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Language Programs > English Teaching Forum > Volume 31 > Number 1
Listening: Problems and Solutions
Fan Yagang
In teaching listening
comprehension we must be careful not to go to extremes, either
by being concerned too exclusively with theories without
thinking about their application to teaching, or by obstinately
following frozen routines-opening the textbook and explaining
new words, playing the tape recorder, and asking/answering
questions. It is essential for a teacher to have an overall
understanding of what listening is, why it is difficult for
foreign-language learners, and what some solutions may be. The
vital question is how to bridge the gap between an analysis of
listening and actual classroom teaching.
What is listening?
Listening is the ability to identify and understand what
others are saying. This involves understanding a speaker’s
accent or pronunciation, his grammar and his vocabulary, and
grasping his meaning (Howatt and Dakin 1974). An able listener
is capable of doing these four things simultaneously. Willis
(1981:134) lists a series of micro-skills of listening, which
she calls enabling skills. They are:
• predicting what people are going to talk about
• guessing at unknown words or phrases without panicking
• using one’s own knowledge of the subject to help one
understand
• identifying relevant points; rejecting irrelevant
information
• retaining relevant points (note-taking, summarizing)
• recognizing discourse markers, e.g., Well; Oh, another thing
is; Now, finally; etc.
• recognizing cohesive devices, e.g., such as and which,
including link words, pronouns, references, etc.
• understanding different intonation patterns and uses of
stress, etc., which give clues to meaning and social setting
• understanding inferred information, e.g., speakers’
attitude or intentions
What are some listening problems?
The evidence that shows why listening is difficult comes
mainly from four sources: the message to be listened to, the
speaker, the listener, and the physical setting.
The Message
Content. Many learners find it more difficult to
listen to a taped message than to read the same message on a
piece of paper, since the listening passage comes into the ear
in the twinkling of an eye, whereas reading material can be read
as long as the reader likes.
The listening material may deal with almost any area of life.
It might include street gossip, proverbs, new products, and
situations unfamiliar to the student. Also, in a spontaneous
conversation speakers frequently change topics.
The content is usually not well organized.
In many cases listeners cannot predict what speakers are
going to say, whether it is a news report on the radio, an
interviewer’s questions, an everyday conversation, etc.
Messages on the radio or recorded on tape cannot be listened
to at a slower speed. Even in conversation it is impossible to
ask the speaker to repeat something as many times as the
interlocutor might like.
Linguistic Features. Liaison (the linking of words in
speech when the second word begins with a vowel, e.g., an orange
/@nOrIndZ/) and elision (leaving out a sound or sounds, e.g.,
suppose may be pronounced /sp@uz/ in rapid speech) are common
phenomena that make it difficult for students to distinguish or
recognize individual words in the stream of speech. They are
used to seeing words written as discrete entities in their
textbooks.
If listening materials are made up of everyday conversation,
they may contain a lot of colloquial words and expressions, such
as stuff for material, guy for man, etc., as well as slang.
Students who have been exposed mainly to formal or bookish
English may not be familiar with these expressions.
In spontaneous conversations people sometimes use
ungrammatical sentences because of nervousness or hesitation.
They may omit elements of sentences or add something redundant.
This may make it difficult for the listener to understand the
meaning.
The Speaker
Ur (1984:7) points out that “in ordinary conversation or
even in much extempore speech-making or lecturing we actually
say a good deal more than would appear to be necessary in order
to convey our message. Redundant utterances may take the form of
repetitions, false starts, re-phrasings, self-corrections,
elaborations, tautologies, and apparently meaningless additions
such as I mean or you know.” This redundancy is a natural
feature of speech and may be either a help or a hindrance,
depending on the students’ level. It may make it more
difficult for beginners to understand what the speaker is
saying; on the other hand, it may give advanced students more
time to “tune in” to the speaker’s voice and speech style.
Learners tend to be used to their teacher’s accent or to
the standard variety of British or American English. They find
it hard to understand speakers with other accents.
Spoken prose, as in news broadcasting and reading aloud
written texts, is characterized by an even pace, volume, pitch,
and intonation. Natural dialogues, on the other hand, are full
of hesitations, pauses, and uneven intonation. Students used to
the former kinds of listening material may sometimes find the
latter difficult to understand.
The Listener
Foreign-language students are not familiar enough with
clichés and collocations in English to predict a missing word
or phrase. They cannot, for example, be expected to know that
rosy often collocates with cheeks nor to predict the last word
will be something like rage when they hear the phrase he was in
a towering. . . . This is a major problem for students.
Lack of sociocultural, factual, and contextual knowledge of
the target language can present an obstacle to comprehension
because language is used to express its culture (Anderson and
Lynch 1988).
Foreign-language learners usually devote more time to reading
than to listening, and so lack exposure to different kinds of
listening materials. Even our college students majoring in
English have no more than four hours’ regular training per
week.
Both psychological and physical factors may have a negative
effect on perception and interpretation of listening material.
It is tiring for students to concentrate on interpreting
unfamiliar sounds, words, and sentences for long periods.
Physical Setting
Noise, including both background noises on the recording and
environmental noises, can take the listener’s mind off the
content of the listening passage.
Listening material on tape or radio lacks visual and aural
environmental clues. Not seeing the speaker’s body language
and facial expressions makes it more difficult for the listener
to understand the speaker’s meaning.
Unclear sounds resulting from poor-quality equipment can
interfere with the listener’s comprehension.
Some solutions
What can teachers do to help students master the
difficulties?
