LISTENING SUMMARY

➔ INTRODUCTION
● When people listen, whether it is a lecture, a news broadcast, a joke or a conversation, they are listening to a
discourse.
● Listening is the most frequently used language skill in everyday life.
● Researchers say that we listen twice as much language as we speak, four times as much as we read, and five
times as much as we write.
● Listening has both bottom up and top down processes:
❖ Top down listening processes involve activation of schematic knowledge and contextual knowledge. The first
one is generally thought of as two types of prior knowledge (content schemata, which is background
information on the topic, and formal schemata, which consists of knowledge about how discourse is
organizanized with respect to different genres, different topics or different purposes, including relevant
sociocultural knowledge). The latter one, involves an understanding of the specific listening situation at hand.
All of this gets filtered through pragmatic knowledge to assist in the processing of oral discourse.
❖ Bottom up level of the listening processes involves prior knowledge of the language system ( phonology,
grammar, vocabulary). Here is where the physical signals or clues come from. This level cannot operate with
accuracy or efficiency to make discourse comprehensible to the listener. This interaction of top-down and
bottom-up processing is crucial to our speech reception framework. For native speakers and skilled Second
language learners, bottom-up processing is assumed to be automatic, whereas it is not automatic and can be
a source of serious problems for beginners and less experts in the second language. To help these learners,
learners need to make use of listening strategies and metacognition. for example, they can make use of an
extract from an important speech by identifying segments, predicting what will come next, etc.

STRATEGIES TO HELP SECOND LANGUAGE LEARNERS ON LISTENING:

1) raise learners awareness of the power and value of using strategies
2) use pre-listening activities to activate learners' background knowledge.
3) make clear to learners what they are going to listen and why
4) provide guided listening activities
5) practise using real data
6) use what has been comprehended
7) allow for self-evaluation

METACOGNITION:
It is also a type of strategy that learners can use to enhance L2 listening skill. Metacognition involves the planning,
reulating, monitoring and management of listening. It also gives learners an overview of the listening process,
allowing them for prediction, monitoring of errors, and evaluation.

➔ THE LISTENING PROCESS: RELEVANT BACKGROUND AND RESEARCH.

Background

In the early 1980s, it was popular to assume that only top-down skills needed to be enhanced to improve L2 listening
comprehension. However, now it’s more acknowledged that top-down and bottom-up listening skills should be
integrated and treated pedagogically to improve L2 listening comprehension. The discourse level is where top-down
and bottom-up listening intersect and where complex and simultaneous processing of background information,
contextual information and linguistic information permit comprehension and interpretation to take place.
Many factors related to the L2 listener are relevant to his success or failure: among these are the learner’s language
learning experience, for example, L2 proficiency in general and L2 listening ability in particular. This exposes learners
to the reality of language variation. There are other factors that are relevant, such as the listener’s prior knowledge,
the listener’s memory and attention, and his general problem-solving ability. It must also be considered:
● the compensatory strategies: the listening strategies and metacognition

● the communication strategies: which good L2 listeners have and which weak ones lack: strategies such as
asking questions of one’s interlocutor, getting the other speaker to slow down, tape recording and relistening
to a lecture, watching a movie a second or third time, among others.
In ongoing conversations, good listeners are able to recognize a problem and alert the interlocutor in some
appropriate way if they have not processed the input well enough to make an interpretation; so they are in a position
to negotiate a repetition or clarification. The ability to implement these strategies helps the listener whose listening
comprehension is not yet nativelike, so they should be part of oral skills training.

There are some situation-specific factors external to the listener: the quality of the acoustic signal and the amount of
background noise. And similarly, there are nonlinguistic situation-specific factors, such as room temperature,
distractions, or being in a test-taking situation, and listener-internal factors such as lack of interest in the speaker or
topic, lack of attention, among others.
In any given situation, these factors may weaken listening comprehension, which is something complex, dynamic and
rather fragile to begin with because of the transitory nonpermanent nature of the speech signal.

Lynch points out that all listening experiences can be placed along a continuum from:
★ nonreciprocal: for example, listening to a radio news broadcast; to
★ reciprocal: face to face conversation.

At the reciprocal end of the continuum the L2 listener’s oral communication strategies already mentioned are very
important. However, at the nonreciprocal end of the continuum, L2 listeners must use their own top-down and
bottom-up processing skills without benefit of any interaction with, or feedback from, the speaker. Generally, L2
learners agree that nonreciprocal listening tasks are more difficult than reciprocal listening tasks.

