8.5. Major premises and conditions for effective teaching listening

8.5.1. Major premises for listening

Listening to a language involves participation – not in the classroom sense of answering questions, but in the ‘real world’ sense of dealing with the message received. Spoken language is not understood in isolation. The listener is actively involved in the communication process and understanding is, therefore, not a purely receptive process (Anokhin’s Theory of a Recipient’s Active Involvement).

The listener is engaged in anticipating what the speaker’s going to say and constantly checks and readjusts his predictions as the speaker provides him with further clues. If a flow of speech were cut off in the middle of a sentence, the listener could make a reasonable guess about the remainder of the utterance. It follows then, that in the classroom pupils should be encouraged to develop their sense of anticipation in order to prepare for using the language in the real world. This could be done by stopping a tape/reading in mid-flow and asking the students to guess what is coming next.

In the real world, people usually have a purpose in listening to something, for example, they may switch on the radio to listen to the weather report because they want to go out somewhere, or they may want to check the time. If we are listening to the news and we want to know about the condition of the roads, we will first listen, then identify and reject those items we are not interested in. Students can be given tasks, which involve selecting and rejecting information. It is particularly important, however, to make sure that we always give students a reason for listening. Setting a pre-question could do this. Assessing the attitude of a speaker might be an alternative goal of the listening, as might be the relationship between speakers.

Although it should be made clear to students that you do not expect them to understand every word, it is useful if they can understand or recognise signal devices. Signal devices are built into the spoken (and written) language. They alert the listener to a change in the content. They may indicate an end of a long continuous flow of speech (in conclusion…; I’d like to finish with…) or review the points made and draw a speech to an end (by way of summary…; to sum up…). They may indicate a continuation of the same opinion, or a supporting fact (moreover, furthermore, also, another point is…). The attitude of the speaker can often be inferred through the use of modal verbs (it would seem that…; it could be that…) or through more overt phrases (in my opinion…; I think that…; I believe that…; my guess/feeling is…). Although the devices mentioned above may be peculiar to certain types of listening text, they form a framework for the information to hang on. Whenever there is a switch of focus, an introduction of new ideas, the listener is made aware by such devices that what follows will be similar, different, related, unrelated etc. to what has gone before.

8.5.2. Conditions for effective listening

There are factors that strongly influence listening as a skill. The skill of listening is based on short-term memory, direction of attention, emotional colouring of speech, language input, speech habits, linguistic apprehension, context peculiarities, tempo, duration of the text and other characteristics.

1) Short-term memory plays an important role in oral perception. Its importance is preconditioned by the irreversibility of perception and relatively short time of remembering things we’ve been listening to. Short-term memory performs the task of keeping in store signals of speech, which compose an utterance. Listening to oral speech we keep words and phrases in our memory for some minimal time (approximately about a couple of seconds) so that to be able to interpret them and to comprehend the meaning of the heard. Numerous research show that at an early stage of learning English students can produce a phrase of not more than 6 notional words.

2) Direction of attention. Listening directly depends on the student’s ability to concentrate his attention on what is being said for a certain period. This necessity is called a span of attention. A steady span of attention is needed for correct reception and understanding of a listening text. It’s common knowledge among psychologists that youngsters have a far better span of attention than junior school children. Their attention is more intensive, concentrated and consolidated that the one of juniors’. The more cognitive interest of students is, the higher the degree of stability of their attention becomes. Thus, the main condition for students’ strained attention is an interesting plot of a listening narrative text corresponding to a certain age group requests and expectations. Students’ desire to understand an interesting plot of a narrative text activates their psychics, gives way to voluntary attention and makes listening easy.

3) Emotional colouring of an utterance influences the quality of listening. It wins the exchange because it arouses the listener’s emotional response. Everything experienced emotionally is remembered far better by a listener, remains longer in his memory and influences the formation of his attitude. Many researchers point out the dependency of the degree of understanding and memorising on an emotional condition of students. Everything that causes positive emotions is acquired and stored up far better.

