Understanding…

Listening Skills

Table of contents
Key points and recommendations 3

1. The conventional listening lesson 4

2. What does listening involve? 5

3. Perceptual processes: The raw material of listening 8

4. Meaning-based processes: Handling ‘comprehension’ 10

5. Listening strategies 11

6. Teacher training in L2 listening 12

7. The future of listening instruction: moving out of the classroom 12

Bibliography / Suggested follow-up reading 13

Appendix A: Detailed list of processes contributing to expert listening 15

Appendix B: Samples of small-scale exercises to test features of connected natural speech 19

This paper is © Cambridge University Press. We provide it free of charge to Better Learning network members,
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August 2017.
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John Field is Reader in Cognition in Language Learning at the CRELLA Research Institute, where he undertakes
research and consultancy on the testing of listening. He formerly taught Psycholinguistics and Child Language
Development at the University of Reading UK and Cognitive aspects of L2 learning at Cambridge University. His
main interest is in second language listening, which formed the topic of his PhD at Cambridge, and on which he
has written and researched widely. His 'Listening in the Language Classroom' (CUP 2008) has become a standard
text in teacher training and MA courses. In another life, he was an ELT teacher trainer and materials writer and a
language school inspector. He wrote national coursebooks for Saudi Arabia and skills materials for Hong Kong
schools. He also designed two English-teaching series for the BBC World Service and TV programmes for the Open
University of Mainland China.

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Key points and recommendations

The standard approach to listening is based on asking comprehension questions about a recording. Concerns are
that it:
 focuses on the product of listening and not the processes that lead to it;
 is teacher-centred;
 grades materials in terms of language rather than listening demands;
 aligns listening too closely with reading;
 uses written comprehension questions that tell learners what they are about to hear.
Recent attempts to improve on the approach have included:
 dividing the skill into component processes to be practised individually;
 giving new attention to basic problems of word recognition.
Current thinking: The standard approach needs to be supplemented by
1. small-scale exercises which practise specific aspects of listening;
2. raising learners’ awareness of the nature of connected speech and the problems it causes for the L2 listener;
3. (particularly at lower levels) strategy practice that enables learners to overcome their inability to reliably
decode all they hear.
Listening instructors need greater support: identifying possible difficult passages in listening texts and providing
remedial tasks to correct likely problems.

The nature of listening

Current approaches avoid intuitive lists of ‘subskills’, and draw instead on research which indicates that
competent listening requires five types of operation:

3 PERCEPTUAL 2 MEANING-BASED
 decoding the input (speech sounds)  putting parsed information into context and
interpreting meaning
 matching groups of sounds to words
 linking pieces of information to construct a line
 parsing words into grammatical patterns
of argument
Within these operations, a skilled listener commands a range of processes, e.g. word recognition includes: using
syllables as cues to word identity, identifying where one word ends and the next begins, accessing all possible
senses of a word. These processes can be practised individually via small-scale tasks, some involving transcription.

Classroom practice
Teacher training should ensure that listening instructors:
 use conventional comprehension classes to diagnose where learners’ problems lie; then provide small-scale
remedial tasks to address the problems identified;
 prepare for a class by anticipating which parts of a passage are likely to prove challenging to the learners;

 replay demanding sections of the recording several times and get learners to discuss them and even to
transcribe short clips.

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1. The conventional listening lesson

The established approach to the teaching of L2 listening involves asking individual or whole-class comprehension
questions about a piece of recorded material. A criticism sometimes heard is that this tests the skill rather than
teaching it; but listening takes place in the mind of the listener, so we do not have much choice but to ask
questions of some kind.
More serious concerns are that the comprehension approach:
 focuses attention upon the product of listening without providing any information about the processes
adopted by learners in arriving at it;
 is teacher centred, with the instructor deciding what is important in a listening passage;
 makes it difficult to provide a staged programme of instruction. Content tends to be graded in terms of the
language which it contains rather than in terms of its listening demands;
 aligns listening too closely with reading and encourages teachers to ignore major differences between the
two;
 often relies on written comprehension questions, which provide learners with advance information
(obtained by reading) about what they are about to hear.
Both teachers and learners recognise that repeated listening practice of this kind does not necessarily produce
better listeners.
These concerns have led to two major recent developments, which underpin much of what will be discussed in
this report.
1. Calls for a teaching methodology that targets the aspects of listening that L2 listeners find problematic. This
has led to proposals for dividing the skill into its component processes (see Section 2), so that they can be
practised individually.
2. Recognition that the vague notion of ‘comprehension’ has distracted the attention of teachers from basic
perceptual processes like recognising words or patterns of grammar, which may frequently underlie
difficulties of understanding.
Field (2008) suggests two possible ways of supplementing the comprehension approach:
 a diagnostic approach, where, instead of simply classifying answers as right or wrong, a teacher follows up the
wrong ones by asking why learners gave them. The insights achieved can feed into small-scale remedial
exercises that address the specific problems identified.
 a prognostic approach, in which, alongside comprehension work, L2 learners are trained in aspects of the
listening skill (often specific to the target language) that are known to cause problems. Again, the training can
take the form of small-scale exercises, each targeting a single issue.

