Theoretical and Practical Aspects of Listening Comprehension
Introduction
Listening is a crucial element in language skills; however, it has received much less emphasis than the other three (reading, writing, and speaking) in foreign language classrooms. Nunan (1997) even calls listening the 'Cinderella skill' because it is overlooked by its 'sister', speaking, despite its critical role in language performance. Herschenhorn (1979) blames the neglect toward listening on the small proportion of listening comprehension sections in language textbooks as well as the lack of available materials specifically developed for and focused on the teaching of listening skills.
It is essential to note that through the normal course of the day, listening is used nearly twice as much as speaking and four to five times as much as reading and writing (Van Duzer, 1997). Therefore, listening should be well acquired and deserves greater attention in language learning.
This article attempts to present a brief overview of listening in theory and in practice as it relates to foreign language learning. The first half of the article discusses the theoretical aspects of listening comprehension, which include factors that influence listening and the nature of the listening processes occurring in learner's mind. This theoretical review serves as the framework of the practical issues explained in the other half. Putting listening into practice refers to the teaching of this skill in EFL (English as a Foreign Language) classes. Concerning the instruction in the classrooms, the types of listening activities that can be done there will be described, followed by some principles which entail consideration from the teacher.
Factors Affecting Listening Comprehension
Listening is often claimed as a passive skill as in the classrooms the learners seem to merely sit quietly and listen to dialogues or spoken texts, trying to decipher meaning. Although the learners appear to be the only one involved in the decoding activity, there are other factors that should be taken into account. Van Duzer (1997) proposes four factors which determine the learners' success in comprehending ideas presented through auditory channel: the listener, the speaker, content, and visual support.
The first one, i.e. the listener, probably holds a central role in the listening process. If she has greater interest in the topic of the dialogues or the spoken texts, she gets more motivated to learn and her comprehension may improve considerably. She often tunes out topics that are not of interest. In addition to interest, background knowledge can also facilitate comprehension. The listener who possesses sufficient knowledge of the topic usually understands the content better than that who does not.
Additionally, the speaker also affects the listener's success in listening comprehension. A speaker's rate of delivery may be too fast, resulting confusion on the part of the listener. She will have difficulties in making sense of an indistinct utterance that sounds like a mumble to her. Consequently, adjusting the speaker's speed to the listener's level is important.
Another factor determining comprehension is content, which is closely related to the aforementioned concept of background knowledge. Content that is familiar is easier to understand. The listener can grasp meaning easily if she has adequate previous knowledge on the subject of the dialogues or the texts she hears. Moreover, the presence of visual support-such as video, pictures, diagrams, gestures, facial expressions and body language-can improve her comprehension provided that she is able to correctly interpret it.
Listening Processes
Basically, listening involves two types of cognitive processing: top-down and bottom-up (Van Duzer, 1997; Nunan, 1997; Norris, 1994). In the top-down processing, the listener actively reconstructs the original meaning of the speaker by utilizing schemata (prior knowledge) of the context and the situation. In this case, context refers to such things as knowledge of the topic, the speaker or speakers, and their relationship to the situation as well as to each other and previous events. She uses all of these to anticipate, predict, and infer meaning on the basis of the decoded sounds as clues.
The bottom-up processing model, on the other hand, views listening as a linear process, from the smallest meaningful units (i.e. phonemes) to complete texts. Thus, the listener decodes a number of phonemes and links them to form words. The words she hears are then combined into phrases, and these phrases are connected to form clauses, which make up sentences. This group of sentences builds a complete text, the meaning of which can be interpreted by the listener by means of her knowledge of grammatical and syntactic rules.
It is generally agreed that these two processes are necessary and work simultaneously. Therefore, in the teaching of listening it is important to include not only bottom-up processing skills such as the ability to discriminate between minimal pairs, recognize stress or identify word boundary, but also top-down processing activity, i.e. using what the learners already know to comprehend what they hear.
Norris (1994) argues that the problem for foreign learners often lies at the phonetic level of bottom-up processing. Usually they fail to figure out some words they hear, probably because of the unfamiliar foreign sounds or the speaker's speed. Cauldwell (1998) claims that some language teachers tend to ignore this problem. They encourage learners not to listen for every word and lay stress on making predictions, guesses, and inferences instead. In other words, they promote top-down activities while neglecting bottom-up ones. Indeed there is some truth in the suggestion against straining for every word: the learners should not concentrate on decoding individual lexical items so much that they fall through apprehending the whole text. However, it has been stated before that top-down and bottom-up do not operate separately. As a matter of fact, both affect listening comprehension, and the absence of one of them may impede the learners' attempt to apprehend the spoken message. Furthermore, Cauldwell (1998) suggests caution in treating this issue. He admits that native speakers do not attend to every word when listening but manage to derive the correct meaning. Nevertheless, this does not mean foreign language learners can do the same since native speakers have great advantages over non-native in terms of both perceptual ability (the ability to perceive sounds) and the ability to guess or predict on the basis of contextual knowledge. As a consequence, listening comprehension exercises should not require learners to simulate native listener behavior in top-down activities without giving them the chance to acquire native-like abilities in perception (bottom-up).