Not all the problems described above can be overcome. Certain
features of the message and the speaker, for instance, are
inevitable. But this does not mean that the teacher can do
nothing about them. S/he can at least provide the students with
suitable listening materials, background and linguistic
knowledge, enabling skills, pleasant classroom conditions, and
useful exercises to help them discover effective listening
strategies. Here are a few helpful ideas:
The Message
1. Grade listening materials according to the students’
level, and provide authentic materials rather than idealized,
filtered samples. It is true that natural speech is hard to
grade and it is difficult for students to identify the different
voices and cope with frequent overlaps. Nevertheless, the
materials should progress step by step from semi-authenticity
that displays most of the linguistic features of natural speech
to total authenticity, because the final aim is to understand
natural speech in real life.
2. Design task-oriented exercises to engage the students’
interest and help them learn listening skills subconsciously. As
Ur (1984:25) has said, “Listening exercises are most effective
if they are constructed round a task. That is to say, the
students are required to do something in response to what they
hear that will demonstrate their understanding.” She has
suggested some such tasks: expressing agreement or disagreement,
taking notes, marking a picture or diagram according to
instructions, and answering questions. Compared with traditional
multiple-choice questions, task- based exercises have an obvious
advantage: they not only test the students’ listening
comprehension but also encourage them to use different kinds of
listening skills and strategies to reach their destination in an
active way.
3. Provide students with different kinds of input, such as
lectures, radio news, films, TV plays, announcements, everyday
conversation, interviews, storytelling, English songs, and so
on.
Brown and Yule (1983) categorize spoken texts into three
broad types: static, dynamic, and abstract. Texts that describe
objects or give instructions are static texts; those that tell a
story or recount an incident are dynamic texts; those that focus
on someone’s ideas and beliefs rather than on concrete objects
are abstract texts. Brown and Yule suggest that the three types
of input should be provided according to the difficulties they
present and the students’ level. They draw a figure, in which
difficulty increases from left to right, and, within any one
type of input, complexity increases from top to bottom.
4. Try to find visual aids or draw pictures and diagrams
associated with the listening topics to help students guess or
imagine actively.
The Speaker
1. Give practice in liaisons and elisions in order to help
students get used to the acoustic forms of rapid natural speech.
It is useful to find rapidly uttered colloquial collocations and
ask students to imitate native speakers’ pronunciation.
2. Make students aware of different native-speaker accents.
Of course, strong regional accents are not suitable for training
in listening, but in spontaneous conversation native speakers do
have certain accents. Moreover, the American accent is quite
different from the British and Australian. Therefore, it is
necessary to let students deal with different accents,
especially in extensive listening.
3. Select short, simple listening texts with little
redundancy for lower-level students and complicated authentic
materials with more redundancy for advanced learners. It has
been reported that elementary-level students are not capable of
interpreting extra information in the redundant messages,
whereas advanced listeners may benefit from messages being
expanded, paraphrased, etc. (Chaudron 1983).
The Listener
1. Provide background knowledge and linguistic knowledge,
such as complex sentence structures and colloquial words and
expressions, as needed.
2. Give, and try to get, as much feedback as possible.
Throughout the course the teacher should bridge the gap between
input and students’ response and between the teacher’s
feedback and students’ reaction in order to keep activities
purposeful. It is important for the listening-class teacher to
give students immediate feedback on their performance. This not
only promotes error correction but also provides encouragement.
It can help students develop confidence in their ability to deal
with listening problems. Student feedback can help the teacher
judge where the class is going and how it should be guided.
3. Help students develop the skills of listening with
anticipation, listening for specific information, listening for
gist, interpretation and inference, listening for intended
meaning, listening for attitude, etc., by providing varied tasks
and exercises at different levels with different focuses.
A typology of activities for a listening lesson
I suggest a variety of exercises, tasks, and activities
appropriate to different stages of a listening lesson
(pre-listening, while-listening, and post-listening). Good
classroom activities can themselves be effective solutions to
listening problems.
The list covers a wide range of listening activities from
simple to more sophisticated. Some teachers, accustomed to
following exactly the exercises and tasks provided in the
textbook without thinking about whether they are suitable for
their students or not, might look on these activities as extra
work and a burden. I would like to point out that it is a
pleasure and a positive experience to try various exercises,
tasks, and classroom activities, for successful lessons depend
on the teacher’s knowing and using a variety of teaching
methods. Teachers should have at their fingertips a set of
exercises, tasks, and activities that they can use with their
classes whenever they may be needed.
Conclusion
Some teachers think that listening is the easiest skill to
teach, whereas most students think it is the most difficult to
improve. This contradiction tells us that there are some things
about teaching listening that need to be explored. Perhaps those
who say it is “the easiest to teach” mean that it does not
require much painstaking lesson preparation and all they need to
do is play the tapes and test the students’ comprehension. But
is there nothing more to teaching listening than testing? We
must find out all we can about how listening can be improved and
what activities are useful to this end and then use this
knowledge and these activities in our own classrooms.
REFERENCES
Anderson, A. and T. Lynch. 1988. Listening. London: Oxford
University Press.
Brown, G. and G. Yule. 1983. Teaching the spoken language.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Chaudron, C. 1983. Foreign talk in the classroom-An aid to
learning? In Classroom oriented research in second language
acquisition, ed. H. Seliger and M. H. Long. Rowley, Mass.:
Newbury House.
Howatt, A. and J. Dakin. 1974. Language laboratory materials,
ed. J. P. B. Allen, S. P. B. Allen, and S. P. Corder.
Ur, P. 1984. Teaching of English as a second or foreign
language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Willis, J. 1981. Teaching English through English. London:
Longman.
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