Successful handling of the comprehension approach depends heavily upon the skills of the individual teacher.
Thoroughly checking comprehension requires an understanding of the problems that listening poses, the nature
of the listening process and the ways in which learners respond to the demands of listening in an L2. It is not
enough simply to elicit check answers to questions, then to move on. A competent teacher has to anticipate
which parts of a passage are likely (for a range of reasons) to prove challenging to the learners – highlight them in
the transcript – replay them – get learners to discuss them – even get learners to transcribe short clips.

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2. What does listening involve?

There is a shortage of reliable information about the listening skill available to teachers - and more than a little
misinformation. This makes it hard for teachers to catalogue likely learner problems and to provide small-scale
practice exercises like those just mentioned. One or two attempts have been made to divide listening into its
component parts but they are mainly based on intuition.

Early attempts to analyse listening

‘Sub-skills’
From the early 1980s, handbooks for L2 teachers presented reading as a componential activity. They proposed
programmes of small-scale localised exercises based upon what were termed sub-skills. Curiously, the approach
was little applied to the teaching of listening. Richards (1983) put together an extensive list of listening sub-skills,
for both general and academic contexts; but formats for practising them were slow to emerge.
The sub-skills approach had its limitations:
 The taxonomies proposed were based entirely upon intuition.
 They were very miscellaneous: mixing basic perception of sounds and words, listening for gist, recognising
the logic of a text and strategies such as guessing word meanings.
 They proved difficult to grade in relation to the proficiency levels of learners.

Strategies
Distinct from sub-skills but sometimes confused with them were the strategies that less experienced L2 listeners,
speakers, readers and writers use in order to compensate for their limited mastery of the skill and their lack of
language knowledge. Listening programmes were developed that supported the comprehension approach by
training learners to use such techniques. They became particularly popular in the USA, where much local teaching
of L2 listening focused (and still focuses) upon target lists of strategies.
The strategy approach has its limitations too:
 Commentators do not always distinguish between two types of strategy: those that compensate for gaps in
understanding and those that help learners to acquire language knowledge.
 They do not distinguish between
• processes (e.g. how to identify words in connected speech): which all listeners have to use in
order to make sense of what they hear;
• strategies: short-term expedients which enable early-stage learners to make sense of a text that
they have understood incompletely.
 The available lists of strategies largely reflect the impressions of commentators; and although a lot of
research has been conducted, much of it adopts the assumption that certain strategies exist and asks
learners if they do or do not use them.

‘Listening for’ categories

A further attempt to categorise listening has been by types. Terms such as ‘listening for gist’, ‘listening for main
point’, ‘listening for details’, ‘listening for information’, etc., are often favoured to demonstrate that tasks are
covering a range of listening experience.
 These categories are few in number and loosely defined; they even sometimes overlap.

 Using them to define tasks ignores the fact that more than one type is used in many real-world listening

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events. It depends upon the material that is being listened to, the context (presentation vs conversation) and
the listener’s goals.

Listening processes
These days a more rigorous approach is available. Extensive research into L1 listening has enabled psycholinguists
to construct detailed models of what the skill entails. This information potentially equips L2 instructors to
understand more clearly what it is that constitutes expert listening – and thus to define their goals more clearly
when planning classroom practice and designing tests of the skill. There are five fundamental operations which
make up competent listening.

By way of explanation:
 input decoding: the sounds reaching the ear of the listener are converted into the sounds of speech;
 lexical search: a group of sounds is matched to a word; information about the word, including its range of
meanings, is then retrieved;
 parsing: a group of words is built up in the listener’s mind, until such time as a grammatical pattern can be
traced in it;
 meaning construction: the information from parsing is placed in a wider context, which might involve the
ongoing topic, world knowledge or the listener’s knowledge of the speaker. Information is inferred that the
speaker has not explicitly expressed;
 discourse construction: pieces of information are linked to each other, their relative importance is considered
and a line of argument is built up.