Another very important factor in L2 listening is the learner’s task flexibility. Nida’s notions of general versus selective
listening are still very relevant today. A good listener is able to do the type of listening needed. Either both types of
listening can be important depending on the situation or task. Teachers, therefore, must give learners realistic
opportunities to engage in both types of listening.

Research
Garnes and Bond analyzed a corpus of 890 “mishearings” committed by native speakers of English while the speakers
were engaging in everyday conversation. Based on their analysis of these hearing errors, they proposed that listeners
process incoming speech by employing the following four microprocessing strategies:

● attending to stress and intonation and constructing a metrical template, or pattern, to fit the
utterance.
● attending to stressed vowels.
● segmenting the speech stream into words that correspond to the stressed vowels and their adjacent
consonants.
● seeking a phrase, with grammar and meaning, compatible with the metrical template identified in the
first strategy and the words identified in the third.
This is a bottom-up model. However, when processing speech, it’s possible that listeners use compensatory strategies
to overcome deficiencies in any of these steps, which would bring in top-down processing too.

Interference from the sound system of the native language, which may well favor a different processing procedure
because of differences in rhythm and/or syllable structure, will make it hard to construct metrical templates and to
identify stressed syllables and their vowel nuclei. Lack of a large audio-receptive lexicon and lack of knowledge about
common collocations will impede segmentation of each intonation contour into words or chunks; likewise, imperfect
knowledge of morphology and syntax will make it difficult to identify word, phrase, or clause boundaries and to
assign meanings.

An examination of written transcriptions of audio-recorded speech that were prepared by advanced second language
learners at UCLA indicates that verbs are misheard:
For example: “thought” for “fraught”
● Personal names are often not recognized as such, for example:
● “down the reed” instead of “Donna Reed”
● And idioms are often misheard, for example:
● “more stuff and barrel” for “lock, stock and barrel”

These are some of the errors that intermediate and advanced L2 learners make due to lack of lexical, grammatical
and cultural knowledge as much as to difficulties with the L2 sound system.
In their attempts to process oral discourse, low-level learners can misconstrue the hesitation phenomena produced
by native speakers as words, for example:
“uh” heard as “a”
“huh?” heard as “up?”
“hmm” heard as “him”

Martin claims that L2 learners’ used two different strategies:

➔ TEACHING LISTENING FROM A DISCOURSE PERSPECTIVE

Teaching bottom-up strategies

In instances where reduced speech or imperfect acoustic processing might obscure a message, an effective listener is
able to use the situational context and the preceding and following discourse (co-text) to disambiguate or to decide
on the best interpretation. Whether the speaker is native or nonnative, there must be sufficient information in the
situation or co-text to process the acoustic signal properly.

Eisenstein encourages teachers to expose learners to reduced speech forms, which are generally not represented
orthographically, to enhance their listening comprehension. Sometimes, the only difference between two possible
interpretations is a hard-to-hear unstressed syllable. So, the co-text, what comes after the problematic sequence, can
provide the information needed to choose correctly.

As problematic sounds or sequences of sounds can be segmented and comprehended if the listener makes effective
use of context, the same is often true in cases where stress or intonation causes the difference. For example, in North
American English, the modal auxiliary “can” and its negative contracted form “can’t” differ with respect to stress
when they occur in context.

Like stress, intonation helps listeners to comprehend a speaker’s meaning and intention if used alongside other cues.
The direction of the speaker’s pitch at the end of an utterance can be crucial. With the same string of words,
intonation can signal the certainty of a declarative versus the uncertainty of an interrogative sentence.

The co-text is helping the listener with bottom-up, data-driven processing. For many practitioners, the assumption
has been that level-discourse information assists the listener only or mainly with top-down processing, and indeed,
there are many convincing examples of discourse-level information being very helpful with top-down processing.
Both types of processing are useful and necessary for effective listening comprehension and that they typically
interact.

Teaching top-down and integrated strategies

“Today we’re going to consider three forces that helped to shape the Carolingian Empire. We’ll look at
religion, we’ll look at the prevailing social structure, and we’ll consider economic factors”.

With these opening words, the university-level history professor has verbally established the topic or main idea for
his lecture.

