the acquisition of the L2 phonological system I advocated the importance of emphasising phonological awareness from the very early stages of instruction.
2. Top-down processing skills and strategies are rarely explicitly and systematically taught. Listening comprehension is also about applying inferential skills; predicting what comes next based on the expectations that make up our schemata about a given situation.
3. Listening comprehensions are over-used with detrimental effects on many learners’ self-efficacy as L2 listeners. Listening comprehensions are tests through and through. As such, there is a place for them in the L2 classroom: as plenaries, after much practice has occurred. A listening comprehension task on a given topic (e.g. environmental issues) should be carried out after the students have had extensive listening practice on that topic which has involved vocabulary, structures, discourse functions, etc, similar to those found in that comprehension task. Otherwise, it will be unfair and will encourage a perception of listening tasks by the students as guessing games. But listening tasks should not be guessing games. Students should come to a listening activity equipped with developed enough listening strategies, phonological processing ability and vocabulary to be able to succeed at it; or we, as teacher, will have failed along with our students. The worst outcome of this practice is usually, in my experience, that the less capable of ‘guessing’ will develop low self-efficacy levels and motivation vis-à-vis listening tasks.
4. The learning potential of listening texts is often not exploited sufficiently. This is particularly the case for the listening tasks found in textbooks. Typically the teacher plays an audio-track two or three times; the students do a listening comprehension task (e.g. True or False); the answers are marked; finally the class move on to a new task. What has actually been learnt? What happened to the potential of the text for practising other levels of the text or other skills other than picking details?
5. Listening tasks do not occur in textbooks or schemes of work as part of a well-thought out learning sequence. In his review of the relevant research Macaro (2007) points out that in most UK classrooms listening tasks are rarely effectively integrated with what come before or after; especially in textbooks.
6. When authentic texts are used by teachers, students are not effectively prepped. Listening tasks invoving ‘authentic’ materials (e.g. youtube videos) are assigned without preparing the students adequately for them in linguistic terms. The assumption made is that it is ‘comprehensible’ input; truth is, often it is not, at least not for all of the students in the class and the logic of the listening task as a guessing game often applies here, too.
7. Speed of delivery. For the sake of ‘authenticity’, the speed of many published instructional listening materials is native or near-native. However, this is not always pedagogically sound when we are dealing with novice to pre-intermediate learners unless we are engaging in the ‘guessing’ game again. After all, in naturalistic settings people talk to novice non-native speakers more slowly and clearly that they would normally do and often simplify their input. This is done by teachers, too, when they speak to the class. However, this is far too often not done by course-books and it is rarely the case for ‘authentic’ listening texts. My students, in a very recent survey of student opinion I conducted in my school, complained that the listening tracks in the course books and published materials in use were either too easy or too difficult; rarely ‘right’.
8. Listening is the least practised skill in L2 classrooms – or at least definitely less practised than reading and writing. This is a huge problem as recent research shows that listening proficiency is a strong predictor of language learning success; even higher than aptitude.

2. Teaching implications

First of all, let us consider what effective listening entails. In order to comprehend L2 spoken texts our learners will need to

1. be able to recognize the words they hear; know where they begin and where they end – as when they do not, L2 speech sounds like a fast unintelligible flow of gibberish. This entails (1) knowing their pronunciation or being able to infer its graphemic form (spelling) based on one’s L2 phonological awareness; (2) knowing their meaning;
2. be able to identify how the function words perform in the target text, both in terms of grammar and discourse;
3. possess well-developed top-down processing skills in order to be able to compensate for lack of vocabulary; hence, they need practice in schemata activation and application in real operating conditions.

These are, in my view, the implications of the above discussion for the L2 classroom:

1. Listening activities (possibly of the kind listed below) should feature in most lessons, the long-term goal being: students listening to L2 audio material for pleasure and/or personal enrichment (at home / in class);
2. Listening activities should focus on bottom-up processing skills through:

• Phonological awareness tasks (see my posts on listening micro-skill enhancers and on transcription tasks: here ) ;
• Word (meaning) recognition tasks. This could start from simple matching tasks (e.g. match picture to word) to translation tasks (e.g. teacher says word/lexical phrases and student writes meaning on mini-board/iPad)
• Metalinguistic awareness tasks (e.g. identification of what word-class lexical items fall into).

3. Teachers should practise top-down processing skills through (1) jigsaw listening or ‘predict what comes next’ activities; (2) explicitly modelling of and practice in effective inferential strategies (e.g. using context and key-words identification to infer meaning; contextualized brainstorming before listening). Comprehension tasks can be used here.