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These five headings provide teachers with a systematic way of approaching listening. The first three can be
thought of as perceptual (or lower-level) operations, where the listener handles units of language. See Section 3.
The last two are conceptual (higher level) operations, where the listener interprets the ideas that have been
extracted. See Section 4.
Within these operations, there are many different processes (see Appendix A) which provide a basis for possible
small-scale practice exercises. The term process is preferable to sub-skill. Whereas sub-skills were intuitive
suggestions by methodologists, the processes referred to here are based on research evidence over many years,
which indicates that they are psychologically real.

‘Bottom-up’ and ‘top-down’

Note that the arrows in the figure above point in two directions. The L2 literature sometimes makes much of a
supposed conflict between a bottom-up view of listening where phonemes are built into words and words into
clauses and a top-down view where context helps the listener to identify words.
This bears no relation to current thinking, which sees listening as a highly interactive process in which an
experienced listener is capable of drawing upon evidence at a number of different levels at the same time. To give
a simple example – recognising a word might depend not only on low-level information at phoneme and syllable
level but also on higher-level cues provided by knowledge of groups of words that occur together or knowledge of
the current topic of conversation. Of course, the interaction just described is a feature of skilled listening and may
be much less present in early-level L2 listeners.

A framework for syllabus design

The framework outlined above can materially assist teachers and syllabus designers in determining what can be
achieved at different levels of proficiency. Broadly, it is not until around CEFR level B1+ that L2 listeners begin to
be able to handle higher-level processes consistently. The reason is simple. Early stage L2 listeners have to focus a
great deal of attention on basic processes such as decoding the input, recognising words and parsing utterances.
But human attention capacity is quite limited, so they do not have enough attention left to interpret wider
meaning or follow a line of discussion.
Two developments take place as a novice listener gains more and more practice.
1. The listener begins to recognise spoken words and access their meanings more automatically, reducing the
amount of attention these operations demand.
2. The listener begins to recognise common chunks of language, which can be processed as a whole instead
of word by word.
The result is to free up attention that can then be given to meaning construction and discourse construction.

Up to B1+ level, teachers thus do well to focus on perceptual processes - in particular, on the features of
connected English speech that cause problems. They also have to address the reality that early L2 listeners will be
unable to decode all they hear. Teachers need to provide training in the use of compensatory strategies such as
ignoring unknown words or inferring their meaning from context – identifying key words marked out by
intonation – deciding the likelihood of a recognised word – checking guesses against later information. These are
critical in order to support the morale of early-stage listeners and to make them feel that progress is being made.
In short, a double programme is needed:
1. training in specific processes central to listening in the L2 (Sections 3-4);
2. training in strategies that enable learners to compensate, short term, for problems of understanding.
(Section 5)

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Younger learners
Young learners represent a special case. In determining what they can handle in terms of L2 listening, we have to
take account of more than just the need to feature the topics and lexical fields with which they are familiar. We
also need to consider their cognitive development. From research into their comprehension of read-aloud
passages, we know that, until the age of about 12, YLs have problems with higher-level processes such as
interpreting pronouns, making inferences and monitoring their own understanding for inconsistencies.
Whatever the target language level, teachers thus need to focus largely on low-level processes. We also know
that YLs are likely to have difficulty with the type of decision-making activity that is involved in using strategies.
Strategy-based practice of the type recommended for adults may not be appropriate.

3. Perceptual processes: The raw material of listening

Successful ‘comprehension’ is thus now recognised as heavily dependent upon a listener's ability to make sense of
the information provided by the speech signal. This may seem obvious – but a claim often heard in the 1990s was
that L2 learners’ ability to process at a perceptual level was unimportant because ‘context’ would resolve any
problems arising. The argument is clearly false: without the ability to identify a certain proportion of words in
connected speech, listeners simply do not have a context to draw on. There is even emerging evidence that, when
lower-level listeners try to make sense of difficult stretches of speech, the conclusions they reach are more often
based upon individual words that have been recognised than upon the wider context.
Insights provided by phonologists, phoneticians and discourse analysts have led to a greatly increased
understanding of the problems that L2 learners face when trying to deconstruct a stream of L2 speech. This has
fed into small-scale remedial tasks, such as those proposed in Field (2008); for examples, see Appendix B.
Additional practice is also provided by conventional ear-training during pronunciation practice, where learners are
encouraged to recognise spoken forms before producing them.
It is dangerous to view speech through the lens of writing. Written words possess standard forms determined by
their spelling and have their boundaries clearly marked by gaps. By contrast, words in connected speech are:
 highly variable in form
 only rarely bounded by pauses
 of different levels of prominence.
What is more, the speech signal is transitory. Listening takes place under pressures of time and at a pace that
cannot be controlled by the listener in a way that reading can by the reader.
It is important to view listening, even in L1, as a tentative process, in which a listener is constantly prepared to
revise initial impressions of what has been heard. Those impressions may relate to words (even L1 listeners
sometimes fail to identify a word until 3 or 4 words later); or to utterances that are not yet complete.

