Am I teaching or testing listening?

Among the four language skills, listening is often considered to be the most difficult skill for students. When I was working as an English teacher, my usual approach to teaching listening was:

1. Pre-teach vocabulary

2. Ask students to read the questions, highlight the keywords and predict the word forms

3. Play the recording

4. Check the answers with students and play some parts of the recording again if necessary
   

            Despite frequent in-class listening practice, I soon realised that my students still struggled to make an improvement in listening. When I discussed how to teach listening with my colleagues, our approach was often the same – more listening practice and dictations.

            After gaining a bit more teaching experience, what I found out was that students often lacked the ability to decode sounds. If I paused the recording right after the answer, they were usually able to repeat the answer but they couldn’t recognise the sounds and spell the word. For some weaker students, all they could hear might just be a chunk of language with some keywords in it. Standard gap-filling or multiple-choice questions may be useful, but we mainly focus on whether students can write the correct answers while ignoring an important step – decoding the sounds with the students.

            This is a common struggle among English teachers and it’s a well-documented problem in existing literature. Listening is described as a “mysterious black box” as the common approach to teaching listening is to offer students more practice without setting clear goals (Rost, 2001, p.13).

            Last year, I learnt a new method from a very experienced English teacher. The method focuses on developing students’ ability to decode sounds, a process of “translating the speech signals into speech sounds, words and clauses, and finally to a literal meaning” (Field, 2008, p.125). This is how it works:

1. Before the lesson, go through the transcript and identify the areas that may cause problems. For example, I focused on a short sentence (“She says she’s very nervous.”), in a listening lesson (elementary level).

2. Tell students to put down their pens and listen to this sentence ONLY. Ask them to count the number of words they can hear.

3. Elicit the number of words from students. Play the recording again if they don’t have the same answer. Tell them the correct answer if most of them can get it.

4. Ask the students to draw five lines on their worksheet because there are five words in this sentence (“She says she’s very nervous.”).

5. Play the recording again (perhaps for 2-3 times). Ask students to fill in the gaps.

6. Draw students’ attention to some features (e.g. ‘says’ is pronounced as /sez/, instead of /seɪs/, “she’s” is a contracted form of ‘she is’). Ask students to repeat after the speaker to practise pronunciation. 

            Based on my teaching experience, students usually enjoy this decoding task even though they have to listen to the same clip for a couple of times. They may even treat it as a game especially when it comes to counting the number of words in the sentence.

Summary

• It’s important to teach students how to decode the sounds – recognising and mapping the sounds with the letters, breaking a word into syllables and identifying other features like connected speech.

• We can just focus on a short clip when it comes to listening practice. It doesn’t have to be a very long comprehension task. Make sure it’s a listening lesson, not a vocabulary lesson.

• Sometimes it’s useful to show and analyse the transcript with the students if they come across any difficulties.

References

Field, J. (2008). Listening in the language classroom. Cambridge University Press.

Rost, M. (2001). Listening. In R. Carter & D. Nuncan (Eds), The Cambridge Guide to TESOL (pp.7-13). Cambridge University Press.