4. Challenging listening comprehension tasks should come at the end of a sequence of listening (or listening + reading/speaking/writing tasks). This is an example of what a teacher could do to prepare a student for a challenging listening comprehension – one would not do all of them, of course, and some of the tasks below may be replaced with reading/speaking or writing activities focusing on the same language items for the sake of variety.

Task 1: vocabulary building activities (in which the vocabulary in the target listening comprehension task are presented and practised)

Task 2: phonological-awareness-enhancing skills (e.g. the same words in Step 1 are gapped and have to be completed whilst listening; gap-fill with missing words to fill in; partial transcription tasks)

Task 3: Word recognition tasks – match words with picture/English word;

Task 4: Listen to short sentences and translate;

Task 5: Listen to a set of sentences and Identify key grammatical / discourse features (e.g. spot the adjectives or categorize the verbs heard in tenses)

Task 6: Jigsaw listening of a text similar to the listening comprehension (both in topic and structure);

Task 7a: listening to the target comprehension task one or two times, with transcript on screen (students can ask questions about words. You can set a limit to the number of words they can ask about);

Task 7b (alternative to 7a): partial transcription task using the target comprehension task;

Task 8: Students carry out listening comprehension (no transcript available);

Task 9: Transcript shown on screen and vocabulary building and/or reading comprehension tasks carried out on text to consolidate any interesting/useful lexical items.

5. In order not to ‘waste’ the full learning potential of a listening track, one could use it to address various levels of the   text, e.g. (after pre-listening vocabulary activities targeting potentially challenging words):

• Firstly, by gapping the transcript of text (taking out words or phrases) and asking the students to fill in the gap (multiple-choice) – transcript projected on screen;
• Secondly (after removing transcript), by carrying out a jigsaw listening activity;
• Thirdly,by noting down as many verbs as they can identify in the text (specifying the tenses they are in?)
• Fourthly, by listing a few ideas/facts contained in the text (in English or TL) in random order and asking the students to rearrange them in the order in which they occur in the text;
• Fifthly, by doing a true/false/not mentioned comprehension;
• Vocabulary recycling follow up may ensue.

6. In order to lessen cognitive load and facilitate retention of the target vocabulary the listening texts used in the same lesson or sequence of lessons should recycle the same lexis. Narrow listening, whereby the students are exposed – through different activities – to four or five (short) texts on the same topic and containing more or less the same lexis, may be very valuable in this respect. It helps the students understanding by recycling the same language material; when the texts are made increasingly (slightly) more difficult, it facilitates differentiation for teachers; it increase retention through recycling. It goes without saying that the input should be pitched at the right level (comprehensible input).

7. Teachers should expose students to TL speech/narrative uttered at a speed which is accessible to the students they are teaching. Hence, if using audio-tracks or video, they may want to produce them themselves with the help of native or expert speakers. I do it all the time and it is not that time consuming. Narrow listening could come in very handy in this respect; the four or five target texts could be recorded at different speed, starting from fairly slow and becoming increasingly faster from text 2 onwards.

8. When using authentic listening texts/videos teachers should prep the students thoroughly by presenting and practising extensively any new vocabulary contained in the text or any other element (e.g. cultural references) which may pose a serious cognitive challenge.

In conclusion, L2 teachers should emphasize listening much more than it is currently done in the typical MFL classroom. Also, serious thought should go into the selection and sequencing of listening tasks.When selecting a listening comprehension and planning listening activities one should ask oneself the following crucial questions:

1. Am I actually teaching listening skills through this task or am I merely testing students on their inferential ability?
2. What skills am I teaching: top-down / bottom-up or both? How?
3. How can I make sure that as many of my students as possible will succeed at the task I am planning? What are they going to find difficult about this task and how am I going to prepare them for these challenges?
4. How can I exploit the full potential of this text for learning?

Although all of the above questions are pivotal, I do believe that the third one is by far the most important. Far too often, for reasons that have often baffled me, listening tasks are unfairly constructed to ‘trick’ students in getting the wrong answer. Sentences like ‘I have a cat but not a dog’ seem to have been put in just to disorientate the learner. For what learning gain? To discriminate which learner picks up on the negative and which one doesn’t ? Teachers and textbooks need to get out of this listening-as-a test mentality. Listening being possibly the most difficult set of skills to develop we need to ensure that students do well at and enjoy it. In this day and age, when so many free videos and audio-materials are available on the internet, we need, more than ever, to develop self-efficacious listeners who autonomously seek opportunities for practice; this can only be achieved if learners experience success frequently in our lessons.

More on listening in my article “Listening – the often mis-taught skill”  and in the book I co-authored with Steve Smith “The language teacher toolkit”