Variation in connected speech

Phoneme variation
The input that reaches the listener’s ear takes the form of acoustic sensations, which the listener has to match to
the sounds of the language. That is not as easy as it might seem. Phonemes do not possess a standard form; they
vary considerably according to the phonemes before and afterwards. Speech scientists discovered long ago that
phonemes spliced from connected speech cannot be accurately identified by L1 listeners and that there is no
standard set of cues for any single phoneme.
We therefore have to assume either that we store many versions of every phoneme in our minds in order to
recognise the sounds we hear, or (perhaps more likely) that the smallest unit of perception for the listener is the

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syllable or even the word.

Word variation
Words also vary in form under the influence of the words that come before and after them.
1. Resyllabification. English speech has a tendency to follow a strong-weak rhythm. This may lead to some
syllables being redistributed: Lizbe/camea/star.
2. When articulating a group of words, a speaker tends to adopt the easiest possible route, avoiding
complicated consonant sequences. The result may change the form of the words:
• Elision: the final sound of a word may be omitted: night club  [naɪ klʌb]
• Assimilation: the final sound of a word may anticipate the word that comes next [tem pounds]
3. Liaison. For similar reasons, speakers often insert an extra consonant to assist the transition between
vowels: to (w)eat, the (y)end
4. Reduction. When producing a familiar chunk of language, a speaker might omit important parts or reduce
them to [ə]. Do you know what I mean? might become [narp mean].

Speaker variation
 Speakers’ voices vary enormously in fundamental pitch and in range.
 Speech rate varies from one speaker to another and one encounter to another.
 Speakers’ voices vary in terms of regional or class accent.
Listeners often find themselves having to adjust (normalise) to the voice of a new speaker or to the rate at which
a known speaker is speaking. While this occurs very rapidly in an L1, it is inevitably more complicated in an L2.

Word boundaries
There are occasional short pauses where speakers plan what to say next; but there are no consistent gaps
between words in connected speech as there are in writing. A listener has to engage in lexical segmentation,
working out the points where one word ends and the next begins. In English, an important cue used by
experienced listeners is provided by syllables bearing lexical stress. They provide a relatively reliable indicator of
where a new content word is likely to begin because the majority of content words in running speech in English
are either monosyllabic or start with a stressed syllable.
This indicates the value of simple transcription exercises, where learners listen, perhaps four or five times, to a
short section of authentic speech of up to 15 seconds. They write down the words they recognise, compare their
efforts in pairs and add to them on each new hearing.

Relative prominence
While lexical stress assists L2 learners in recognising content words, they still have difficulty in identifying some of
the most frequent words in the language (i.e. function words) in connected speech. The words are short and
often include the weak vowel schwa; and their duration gets reduced within an intonation group. A breakthrough
in decoding these words occurs around CEFR level B1+; it appears to be connected with the listener’s growing
ability to recognise common chunks of language.
By contrast, the stressed word in an intonation group is more prominent and longer in duration than the others
and is therefore easier to recognise. Identifying the focal word provides an important strategic prop for early-
stage learners.

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Parsing and the transitory nature of speech

Because listening takes place in real time, parsing obliges a listener to store words in the mind one by one until
such time as a syntactic pattern becomes evident. This process is a challenging one for many L2 listeners. They
may not be familiar with the grammatical pattern that is emerging; and they face heavy mental demands in
having to retain words at the same time as listening to incoming ones. They may also be uncertain about the
accuracy of the words they have stored.
Experienced L1 listeners can quite often anticipate what words are coming next, then check these predictions
against what they hear. However, even experienced L2 listeners tend to cling to their original hypotheses and are
slow to abandon them when evidence disconfirms them.

4. Meaning-based processes: Handling ‘comprehension’

We now consider higher-level processes. Exactly what is ‘comprehension’ is and how is it achieved? Teachers
tend to assume that it mainly involves extracting facts; but, in real-world contexts, listeners have to do much
more.
 In terms of meaning construction: they have to work out the relevance of a new point of information, relating
it to the current topic of conversation and the speaker’s apparent intentions. They have to link pronouns (it,
she, them) to what they refer to. They may also have to infer information that a speaker has left unsaid -
including working out links between utterances (The bus stopped. We got off.).
 Regardless of the type of communication (a conversation, a lecture, a radio programme), they also have to
build up an overall picture of what a speaker has said – a discourse representation. This involves: deciding
what information is minor and what is major, checking information to see if it is consistent with what was
understood before, recognising logical links between pieces of information and building a line of argument.

