Introduction

Listening is widely recognized as one of the most challenging yet crucial skills in second language acquisition. Despite its importance, traditional listening instruction in many language classrooms remains product-oriented, focusing primarily on testing comprehension through questions and answers, rather than teaching students how to listen effectively. This approach often leaves learners feeling frustrated and demotivated, as they struggle to make sense of spoken language without the necessary strategies or skills to decode it. To address these challenges, a process-based approach to listening instruction has emerged, emphasizing the development of aural micro-skills, strategic listening, and metacognitive awareness.

In this context, effective listening instruction involves more than just exposing students to spoken language; it requires a systematic approach that empowers learners to actively engage in the listening process. This includes teaching vocabulary aurally in context, rather than through isolated word lists or digital flashcards, to enhance word recognition and retention. Furthermore, successful listening hinges on mastering a range of micro-skills, such as phoneme recognition, word segmentation, lexical retrieval, parsing, chunking, and meaning-building. These skills enable learners to process spoken input efficiently and accurately, paving the way for improved comprehension and fluency.

Moreover, motivating learners through engaging and interactive tasks is essential for sustained listening practice. Research consistently shows that motivation and self-efficacy are powerful predictors of success in listening. Therefore, this article advocates for a motivational framework that incorporates gamification, relevant input, and the PIRCO sequence—a structured approach that guides learners through pre-listening, while-listening, and post-listening phases to maximize comprehension and retention.

This article explores how a process-based approach, grounded in cognitive and metacognitive strategy instruction, can transform listening instruction from a passive activity into an active, strategic, and enjoyable learning experience. By shifting the focus from merely testing comprehension to teaching the process of listening, educators can better equip students to navigate the complexities of spoken language, ultimately leading to greater language proficiency and confidence.

Ten tips that will enhance your listening outcomes

Here are ten key tried-and-tested instructional strategies that will definitely enhance your listening oucomes.

1. Teach vocabulary through listening in the context of highly comprehensible input– Success at listening hinges largely on word recognition (72 % !).  However, in order to be useful for listening tasks, words need to be acquired through listening. This often doesn’t happen in the typical MFL classroom, where words are typically learnr through worksheets or apps like Quizlet, which do not provide much listening practice.

Note that learning vocabulary aurally requires more exposures than learning it through reading, so you need to factor in 10 to 15 meaningful exposure in context, not in isolation, at least. Practising words aurally, in isolation, is not very useful and totally unauthentic. Teaching vocabulary aurally ought to involve an initial phase involving listening-while-reading (see my previous post on this) with or without pictures followed by listening without a script.

Highly comprehensible input is key, of course, due to the very high cognitive that listening poses on language learners and the anxiety that exposure to a lot of unknown vocabulary can cause. Listening-specific anxiety is a phenomenon that has been widely documented by researchers and one which significantly hinder performance.

2. Develop the micro-skills of listening using a process-based approach (Field, 2009) – Too much listening instruction has traditionally been about top-down processing, i.e. asking students to predict the content of an aural text, to guess intelligently using content and critical thinking and other higher order cognitive skills which, whilst useful, should not dominate listening instruction, especially not at the early stages of second language instruction and not with low-ability L2 learners. The Pearson textbooks are notoriously bad in this respect.

To understand how difficult listening is: in the space of 2 seconds, your students must decode every sentence they hear executing the following skills:

– phonemes recognition

– recognition of syllables and intonation patterns

– word segmentation (identification of words boundaries)

– lexical retrieval (recognition of content words and lexical phrases)

– parsing (grammar, syntax, function words, etc.)

– chunking (as they do the above, the learners need to keep each sentence they hear firmly and comfortably in their phonological memory for as long as it takes for them to decode it)

If the execution of the above skills is successful, they will likely understand the meaning of each sentence they hear (the meaning building phase). If they are listening to a text longer then a sentence, they will use the information gathered from the sentence just decoded and mix it with the information in every new incoming sentence to gather a global understanding of the whole text (discourse building).

Due to the severe demands of the listening process, it is key that the students become fluent in the execution of the above micro-skills. Hence, in each listening lessons, you will stage tasks which engage the students in practice with above micro-skills. Here are some examples of mostly SCRIPTED LISTENING activities which practise the micro-skills of listening:

You will start using this approach from the early stages of secondary, gradually transitioning to more challenging texts, where you may implement the above activities as part of the PIRCO sequence (see below) both in the Pre-listening and in the Consolidation phases. This approach has been laid out in my best-selling book with Steve Smith, Breaking the sound barrier, teaching language learners how to listen.

3. Make it motivational by building self-efficacy, making it enjoyable and choosing interesting input – Motivation and Self-efficacy (one of the most important catalysts of motivation) are the strongest predictors of success at listening (Macaro, 2001).

