LEARNING TO LEARN
in their Language B examinations, which had previously been tested‘ implicitly’ under the auspices of other skills.
The importance of listening is therefore impossible to ignore, yet ostensibly remains one of the hardest skills for all students to acquire. The perceived stress and time-boundedness of classroom listening practice so often seems to replicate an exam, which Vandergrift( 2007) describes as an undue weight‘ on the product of listening: the correct answer’. Anecdotally( from what we might call the‘ groan-o-meter’) our department has seen that students often dread this skill and have historically performed less well here in exams. As a result of in-house training, we have implemented strategies to improve students’ listening whilst also reducing anxiety around this essential skill. The approaches outlined below would of course have applications beyond the Modern Languages classroom.
Learning to listen: improving listening skills in modern languages and beyond
Dr Fabienne Cheung, Head of French
Introduction
Picture the scene in the average Modern Languages classroom, unchanged over many decades: Monsieur, Madame, Señor or Professoressa, poised with their finger on the‘ Play’ button; the diligent students, ears craning towards the loudspeaker; the less diligent perfecting a doodle in their margin. The tape begins. The classroom jolts to a start, and by the end of the audio some are dusting off their hands in satisfied glee whilst others ask:‘ Why are they speaking so fast, Miss?’.
Traditional listening activities in Modern Languages still form an essential part of both classroom practice and examination assessment. Indeed, from as recently as 2018, the IB decided to instate a listening component
Why do students find listening so hard?
Research into why students seemingly find listening difficult abounds, particularly in the Modern Languages context. This research has attempted to take account of the way listening is taught, as the key to understanding how teachers can improve our delivery of this skill.
Perhaps the most useful explanation of this comes from languages teacher-researchers such as Conti and Smith( 2019), who have argued that listening was, for too long, taught with majority emphasis on students’‘ top-down’ processing. Here, students apply their existing knowledge of a given scenario( e. g. buying a ticket at a train station) and match their expectations to what they hear on the audio tape. Conti and Smith assert instead that‘ bottomup’ processing must be given more weight. That is, students must be‘ built up’ to listening through activities such as: increasing their phonological awareness; word recognition tasks; metalinguistic preparation; and pre-listening activities. By joining these top-down and bottom-up approaches, students stand not only a better chance of ascertaining what information to isolate to answer a given question, but crucially are taught to learn to listen.
Bloomfield et al( 2010) indicate that‘ ability to understand the phonology of the non-native language’ in addition to‘ background knowledge about the topic’ and the‘ mental state of listeners’ all together influence listening skill. They advise that‘ working memory is likely to impact L2 listening comprehension, and that [ negative ] effects will be particularly strong in conditions that impose additional demands on working memory’. In agreement with Conti and Smith, Bloomfield et al suggest that teaching strategies to support students’ working memory will ultimately lead to higher listening ability and reduces the anxiety which‘ can have a profound effect on listening performance’.
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