Listening Activities
Knowledge about the factors and the processes of listening comprehension elaborated above may serve as a guide when teachers would like to incorporate listening skills into their EFL classes. Broadly speaking, listening instruction comprises three kinds of activities, namely: pre-listening, while-listening, and post-listening activities (Van Dunkel, 1997).
First of all, the teacher should engage the learners in a pre-listening activity. It aims at establishing the purposes of listening activity and activating the schemata by encouraging the learners to think about and discuss what they already know about the content of the text or the dialogue. It also provides the background needed for them to understand the text or the dialogue and focuses the learners' attention on what to listen for.
The next step that the teacher should do is while-listening activity, in which she gives listening tasks to the learners. There are a variety of activities that can be done in this stage to develop listening skills. The activities listed below are adapted from Lund (1990).
The tasks can be designed in such a way that they combine several types of the above activities to avoid boredom as a result of monotonous exercises. Also, they have to include activities that require the learners to perform both top-down and bottom-up processing. For instance, to develop bottom-up skills the teacher may use 'choosing' by having learners listen to a dialogue consisting of sentences spoken with rising and falling intonation and check column 1 for the rising intonation or column 2 for the falling one. One the other hand, to develop top-down skill she can ask them to get the gist of the exchange.
After completing the while-listening activity, the teacher closes the lesson with post-listening activity by helping the learners evaluate success in carrying out the tasks. She discusses the answer to the exercises with them so that they get feedback about the tasks they have performed. Lastly, she has to try integrating listening with the other language skills.
Some Considerations
To make a listening lesson as effective as possible, the teacher should bear several things in mind. Van Dunkel (1997), for example, suggests that listening should be relevant to the learners' purpose, so that their motivation and attention can be kept high. If they learn English to study in the university, monologues in the form of mini-lectures are the most suitable tasks in the listening class. However, if the learners are bank employees who study English to enable them to communicate with English-speaking customers, the appropriate materials will be dialogues in various banking contexts. Besides relevance, authenticity needs special attention. In order to be authentic, the language presented in the listening materials should reflect real discourse characterized by hesitations, rephrasing and accents. Van Dunkel disagrees to texts or dialogues which are modified or simplified to make it easier for the learners to grasp meaning because this can destroy authenticity. According to her, the difficulty level of the materials can be controlled by the selection of tasks: beginners require simpler tasks than the advanced learners.
She also underlines the necessity of developing both top-down and bottom-up processing skills in listening class. Nunan (1997) adds that the former should be done first, so schema building tasks precedes the listening. The application of the two types of skills is supposed to be supported by the appropriate strategies. Both Van Dunkel and Nunan agree upon the inclusion of the strategies for effective listening-such as predicting, asking for clarification and using non-verbal cues-into the materials.
Finally, the teacher needs to keep in her mind that activities should teach, not test, the learners. The teacher, consequently, should avoid employing activities that tend to focus on memory rather than on the process of listening. She should not simply give practice rather than help them develop listening ability. A good example of such misapplication is having the learners listen to a passage followed by true/false questions. Such a task indicates how much the learners remember rather than helping them develop the skill of determining main idea and details.
All of the principles elaborated above should be taken into account by the teacher prior to presenting listening materials in the class. It does demand careful efforts on the part of the teacher; however, applying those principles in the listening class can ensure the learners' success in listening comprehension.
Conclusion
Listening, which is an essential skill in language learning but often forgotten, is a complicated task involving many variables. The most determining one, namely the listener, have to perform two kinds of cognitive processing in trying to comprehend spoken texts or dialogues. These processes are known as top-down and bottom-up, and surely both should be taken into consideration in selecting the listening materials and conducting classroom activities that meet the needs of the learners.
Bibliography
Cauldwell, Richard T. 1998. Faith, Hope, and Charity: The Vices of Listening Comprehension. The Language Teacher Online, 22(7).
Herschenhorn, S. 1979. Teaching Listening Comprehension Using Live Language; in Celce-Murcia, M. and McIntosh, L. (Eds.), Teaching English as a Second or Foreign Language. Rowley: Newbury House Publishers, Inc.
Lund, R.J. 1990. A Taxonomy for Teaching Second Language Listening. Foreign Language Annals, 23 : 105--115.
Norris, Robert W. 1993. Teaching Reduced Forms: An Aid for Improving Lower-Level Students' Listening Skills. Fukuoka Women's Junior College Studies, 46 : 49--56.
Norris, Robert W. 1994. Keeping up with Native Speaker Speed: An Investigation of Reduced Forms and Deletions in Informal Spoken English. Studies in Comparative Culture, (25) : 72--79.
Nunan, David. 1997. Listening in Language Learning. The Language Teacher Online, 21(9).
Van Duzer, Carol. 1997. Improving ESL Learners' Listening Skills: At the Workplace and Beyond. Washington D.C.: National Clearinghouse for ESL Literacy Education.
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Kusumarasdyati is a lecturer at the Faculty of Letters, 17 Agustus 1945 University, Surabaya.