Here are some important tips if you want to generate and maintain the motivation to listen:

– Make it as interactive as possible using mini-whiteboards. Most of the activities in the table above are interactive or can be made interactive with the use of mini-whiteboards. The teacher reads aloud a sentence with an intruder, for example, and the students need to spot it and write it on her miniwhiteboard

– Gamify it whilst keeping it meaningful and evidence-based (See activities in the the table above)

– Make it accessible to most of your learners (a meaty pre-listening vocab teaching phase is key with mixed ability classes)

– Make sure your students arrive at a text prepared and leave with the feeling that they have learnt something. Never let the students leave the task with very little learning and a meaningless grade (the ‘Empty hands’ + ‘I can’t do listening’ effect) as too often happens! To prevent this, you should embed listening within a carefully designed Input-to-Output sequence (see Rost, 2002; Conti and Smith, 2019) which aims at recycling the target vocabulary around 40 times across all four skills (that’s the minimal amount of exposure we need to commit a word to long-term memory across all four skills). Please note that for the vocabulary you will want your students to learn only receptively, you will need 6-10 exposures through reading and 10-15 through listening. Here’s an example of my favourite input-to-output sequence:

(1) a very substantive pre-listening phase where you teach key vocabulary, grammar and sound patterns. This should be longer than the one or two vocab-building activities usually done, and should include a mix of listening (including Scripted Listening ones) and reading activities.

(2) a while-listening phase in which the students gradually move to listening comprehension tasks – These should include very simple tasks allowing most students to succeed, e.g. word grab, and/or a set of very simple comprehension questions that most children can answer and then move to more challenging activities.

(3) a review phase where the transcripts are examined and the obstacles to comprehension are identified;

(4) a consolidation phase where (a) the reading-whilst-listening tasks are performed on the transcript (this should be as gamified as possible and target the key linguistic features in the text) and (b) the vocabulary in the text is solidified;  

(5) a pushed-output phase where the key linguistic items are used by the students to translate and to communicate more creatively (role plays, interviews, monologues). This sequence, that I call PIRCO (see figure 1 below), is the most powerful I have ever implemented with my GCSE classes.

Do note that the post-listening phases, i.e. (3), (4) and (5) are key. As professor Rost, in his seminal 2002 article states: the “post-listening” stage of listening occurs in the few minutes following the actual attending to the text. This is probably the most important part of listening instruction because it allows the learner to build mental representations and develop short-term L2 memory, and increase motivation for listening a second time.

MPORTANT – When you stage the pre-listening phase, make sure that you do not give away the answers to the questions in the subsequent aural comprehension phase.

Figure 1: the PIRCO sequence

– Avoid ‘death by past-paper’ practice until you get closer to the exam, and even then, bearing in mind that cognitive fatigue sets in when we listen after barely 90 seconds of continuous listening, stage only specific tasks in the exam papers that you deem more useful.

– Make the input relevant. Students are keener to listen to something they are interested in. Before playing a text about a celebrity, play a song, video or film trailer to enhance their interest and curiosity

– Avoid grading every task – which brings me to the next point

(4)  Delay awarding grades until is truly necessary. Focus on improving listening skills (listening to learn) not grades (listening to test), until you are close to the exams – Prioritizing a focus on the process of listening over a focus on the product of listening is essential in listening instruction, especially when transitioning from lower to upper school. Listening being the most challenging of the four skills and the one that causes the most anxiety amongst children, it is key to refrain from grading the students’ work every time you stage a listening activity. Remember the ‘empty hands’ effect, so common after a listening activity; do you really want to compound its negative effect on self-efficacy and motivation with a poor grade? Why would that student ever want to listen to another aural text again? By investing your efforts, instead, into working on improving student self-efficacy and listening skills you are more likely to forge more motivated and competent listeners who are not afraid to listen.

How about the exams? Remember the PIRCO sequence above? You will gradually phase it out as you draw close to the exam and move to PIR (pre-listening, in-listening and review) where the pre-listening phase will be mostly about imparting listening strategies. Bear in mind that according to research listening strategies need to taught regularly for a period of over three months. So, starting with PIR one term before the listening exams would work. Remember that teaching listening strategies when the students have a modest vocabulary repertoire can be counterproductive, according to some researchers (e.g. Renandya, 2022). Strategies cannot be a substitute for vocabulary and syntactic knowledge.

(5) Stage a Needs’ analysis when you first meet the students – At the beginning of year 10, I recommend a quick survey carried out using google forms aimed at finding out what the students experiences with listening were at KS3, what their attitude to listening is, as well as other data to do with their self-efficacy and self-confidence as listeners. This is imperative in departments where learner motivation to listen is low, the team have heterogenous/inconsistent approaches to listening instruction and/or use the listening materials and tasks in textbooks (which are horrendously designed and sequenced) and/or where listening is the ‘cinderella’ skill.

