Editorial
For more ideas see Dialogue Activities reviewed by Lindsay Clandfield in HLT December 2008.
Listening Unplugged!
Nick Bilbrough, UK
Nick Bilbrough has been involved in language teaching for nearly twenty years and has taught in three continents in a wide range of different contexts. He now runs teacher development courses, specialising in the use of drama and storytelling techniques, at Horizon Language Training, Totnes, Devon, United Kingdom.
http://www.horizonlanguagetraining.co.uk/
E-mail: nickbilbrough@yahoo.co.uk
Menu
Background
Light on planning and materials
Adaptability
Taskless listening
Visual stimulus and visualisation
Interactivity
A model for output
References
At the time of writing, there is more pre-recorded listening material available to learners of English as a foreign or second language than there has ever been. And by the time that you read this, it is likely that, not only will the amount of material have increased again, but it will also be available in formats which today do not even exist. Here are a few examples of what is now on offer.
- Websites like www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer, where programmes originally broadcast on BBC television and radio may be listened to again and again. (A television license is not required for this service, but TV programmes can only be watched again from within the UK.)
- A huge range of podcasts about every topic under the sun, made by lay people, teachers, and learners of English (see for example http://bardwellroad.podomatic.com)
- Video sharing sites like www.youtube.com and
www.xtranormal.com
- DVDS of nearly 100 years of English language cinema.
- The possibility of finding pretty much any English language song, through a few mouse clicks and a minimal payment on a debit card, at sites like www.apple.com/itunes
- Apart from the CDs and videos which always accompany coursebooks, there is now often workbook related listening material too, and even extra listening materials available on line.
Many of us also have the tools for saving listening material and for listening to it at our leisure, or on the move. Much of this material is available completely freely. For those in rich nations, where unlimited internet access is taken for granted by many, the democraticisation of knowledge, much flouted by the early internet pioneers, would seem to be dawning.
But what about the rest of the world? More than ¾ of the world’s population do not have regular access to the internet. Learners of English in the majority of the world’s classrooms actually have very limited exposure to pre-recorded listening material of any kind. Can listening skills still be developed in these kind of contexts? Of course they can! People were successfully developing their second language listening skills a long time before the advent of the internet, and even well before the idea of coursebook cassettes came into being. In fact they have been doing so since the beginnings of human interaction, in situations where the only material used is the human voice.
On a recent trip to Brazil I was staying at a friend’s flat in a room without any storage space for clothes. Being rather an untidy person, my clothes were placed in disorganised piles all over the floor. Erta, the woman who cleans my friend’s flat, walked in, looked at the mess, looked at me and then the following short exchange took place.
Erta: ‘Quer cabide pra pendurar roupa?
Me: Sim
I didn’t know either the word cabide (which means clothes hanger) or pendurar (which means ‘to hang’) but from the context, and from her look of pity for my lack of both clothes hangers and organizational skills, I understood that she was offering to bring me some. She probably also added the ‘para pendurar roupa’ (to hang your clothes up with) to help clarify the meaning for me because, as she correctly assumed, as a much less advanced speaker of Portuguese, I wouldn’t understand ‘cabite’ without it.
It’s interesting that this simple utterance provided me with a rich opportunity for learning. I was exposed to some language that was more advanced than I could produce myself, but at a level that was still comprehensible. The shared personal investment in the context, for both speaker and listener, helped me to understand, but also encouraged me to pay some attention to linguistic form. Of course, there is nothing particularly remarkable about this kind of thing. It happens on a very regular basis when there is a significant difference in level between two or more speakers of a language, and plays a substantial part in the second language learning that happens in informal, out of class settings. I would also argue, however, that this kind of exposure to language can be a very useful component of listening activities which take place inside the classroom.
Even for those learners with access to the wealth of both on and offline listening material, natural, face to face interaction with more advanced speakers, is still very highly valued as a source of language input. I was once frustrated by a learner in one of my classes who seemed to take an age to get started in the pair work activities I had set up. He always seemed to be writing things down whilst his partner waited for him. What I later discovered was that he was actually writing down bits of language that I had used to explain what they had to do. If learners are using our classroom instructions as input, it seems logical that we should also be exposing them to other, more natural, forms of teacher talk as input too. In many situations we may be the only real speaker of the language that the learners have a chance to talk to. Perhaps we should be starting to prioritise this more interactive form of listening as a positive use of class time, and moving towards setting up more extensive kinds of listening as homework activities. Extensive listening is, after all, like extensive reading, for the most part a solitary experience.