There is a tendency for items in listening tests to focus on facts and to neglect these more sophisticated
operations. This is unfortunate as it is not difficult to design tasks that elicit them. There is no reason why, in the
classroom, conventional comprehension questions cannot target areas such as speaker attitude, inference or
logical connections:
Did the speaker like the film? If so, why? If not, why not?
Compare the attitudes of these two speakers to mobile phones.
How likely is the speaker to vote for the new motorway?
Do you think the couple really enjoyed their holiday or not?
What happened first: the driving ban or the accident?
What caused the accident? What was the result?
How did the speaker’s phone lead to him missing the plane?
Why is palm oil relevant in this talk on global warming?

Similarly, various forms of note-taking can demonstrate a learner’s ability to report argument structure. One easy
format is to ask learners to complete a skeleton Table of Contents showing the major and minor points of a talk
(listed as 1…. 1.1 …. 1.2…. 2…. 2.1…. 2.2…. 2.3…. 3.... etc.) – with perhaps one or two answers included as points
of reference.

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5. Listening strategies
L2 listeners in the earlier stages of development (up to about B1+) often have to focus heavily on the language of
the speaker because they are unable to recognise every word that is said. Inability to follow L2 speech can be
demotivating to learners, especially nowadays with so much spoken English available on the internet and through
broadcast media. Training learners in compensatory strategies is sometimes said to be useful for higher-level
listeners; in fact, it is those at lower levels who benefit most. The two strands of a listening programme identified
so far (practice in the processes used by experienced listener and getting used to the features of connected
speech) should thus be supplemented with tasks which train these learners to handle listening passages that they
only partly understand.
Types of strategy:
 Avoidance strategies: Listener learns to ignore a piece of text that seems unimportant or to accept a general
impression of what was said;
 Achievement strategies at clause level: Listener uses context or topic to infer what was said, listens for key
words or uses prominent words to guess clause meaning
 Achievement strategies at word level: Listener uses context or analogy with other words in L2 or in L1 to
guess the meaning of new or unrecognised words. Listener extracts a general sense (oak = a type of tree).
Evidence suggests that many listeners deal with unknown words by making approximate matches and then
trying to fit them into what the speaker says.
 Repair strategies: Listener learns formulaic expressions used in interactive situations to get clarification or
repetition.
 Pro-active or metacognitive strategies: Ways of predicting in advance what a speaker will say or of ensuring
that different points are committed to memory. Many of these are useful in the classroom and in listening
tests but not relevant to real-world interaction.
There is some disagreement about methodology. A ‘direct’ approach to strategy training widely favoured in the
US introduces, demonstrates and practises individual strategies. Its problems are that:
 strategic behaviour varies considerably from one individual to another. Some learners are risk avoiders (often
for cultural reasons); others are risk takers.
 much strategy use follows a problem-solution pattern, and thus varies according to the specifics of the
problem. So it may be better for learners to become aware of appropriate strategies during a more general
listening task
An alternative to direct teaching is therefore a task-based strategy approach, where learners
1. listen to a recording (or a short clip)
2. share ideas on how they managed to make sense of parts they did not fully follow
3. report to the class
4. listen again
Strategy practice of this kind entails using recordings that are at or slightly beyond the language level of the
learners (useful for demonstrating how to deal with unknown words). Even at quite low levels, these recordings
should include simple clips of authentic speech.

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6. Teacher training in L2 listening

Several issues for teacher training emerge from this document. Future training needs to recognise that
competent L2 listening instruction goes well beyond simply asking questions and checking answers. It should
include
 A thorough preparation of the material to be used. This should involve not just a conventional examination of
the language of the transcript but also listening to the recording, and marking the transcript with passages
that are likely to cause a) perceptual difficulty or b) conceptual difficulty. After asking initial comprehension
questions, the teacher should focus more narrowly on those sections, with learners reporting what they
understand or making transcriptions.
 Detailed record-keeping of any parts of a listening passage that cause learners particular difficulty to enable
insights into where their problems lie.
 The use of small-scale exercises to practise areas where learners are likely to have (or have been found to
have) perceptual difficulties. These exercises should be given particular importance at lower levels up to B1+
 Opportunities for learners below level B1+ to develop compensatory strategies for listening to material that a)
is authentic and/or b) contains words and phrases beyond their vocabulary range. This might entail listening
to short recordings, then discussing in pairs what was understood and how. Strategy work is vital for
motivation and for enabling learners to cope in real-world contexts.
 Questions at level B2 upwards that target listeners’ ability to engage in meaning or discourse construction.
Future training needs to ensure that teachers possess
 An adequate understanding of the nature of connected speech and the problems it raises for learners;