(6) Use Narrow Listening (possibly in combination with Narrow Reading) – Narrow listening, where two or three near-identical aural texts are used in an instructional sequence involving connected texts, is a powerful way to practise and reinforce vocabulary. With ChatGpT or other AI powered tools, this is very easy to accomplish in a matter of seconds; just ask the software to produce an identical text by changing an X number of words. Then copy and paste in a text-to-speech online tool and the job is done! Staging narrow reading prior to narrow listening with very similar texts to the ones that they will be listening to will, of course, be a great way to prime the students for the subsequent aural tasks.

(7) Before your students do any silent reading comprehension work, stage some Scripted Listening (aka reading-whilst-listening) activities – Activities such as Spot the intruder, Spot the missing detail, Faulty transcript, Spot the pronunciation mistakes, Add the missing endings, Track the sound, Spot the wrong word order, Disappearing text, etc. can easily be staged prior to reading tasks injecting some fun in what are often pretty dry tasks. The pedagogical rationale for this approach is two-fold: firstly, when students read silently they subvocalize automatically converting every written symbol they process into their dominant language – so you may want to prevent that; secondly, you have an extra chance to practise listening!

(8) Teach listening strategies when the students are ready – Listening strategies (see table below) can be useful, but are no substitute for vocabulary, grammar and phonological competence. Hence, teaching your students listening strategies ought to be done in the later stages of KS4, when the students have accrued a substantive vocabulary (between 1,000 and 2,000 high-frequency words) . The training should involve regular practice with the strategies, at least 15 minutes per week for 3 months, according to some research. Do remember that the research evidence on the effectiveness of listening strategy instruction is very scant and inconclusive and most studies have been carried out with older students, most at university or pre-university level.

(9) Develop their metacognition – Make them aware of the listening process since the very early stages of their language learning journey. Show they how we listen, what skills are involved in the process. Starting in year 7 do reading whilst listening games with the transcript of the aural texts they have just listened to, to inject some fun in the process and to make them aware of the obstacles they encountered whilst listening. In pre-examination times, make them aware of their most common affective and cognitive problems as they listen and provide them with tips on how to overcome or mitigate them.

(10) Do regular surveys of student self-efficacy – If in your Department there is a history of poor achievement in listening, do carry out regular surveys to find out whether the students (1) are enjoying listening; (2) feel they are learning from it (self-efficacy) ; (3) what concerns them the most; (4) what they suggest you could do to help them and (5) make it more fun.  Do them every half-term with ‘at risk’ classes and use a 1(lowest) to 4 (highest) scale for them to rate each item, so that nobody sits on the fence. If you see lots of 1s and 2s very early on in the process, then you know it-s time to intervene drastically.

Concluding Remarks

In conclusion, effective listening instruction hinges on a  process-based approach that goes beyond mere comprehension checks and emphasizes the development of essential aural micro-skills, vocabulary acquisition, and metacognitive awareness. This article underscores the necessity of teaching vocabulary aurally in context, recognizing that listening is primarily about word recognition and requires multiple exposures within meaningful contexts to ensure retention and application. By integrating vocabulary teaching with listening tasks, learners will be better equipped not only to handle GCSE exam tasks but also authentic listening scenarios, thereby enhancing their overall comprehension and confidence.

Furthermore, the process-based approach advocated here emphasizes the importance of developing the micro-skills of listening, including phoneme recognition, word segmentation, lexical retrieval, parsing, chunking, and meaning-building. These foundational skills are crucial for accurate decoding and meaning-making, ensuring that learners can efficiently process spoken language. This structured practice, combined with scripted listening activities tailored to each micro-skill, provides the necessary scaffolding for learners to build fluency and accuracy in real-time listening.

Additionally, this posts emphasizes the need to build motivation and self-efficacy by creating enjoyable and meaningful listening experiences. By using interactive tasks, gamification, relevant input, and the PIRCO sequence, teachers can foster a positive learning environment that encourages persistence and reduces anxiety associated with listening tasks. This motivational approach not only sustains learners’ interest but also cultivates a sense of achievement and progress, essential for long-term language acquisition.

Finally, this article emphasizes the key role of listening-to-learn, a methodology laid out in Conti and Smith (2019), where it is called LAM (or Listening As Modelling), whose key staples are summarised below:

Please note that a new Language Gym GCSE workbook based on these and other effective instructional strategies will be out in March. It will implement the PIRCO sequence as applied to the new GCSE word lists. In addition to listening-to-learn tasks, it will also include listenint-to-test tasks based on the new GCSE exam papers.