Success in listening much depends on the language input of an utterance. Listening is a complex creative skill. It can only operate under the condition of the needed speech habits being formed. Such habits are phonetic, lexical and grammatical.

4) The phonetic aspect of a listening speech habit includes operations of perception and identification of separate sounds and their combinations in the flow of speech. It’s also true of various intonation contours of a language. With sounds, the main difficulty for our students lies in differentiating mainly seemingly identical sounds of the target language in the flow of speech, i.e. the problem of intralanguage interference. For example: [θ-s]; [θ-f]; [s-z]; [w-v]; [ð-z]; [ð-v]; [n-ŋ]; [t-t_]; [dr-d₃]; [-כ]; [:-כ:]; [:-]; [æ-e]; [כ:-∂:]; [כ:-כ]; [i:-i]; [u:-u].

Mother tongue interference is less than intralanguage interference in listening. Still it is not an easy task for our students to discriminate between words in the target language, which are similar in their sound form (sink – think; chick – cheek; pot – port; worked – walked; first – fast – forced etc.) All this, alongside with such phenomena as assimilation, linking and reduction of the quality of sounds in the flow of speech, leads to misinterpretation and miscomprehension.

No less important is the degree of development of intonation hearing. If intonation hearing is not developed to a sufficient extent, then it can also lead to misinterpreting a speaker’s communicative intentions.

5) The lexical aspect of a listening speech habit has its own difficulties too. These difficulties are revealed in identification of sounding images of lexical items and their immediate comprehension. While listening our students’ comprehension of oral English speech can be misinterpreted. And the reasons for miscomprehension are mainly:

• homophones (write – right, see – sea);

• conversed words (There’s water in the jug. – Water the flowers!);

• verbs with postpositions (take off; go in for; bear up under = endure; drop out of = leave/quit; fall behind in = cover the distance between oneself and the goal);

• phrasal prepositions (at sight of; by dint of = By dint of hard work he caught up with his work; in compliance with = In compliance with your request the lock has been put on your door);

• adjectives with ‘that clauses’ (amazed that; aware that; delighted that; surprised that = I’m surprised that you did that);

• adjectives with infinitives (amazed to, happy to, annoyed to, surprised to = I’m surprised to hear that);

• adjectives with prepositions and nouns or pronouns (slow at, in favour of, inclined toward, surprised at = I’m surprised at that/you).

• Unknown proper names, realia, geographical names, numerals indicating dates are difficult for comprehension as well.

In case of the grammatical aspect of a listening speech habit, main difficulties concern identifying grammar forms and anticipating grammar structures. These difficulties are caused by the analytical character of the English language, presence of grammatical homophones (a milkman – milkmen, a student’s – students’ – students), contracted grammar forms (I’ve done, you’d’ve come, there’s milk), phrases ending in prepositions (What are you thinking of? Cross them out!).

Specific linguistic difficulties could be got over while performing exercises, which prepare students for oral perception of English.

6) Under the programme in foreign languages for secondary school, listening texts should be mainly based on the acquired language input. It is regarded conceivable to include a small number of unknown words into listening texts. It is only those words the meaning of which could be easily guessed from the context, or due to the consonance with words in the mother tongue, or by familiar word-building elements. Unknown words the meaning of which could be easily derived from the main content of a listening text are also conceivable. The unfamiliar words the meaning of which could be guessed from the content of a listening text compose our students’ potential vocabulary.

The realisation of linguistic apprehension is influenced with either agreement or disagreement of stress and a stressed vowel in corresponding Russian and English words, their length. The longer the word is, the higher the degree of exactness of identification will be. Thus, 1-syllable words are comprehended correctly in 12.5% of instances, while 6-syllable words are better understood in 40.6% of instances. The degree of exactness in recognising 2-syllable words is 30% higher than that of 1-syllable words. 3-syllable words are 50% easier for recognition than 1-syllable ones. Words beginning with a consonant are perceived 10% better than words with an initial vowel. Words, stressed on the last syllable, are perceived 20% better than those with the first stressed syllable. The most essential support for recognising sound images of multisyllable words is provided by consonants. If the difference in sound images of words is great, then language apprehension is hard to access, as, for example, in the words like ‘process, melody, storm’. Such words as ‘business, focus, correspondent, acrobatics, parachute, planet, mechanism’ are easy for oral comprehension. These words are significantly similar in their consonant structure in both languages and differ slightly only in separate vowels and sometimes consonants.

