Learning To Listen, Listening To Learn

  When we are experienced listeners of a language, we understand what is being said automatically, much the same as when we listen to our first language in optimum conditions (i.e. not with a lot of background noise or distractions). In other words, we move straight from words to meaning without taking a detour. But many beginner listeners of a second language don’t do this; instead, it seems they are furiously scurrying to TRANSLATE everything they have heard into their first language(s). As you can imagine, this has a range of interesting effects.  Some researchers have gone so far as to say that mental translation is ‘a strategy that beginning-level listeners feel compelled’ to use (Vandergrift, Goh, Mareschal, & Tafaghodtari, 2006:450) - it’s hard to tell from this idea of compulsion whether it’s a reflex, or whether it’s more a sense of obligation. My own sense is that a lot of beginner listeners will translate almost automatically, and they can’t help it. After all, ...

  If you want to improve your teaching of listening, it’s a good idea to have a sense of what we know about what goes on between the moment that the message made by a human voice hits your ear drum, until the moment in which you form meaning from it. Anderson, writing in 1990, came up with a ‘three phase model’ consisting of ‘perceptual processing’, ‘parsing’ and ‘utilisation’: in layman’s terms meaning that firstly you recognise the sound as familiar language, then you break the sound into words and chunks, and finally you give meaning to them, and / or act on them in some way. Later, Cutler and Clifton split up the ‘parsing’ section into two: firstly ‘segmenting’ – breaking the up the continuous stream of what you hear into individual words – and secondly ‘recognising’, which is the process of using your mental dictionary to look up the words. Most recently, John Field has been the world expert in second language listening. His book Listening In The Language Classroom (2008) gi...

  When I began my MSc at Oxford in 2015, I never thought my journey would take me to a DPhil, and never imagined that if it did, it would be in the developmental trajectory of listening. Still, the presentation of a single study – Graham & Macaro (2008) – peaked my interest as I saw the relevance of the research questions to my own context as a teacher of French in an English secondary school. A Master’s dissertation about the experiences of listening to French as a lower intermediate English learner (Simpson, 2017) showed me the excitement of trying to grasp what happens in the listener’s mind when they hear French, with all the intriguing nuances that this brings. A rainy evening in the university library at the start of my DPhil. The full-time students have long since gone home, and another paper captures my imagination. For practical reasons I am doing the DPhil part-time, and continuing to work, and want to make a virtue of my part-time status by looking at the progres...