 A recognition that listening difficulties may derive from the recorded material and not simply from the
language of the transcript;
 An understanding of how listeners process speech, turning sounds into ideas;

 The ability to diagnose perceptual and conceptual problems as and when they occur;

 The ability to design local tests of listening which are not heavily dependent upon conventional
comprehension questions or test formats.

7. The future of listening instruction: moving out of the classroom

At present, much teaching of L2 listening continues to take place in full-class situations. In some teaching
contexts, class size creates problems of audibility. In addition, the way which a teacher focuses on difficult
sections depends upon the teacher’s own intuitions as to what aspects learners may have found difficult. Listeners
vary enormously, both in the aspects of connected speech that they find difficult and in the strategic approaches
that they adopt to resolve problems. The quality of voice recordings transmitted via the internet has improved
exponentially over recent years, as has the range of authentic material available online. This suggests strongly
that, in years to come, much listening instruction will move out of the classroom and take the form of:
1. Listening homework, where the teacher sets open-ended questions and learners listen and re-listen to the
recording as long as necessary in order to find answers. Or learners might transcribe a short recording
which exemplifies some of the problems associated with connected speech.
2. Self-access work in a listening centre as part of the class programme.
3. Paired work within a whole-class setting, where pairs of learners compare answers, explain to each other
how they arrived at them, then listen again.

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Bibliography / Suggested follow-up reading

Most of the issues raised here are treated at length in Field, J. (2008) Listening in the Language Classroom (CUP).
The book contains multiple concrete examples of small-scale listening tasks that practise the various component
processes of listening.

Section 1 The conventional listening lesson

Field, J. (2008): Chaps 1-3

Field, J. (1998) Skills and strategies: towards a new methodology for listening. ELT Journal 54/2: 110-
118

Field, J. (2012) Listening instruction. In A. Burns. A. & J.C. Richards (eds.) Pedagogy and Practice in
Second Language Teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.207-217.

Section 2 What is listening?

Field, J. (2008): Chaps. 7, 12, 15

Field, J. (1999) Key concepts in ELT: bottom up and top down. ELT Journal, 53/4: 338-339.

Field, J. (2000) ‘Not waving but drowning’: a reply to Tony Ridgway. ELT Journal, 54/2: 186-195. Also:
ELT Journal, 54/3: 307.

Field, J. (2003) Promoting perception: lexical segmentation in L2 listening. ELT Journal, 57/4: 325-334.

Field, J. (2004) An insight into listeners problems: too much bottom-up or too much top-down?
System, 32: 363–77.

Richards, J. (1983) Listening comprehension: approach, design, procedure. TESOL Quarterly, 17: 219-
39.

Section 3 The raw material of listening

Field, J. (2008): Chap. 9

Brown, G. (1990) Listening to Spoken English. Harlow: Longman, 2nd edn.

Field, J. (2014) Myth: Pronunciation teaching needs to fix in the minds of learners a set of distinct
consonant and vowel sounds. In L. Grant (ed.) Pronunciation Myths. Ann Arbor: U. of Michigan
Press, pp. 80-106.

Laver, J. (1994). Principles of Phonetics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Section 4 Handling ‘comprehension’

Field, J. (2008): Chaps. 12-13

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Section 5 Listening strategies

Field, J. (2008): Chaps. 15-16

Cohen, A. (1998) Strategies of Language Learning and Language Use. Harlow: Longman.

Dornyei, Z. & Scott, M.L. (1997) Communication strategies in a second language: Definitions and
taxonomies. Language Learning, 47/1: 173-210.

Faerch, G. & Kasper, G. (1983) Plans and strategies in foreign language communication, In G. Faerch &
G. Kasper (eds.) Strategies in Interlanguage Communication. London: Longman, pp.20-60.

Field, J. (2000) ‘Not waving but drowning’: a reply to Tony Ridgway. ELT Journal, 54/2: 186-195. Also:
ELT Journal, 54/3: 307.