Scott Thornbury, in a recent posting to the dogme discussion group, put it like this.
‘..the classroom is a less than ideal place to get exposure to
audio input (poor acoustics, lockstep listening mode, lack of visual support, no
chance to interact with speaker etc). Technology now allows learners to do their
listenings in the comfort of their own homes, using iPods, headsets, or
whatever. This doesn't absolve the teacher from the need to set listening (and
viewing) tasks, provide material, direct the students to useful sites, check
that they've done their homework etc, just as in the "old days" teachers set
reading and writing homework, and checked it in class.
What it does mean is that the (valuable) classroom time and space can be freed
for what it's most fitted for – the mediated face-to-face talk between the
people in the room’
So, having emphasised the wonders that the digital and technological revolution can bring us for independent learning, I now want to argue for a much more lo-tech approach to developing listening skills within the classroom. An approach not dominated by pre-recorded listening material at all, but based around spontaneous, unscripted and interactive talk between the teacher and the students . This might include telling anecdotes, jokes, and stories, as well as simply chatting and talking about real things which relate to the lives of both the teacher and the learners. These types of activities have become collectively known as Live Listening. Below are some of the advantages of incorporating a healthy amount of them into a language course.
In many of the world’s classrooms, where resources of all kinds are limited, live listening may be the only way in which learners can be exposed to language being used naturally. And teachers everywhere are busy people. Not only are we expected to teach for many hours a week, we also have to plan lessons, produce lesson plans and records of work, and perform a huge range of other administrative duties. If we tell the learners a personal anecdote or a story, we shouldn’t need to spend a long time assessing what difficulties learners may have with the text, and producing materials to go with it. In fact, one of the most effective ways of using live listening, is simply to talk, to ask the learners to discuss what they understood in pairs, and then say the same thing again, asking learners to focus on the language items used. This approach requires nothing in the way of materials or planning.
The material on coursebook CDs is usually designed for the average student in the average classroom. The result may be that no one is offended by it, but perhaps nobody is particularly inspired by it either. When we use live listening we have the chance to talk about topics which we feel will be interesting for the class and, since it is spoken by a real person, who is known to the learners, it will be intrinsically more interesting than the invented lives of characters in a coursebook.
Neither is it likely that coursebooks produced for the global market will use the variety of English which is most suitable for the learners in your classroom. English is being used more and more as a lingua franca. The latest figures suggest that in the majority of conversations which happen in English in the world, neither party would consider themselves to be a native speaker. For how many learners in the world is it useful to be challenged to understand the voices of actors with fake Liverpudlian or Cockney accents, using expressions and idiomatic language which is pretty much only used in Britain? With live listening we’re able to model the form of English which our learners are most likely to need.
The chances of the coursebook hitting the spot in terms of level are also minimal. In my experience of using pre-recorded material, we often end up with students who are either frustrated because the material is too difficult, or bored because the level of challenge is too low. With teacher talk as the source of input, we are able to grade what we say to exactly the right level so that it is comprehensible but still challenging.
On pre-service teacher training courses, new teachers are often encouraged to plan lessons using a task centred approach to developing listening skills. This typically involves starting with creating interest in the topic, pre-teaching any necessary vocabulary that the learners may need, and then setting a series of at least two tasks, the first focusing on the ‘gist’, or global understanding of the material, and later ones asking learners to answer questions which require more detailed understanding. This may provide a certain level of security for teachers and learners, but I doubt whether it really resembles the way in which we listen in the real world, and whether it is always the most useful way of working in terms of providing practice in listening skills. Outside the classroom we do not have somebody saying, ‘Right you’re going to listen to the news. What do you think the newsreader is going to say? Here are a few tricky words that you might not know, and, while you’re listening, could you just try to answer these questions.’ In fact, we probably go through a far less structured process, listening more attentively when something grabs our attention, and beginning to switch off as we lose interest in the topic. Most importantly we are listening with our own agendas in mind, rather than with one imposed from outside.
Of course, classrooms are not the real world, and perhaps we should not be too eager to make them resemble it. One reason for the very existence of language classes is to provide a filter through which the chaos of the world outside can be made sense of, and reflected on. However, if we only ever do listening lessons via the controlled approach outlined above, there is a danger that learners end up seeing classroom listening activities as a test, rather than as both an opportunity for development, and as something to be enjoyed in its own right. When working with coursebook material, I have often felt that some learners seem to switch off when they have answered the questions set by the book -as if the only purpose of listening is to get the right answers. Is this the message we are giving learners when we work in this way?