The L2 listener who has comprehended the opening statement (for example, the topic) and its relationship to the list
(which is in effect an outline of subtopics) is in a much better position to understand and take notes on the lecture
than the L2 listener who has missed the opening information about the overall topic. Second language learners in
English-for-academic-purposes programs can be trained to process such material by listening to a variety of lecture
openings and being told to write down the topic and to predict what the lecture will cover. Their written notes can be
checked, and feedback and clarification can be provided if necessary.

Learners can also benefit from listening to long segments extracted from authentic lectures and working at getting
the “gist”, for example, writing down the main points or topic(s). This task can be complemented by relisting to the
same segments and jotting down the “details” (facts, dates, names, results, etc). Learners can also listen to a lecture
while looking at a partial outline where they must fill in the missing information. Such listening-related tasks are done
so that the learners can become more effective at using both top-down and bottom-up listening strategies.

To integrate practice in listening comprehension with other skills in communicative language teaching, Geddes and
Sturtridge suggest the use of “jigsaw listening activities”, where several small groups of learners each listen to a
different part of a larger piece of discourse (for example, a story, a recipe, etc) and write down the important points.
Then, each group shares their information with another group and then another so that each group can piece
together the larger discourse segment and report the overall summary of the discourse.

➔ TEACHING USE OF THE TELEPHONE

Technology (audios de whats app, answering machines) and cellphone:

SL listeners should be exposed to a variety of AUTHENTIC messages, after each message they should write down the
essential information so that they would be able to respond appropriately to the message/call.

Nonreciprocal telephone listening:

Today, many phone messages are prerecorded and the listener cannot ask questions or slow down the interlocutor.
Getting the right information depends on being able to understand:

● the range of options

● the specific instructions

Telephone use everyday conversation:

Inexperience in dealing with live interactive telephone conversation in the target language can also be a serious
problem for SLL. They need opportunities to listen to, interpret and sum up what they hear in a series of authentic
recorded phone conversations. Their listening skills can be facilitated:
 ● if they are exposed to authentic telephone conversations
● taught the conversational structures and options

STRUCTURES OF AN INFORMAL TELEPHONE CONVERSATION (examples on page: 112 y 113)

Listening to a number of telephone conversations prepares learners not only for informal tele. conversations but will
also assist them in being more effective in face-to-face conversation.

➔ LISTENING TO SPEECH ACTIVITIES

The entire area of social functions or speech activities can be challenging for L2 listening as well as speaking.

For example: if L2 listeners hear a sample of apologies and get a sense of the overall structure of apologies in English
they can comprehend and analyze subsequent instances of apologies.

To give learners a sense of the overall structure of a SPEECH ACT like an apology, Olshtain and Cohen make use of the
notion speech act set which refers to the routinized ways in which a given speech act can pattern. Apologises differ
according to culture. In all cultures, however, the speaker´s aim in uttering an apology is to provide support for and
placate the addressee.

5 strategies cross-culturally in apologies:

General strategies minimally necessary:

1. Explicit expression.
2. Admission of responsibility.

Situation-specific strategies: optional ways:

3. An excuse/explanation
4. An offer to make amends.
5. A promise of non recurrence.

Other researchers have found that learners can improve significantly in their ability to process and produce SPEECH
ACTS like apologies and complaints when they are familiar with the speech act set and have been exposed to and
have analyzed many authentic instances of the target speech act occurring in different contexts. Hawkins mentions
that learners report genuinely enjoying the process of learning about the structures and options used in such social
interactions.

➔ PEDAGOGICAL STRATEGIES AND PRIORITIES

the most recommended strategies to be successful in listening are:
1. first listening: extract a topic
2. second listening: get details of the news items
3. third listening: evaluate the impact of the new items, that is to say, the information that is important, the one
that is not, the information that makes me happy or sad

It would also be helpful to look at faithful transcripts of a lecture or conversation with all the pauses, false starts,
incomplete sentences, etc. access to such transcripts can make listeners aware of many things. More specifically, it
helps learners to see the discourse function of items such as: cue words, discourse markers, lexical clues, chinks, new
items, key text segments.

Also important for comprehending interactive reciprocal discourse are:

● words and phrases used to open and close topics in conversations
● ways to ask a question or to interrupt a speaker
● ways to ask for clarification or elaboration