Macaro, E., Graham, S. & Vanderplank, R. (2008). A review of listening strategies: focus on sources of
knowledge and on success. In A.D. Cohen & E. Macaro (eds.): Language Learner Strategies.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Section 6 Teacher training for L2 listening

Field, J. (2008): Chaps. 1-4

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Appendix A: Detailed list of processes contributing to expert listening

(Source: Field, 2008: 336-339)

Decoding processes

1. Phoneme level
1.1 Phoneme recognition in a range of contexts
1.2 Discriminating consonants
1.3 Discriminating vowels
1.4 Recognising consonant clusters
1.5 Extrapolating spellings from sounds

2. Syllable level
2.1 Recognising syllable structure
2.2 Recognising syllable stress
2.3 Treating stressed syllables as more reliable
2.4 Using stressed syllables to recognise words
2.5 Using weak syllables to locate function words

3. Word level
3.1 Lexical segmentation
3.1.1 Rhythm based strategies
3.1.2 Using prefixes and suffixes as boundary markers
3.1.3 Using fixed stress (where appropriate)
3.2 Recognising variant forms of words
3.2.1 Allowing for cliticisation
3.2.2 Allowing for resyllabification
3.2.3 Recognising weak forms of function words
3.2.4 Recognising assimilated words
3.2.5 Allowing for elision
3.2.6 Recognising reduced words within intonation groups
3.3 Recognising complete formulaic chunks
3.4 Using awareness of word frequency
3.5 Current activation
3.6 Spreading activation (word networks in the mind)
3.7 Distinguishing known and unknown words
3.8 Dealing with unknown words: infer – generalise – ignore
3.9 Automatic lexical access

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4. Syntactic parsing
4.1 Building syntactic structures during pauses and fillers
4.2 Using planning pauses to demarcate syntactic structures
4.3 Distinguishing planning and hesitation pauses
4.4 Using intonation groups to demarcate syntactic structures.
4.5 Building a syntactic structure on-line
4.5.1 Testing hypotheses
4.5.2 Using probability
4.5.3 Recognising syntactic chunks
4.5.4 Recognising the sentence pattern associated with the verb
4.5.5 Recognising primary L2 cues to syntactic organisation
4.6 Understanding pragmatic intentions
4.7 Drawing inferences based on syntax

5. Intonation
5.1 Relating intonation groups to syntactic structure
5.2 Forming and testing decoding hypotheses within an intonation group
5.3 Identifying focally stressed syllables
5.4 Treating focally stressed syllables as central to the message
5.5 Guessing words of low prominence in the intonation group
5.6 Allowing for variations in intonation between varieties of English

6. Normalisation to speaker voices

6.1 Allowing for voice variation
6.2 Setting baseline for loudness, pitch level, speech rate
6.3 Drawing on an accent repertoire

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Meaning building processes

1. Word meaning
1.1 Narrowing word sense to fit context
1.2 Dealing with word ambiguity
1.3 Inferring meaning of unknown words

2. Syntactic meaning
2.1 Relating syntax to context
2.2 Interpreting speaker’s functional intentions
2.3 Forming inferences from syntactic information

3. Intonation meaning
3.1 Recognising given / new relationships
3.2 Distinguishing given/new and contrastive and emphatic stress
3.3 Relating contrastive and emphatic focal stress to context
3.4 Recognising finality
3.5 Recognising the end of a speaker turn
3.6 Using intonation to identify questions in statement form
3.7 Distinguishing a confirmation request from a more open question
3.8 Distinguishing echoes and challenges
3.9 Distinguishing neutral – emotive – withdrawn intonations

4. Using contextual knowledge

4.1 World knowledge
4.2 Topic knowledge
4.3 Speaker knowledge
4.4 Knowledge of situation
4.5 Knowledge of setting

5. Using schema knowledge

5.1 Predicting what will be said
5.2 Triggering spreading activation
5.3 Inferring what the speaker has not expressed
5.4 Allowing for culturally determined schemas

6. Context / co-text and meaning

6.1 Using context and co-text to narrow down word meaning
6.2 Using context and co-text to infer pragmatic meaning
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6.3 Using context and co-text to infer word meaning

7. Using inference
7.1 Inferring information the speaker has left unsaid
7.2 Inferring connections between pieces of information that were not made explicitly

8. Making reference connections

8.1 Carrying forward current topics
8.2 Dealing with imprecise reference

9. Interpreting the utterance

9.1 Interpreting speaker language
9.2 Deep processing

10. Selecting information

10.1 Considering relevance
10.2 Considering redundancy: addition versus repetition
10.3 Dealing with incoherence

11. Integrating information

11.1 Connecting new information to previous
11.1.1 Recognising locally connecting linkers
11.1.2 Recognising ‘signpost’ linkers
11.1.3 Recognising links not marked by linkers
11.2 Monitoring for consistency
11.3 Structuring the discourse
11.3.1 Recognising topics and sub-topics
11.3.2 Using formal schemas