Bowen and Marks (1994) discuss the importance of, what they call ‘secure listening’ – where learners listen purely for pleasure, without the pressure of having to answer questions - and state that this is an underused activity in many language classrooms. Live listening, because of its emphasis on interesting and personalised content, is the ideal format in which this can happen.
Live listening in many ways replicates the kind of listening that we do in the world outside the classroom. Because it is performed by a real person in front of the learners, the gestures, physicalisation, and other visual clues used by the teacher can all help with the comprehension process. This means that we can expose learners to language at a higher level than we can with coursebook material, and the fact that the language is linked to these visual clues can also help learners to notice and remember it.
There is a difference, however, between the gestures which aid comprehension in live listening, and the spoon feeding of imagery which takes place when learners watch a video or television programme for example. The psychologist, Aric Sigman, has suggested that screen based listening material, like that shown on TV and computers, is far less effective as a trigger for language acquisition, particularly in the very young, since it limits the need for the listener to create their own mental imagery, and thus make language more memorable.
Most people would agree on the importance of grading listening material to make it more accessible for learners. An interesting issue, in terms of language development, is when and how this grading should happen. Most authentic material available on the internet or elsewhere contains no grading at all, making much of it inaccessible to all but the most advanced learners. Coursebook material is graded beforehand to suit the perceived needs of a particular level. As discussed before, this may result in none of the learners’ exact needs being met. Live listening, however, has the potential for being graded in real time, as it occurs, and in response to feedback from the learners. If the teacher gauges that there are problems with comprehension, she is able to make on-line adjustments, by repeating, slowing down, or paraphrasing. The learners are also empowered to ask questions and interact with what is being said – something that is simply not possible with pre-recorded material.
Theresa Pica’s (1987) fascinating research looked into the benefits of interactionally modified, as opposed to pre-modified, input in the language classroom. She concluded that the advantages of grading input in advance were limited, and that if learners had sufficient opportunities to interact with the input, then even quite complex sources could be used.
‘If classroom input is to become optimally comprehensible, it should no longer be the teacher’s sole prerogative to ask questions...All participants in classroom interaction should ask questions, and those questions should seek to clarify and confirm input, thereby making it comprehensible.’
Listening material in the classroom has traditionally been used as a largely passive activity, emphasising the importance of recognition and comprehension of language areas, above production. The distance between the level of the learners and that of the speakers on pre-recorded material is often so great that it tends not to be seen as a model for talk that the learners can produce themselves. I believe that there is a definite place for listening as a model for immediate output, as it promotes activation of new language and provides a real sense of achievement for learners. Live listening, because of the advantages outlined above, fills this void. Here’s a very simple but effective way of organising live listening so that it serves as a model for leaner talk.
- The teacher talks for about a minute about herself. This can be focused around a
particular area of language like likes and dislikes, or past experiences. The
learners listen.
- The learners try to remember and orally reconstruct what was said in pairs.
- They individually prepare to speak about themselves using the same area of
language.
- They tell their partners, who listen and try to remember what is said.
- Partners report back to the speaker, saying what they have remembered.
The strength of this activity is that the texts produced by the learners inhabit the zone between the level of the teacher, and the level of the learners without the teacher’s support; what Vygotsky referred to as the zone of proximal development. By asking learners to reconstruct both the teacher’s text and that of their partner, we push them to process and activate language which may be comprehensible, but not as yet part of their spoken repertoire. In my opinion, if this is happening in the classes that we teach then we going a long way towards meeting the needs of the language learners we are working with. For more examples of activities which run along similar lines please see the final chapter of my book, Dialogue Activities.
Dialogue Activities (CUP 2007) Nick Bilbrough
Mind in Society (Harvard University Press 1978) Lev Vygotsky
Remotely Controlled: How television is damaging our lives (Vermillion 2007) Aric Sigman
The impact of Interaction on Comprehension (TESOL Quarterly 21/4 1987) T. Pica, R. Young and C. Doughty.
Inside Teaching (Macmillan 1994) Tim Bowen and Jonathan Marks
Please check the What’s New in Language Teaching course at Pilgrims website.
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