7) A human’s auditory system orientates itself flexibly. Many signs of a sound signal guide it. These indications of a signal play a decisive role in sound processing. The level of the perceived sound signals determines the process of perception of verbal sounds. Such levels can be phonetic, syntactic and semantic. In this regard, the higher level is determinant. Perceiving isolated syllables and words, a listener is guided by their phonetic characteristics. At the same time, phonetic characteristics move back, giving way to syntactical dependencies, while our listener is perceiving word-combinations. To perceive word-combinations the listener utilises syntactical connections between words. He uses syntactical connections for reconstructing the destroyed parts of an utterance. If we dismiss lexical-grammatical characteristics of a word-combination and concentrate only on the syntactical characteristics, it will turn out that the listener in his perception in the first instance depends on the concord, agreement, then – on the government, and finally – on the adjoining.

With transition to the perception of phrases, a listener begins utilising a complex grammatical structure of the whole sentence, not its separate elements.

8) The unfamiliar word surrounding (the so-called phonetic and grammatical peculiarities of context) can be favourable, neutral and unfavourable. These peculiarities are vital for the realisation of linguistic apprehension. No less important is the degree of dispersion of unfamiliar words in the passage, as well as the position of an unfamiliar word in a period. Listening texts are easy for comprehension if there are no unknown words at the beginning/end of the text and if unknown words are evenly dispersed in the rest of the text.

9) The skill of predictability (anticipation) plays a significant role too. While listening to a text, our students’ anticipation is often based on fantasy and conjecture of the misunderstood facts. This can be helped with giving the students a task before listening. The instruction directs and concentrates a listener’s attention on the task set, motivating the process of perception itself (e.g.: Listen to a story about exciting adventures of a little boy. Try to understand what made him do the thing described in the text). Teaching listening is more effective if students listen to something new, unknown to them. If the text resembles them something they already know or reminds them of something familiar in their mother tongue, then it usually leads to misinterpretation of the facts and, as a result, to conjecture.

10) The composition of listening texts, particularly at the junior stage, should be simple. It should have one main plot line with a small number of characters. It should not be an extended description. The fewer there are the author’s digressions, the better.

11) The duration of listening texts can slightly overlap syllabus requirements, up to 8-10 minutes sometimes. The tempo of utterances can vary from very slow (90 w/min) up to 160 w/min. The main request here is: the tempo of listening should coincide with the tempo of speaking. Pauses are used to slow the tempo of speech down. Pauses should be used between meaningful segments of discourse, at least between syntagms. It seems to be reasonable because of two factors. Firstly, in real life communication, pauses take the load of 30% of all speaking time; one third of all pauses are not less than 2 seconds. Pauses are not simply the moments of silence, but of uttering delay words as well. Thus, the second factor is as follows: pauses help giving time for anticipation of the preceding part of the utterance and for putting forward further predictions.

12) The number of times we should give listening is another influential thing. We should try to make our students comprehend an utterance at a single presentation. If more than 30% of the text is not understood, then another attempt has to be given. This time a communicative task has to be different. It should help the students deduce the misunderstood information. The 2^nd listening usually adds up 16%. As for the third session, it is only 6% plus and is practically of no use.

13) The rational succession of listening texts presentation in school is as follows:

1. a teacher’s story based on illustrative visual aids (a picture, a slide);

2. a teacher’s story without illustrative visual aids;

3. reading a text by a teacher and using visual illustrative aids;

4. reading a text by a teacher without visual illustrative aids;

5. a teacher’s storytelling escorted with a moving slide demonstration or a film

strip demonstration;

6. a sound film demonstration;

7. listening to a phonogram.