12. Forming and checking provisional discourse representations

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Appendix B: Samples of small-scale exercises to test features of connected natural

speech
(Source: Field, 2008)

Reduced word forms

 Resyllabification. Teacher designs simple sentences with resyllabified words in them (see examples above) or
uses sentences from a naturalistic recording. Look especially for instances where the second word begins with
a vowel. The sentences should give very little contextual information.
The children went in  when tin The customer made out a cheque  may doubt
I can’t help it if the bus is always late.  (carn) tell pit
I described the boat I saw  the bow tie saw

Dictation of word pairs where elision is likely

nex(t) spring  [nekˈsprɪŋ]
nigh(t) club  [ˈnaɪklʌb]
firs(t) three  [fɜ:sˈθri:]
arm(ed) guard  [ɑ:mˈgɑ:d]
ol(d) people  [əʊlˈpi:pl]
lea(ve) school  [li:ˈsku:l]
studen(t) card  [ˈstʃu:dnkɑ:d]
Eas(t) Coast  [i:sˈkəʊst]
cou(ld) take  [kʊˈteɪk]
blin(d) man  [ˈblaɪmæn]
fi(ve) pm  [faɪpi:ˈem]
back t(o) London  [bækˈtlʌndən]

Exercises in recognising chunks

 Isolated groups. Teacher uses a tapescript of a piece of relatively rapid authentic speech to select groups of
words which occur frequently in everyday speech and which have a relatively consistent intonation pattern.
Examples: fixed formulae (You all right?), longer fillers (do you know what I mean?), syntactic patterns (I
should have done) Teacher plays them; learners report what they hear. Learners then practise producing
them.
 Focus on chunks. After playing an authentic text for comprehension, teacher replays sections of the
recording representing chunks that occur frequently in natural speech. Learners transcribe.
 Locating chunks. The teacher asks learners to listen not for general meaning but for groups of words that
they have often heard together. Class discusses and listens again.
 Reduced forms in larger chunks. Teacher excises formulaic chunks from authentic recordings, and asks
learners to transcribe them. The most useful are noted down by learners and practised orally as items of
vocabulary. Examples from English:
• syntactic chunks (wanna go, must’ve done)
• fillers (do you know what I mean?)
• frequent sentences (Where are you from? Any idea of the time?)
• strings with a pragmatic purpose: (Do you mind if I…? Why don’t we …? Sorry about the …
Any chance of a …?)

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Lexical segmentation exercises

 Standard segmentation practice. Teacher plays a sentence excised from a piece of natural speech. Learners
transcribe the words they understand. Teacher replays, learners add more words to their transcriptions.
Learners compare answers, teacher replays. Repeat with several sentences. Ideal also for self-study.
 Gap filling. ‘Listen and fill in the missing words’. Teacher gives learners a transcript, in which groups of words
(not just single words) have been omitted.
 Awareness raising: ‘Write what you hear’. Teacher dictates ambiguous sequences to the learners; then adds
an unexpected ending.
a nice cream … dress [Learner writes ‘an ice cream’, then has to revise it]
the way to cut it … is like this [‘the waiter cut it’  ‘the way to cut it’ ]
Some boxes have … arrived [‘some boxes of’  ‘some boxes have’]
 Sample sentences. ‘You will not understand everything. But try to guess how many words there are.’ Poetry
provides examples of the rhythmic pattern for English:
Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smokestack.
Every tiger madness muzzled, every serpent passion killed.

Extrapolating the spelling of an unknown word

 Dictionary practice. ‘Listen to these words; then look up their meaning in your dictionary’.
quibble pheasant stretcher limb mane
alight despite freight innate grain
slovenly breath relief fraud
 Cognates. Teacher dictates words with cognates in L1. Learners spell them using L2 spelling rules.
 Note-taking. ‘Listen to these answer-phone messages. Write down the names of the people who left them
and where they are from’.
Hello. My name’s Harper. I’m ringing from the Grove Corporation in Darwin.
 Locating words on a map by approximate matching. ‘Follow the journey on a map, marking the stations that
are mentioned’.
Here is a map of the London Underground / New York subway / Sydney City
Circle. Let me tell you how to get to where I live. The nearest station to you is [A].
Can you find it? Now, get the northbound train as far as [B]. When you get to [B], you have to change to
the [X] line and get the train going towards [C]. You get off at [D]…

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