As I said to my daughter ‘I’m going to write a blog about how listening isn’t reading’, she said ‘well, obviously.’ But of course there’s a lot more to it than that.
The types of tasks that are set in the language classroom (regardless of target language) might well suggest that listening tasks are identical to reading tasks, with the only difference that the passages are heard by the student rather than read. In my context - teaching French, German and occasionally Spanish to students in an English secondary school, one would be forgiven to assume, therefore, that listening is simply ‘heard reading’. And indeed, the types of passages that my students are exposed to from the exercise books and then in the exams, this is largely the case (a little bit less than it was, perhaps, but still largely the case). The inherent wrongness of this approach is fodder for a different blog post and will no doubt form a thread throughout all the posts on this blog.
So rather than dipping into what on earth resource writers and exam setters are thinking of by testing ‘aural reading’, let’s consider how listening isn’t reading. I’ll include an example from my experience in the classroom, and end with some ideas of classroom exercises that can exploit the nature of actual listening (as opposed to ‘aural reading’).
An illustration to kick us off
Shortly before Christmas I was doing a listening exercise in French with my year 7 students. These were just into their third month of learning French, with about two and a half hours’ a week of learning. We were doing a lovely listening gap-fill exercise, in which students were given the text with a few gaps and had to fill in the words they identified. There was a sentence that read J’ai ____ ans (‘I am ____ years old.’) The students heard ‘j’ai onze ans’. (‘I am 11 years old. / ʒe õz ɑ̃)
I asked around the classroom to find out what they had heard - many were pleased to show off that they had got ‘the right answer’ and had identified the speaker’s age as 11. They had noticed that the gap had required a number, and they were largely familiar with the full sentence as we had learned saying our age with most of them being 11.
One student, A, looked confused, though, and I honed in on her. I asked her what she had heard and she said she had understood j’ai ans ans [ʒe ɑ̃z ɑ̃] - which had confused her. She knew that you couldn’t say ‘I am years years old’ but nonetheless, ‘ans’ is what she got and was stuck with.
I don’t think A would have encountered the same difficulty if this had been a reading passage for several reasons:
She would have had more time to puzzle through her confusing answer, working at her own pace - she would not have had to work at the pace of the auditory input
Seeing the words written out would have allowed her to note the difference between ‘onze’ and ‘ans’
She would have more likely intuited that the gap necessitated a number, so the pool of potential answers would have come from a lexical set of numbers, rather than a lexical set of ‘sounds like [õz]’
A mini-conclusion
A’s response then can show us that listening is not like reading in that…
A reader can control the way they manage the input in a way that a listener just can’t.
When the stimulus is being read rather than heard, it (probably) kicks off different streams of thought (and more probably for L2 beginners and less so for very advanced learners, bilinguals and L1 users). The L2 beginner learner is accessing spelling / written based mental models when reading, and sound-based ones when listening (these get much more blurred as we get more proficient).
Thoughts about classroom practice
My little interaction with A on a Tuesday afternoon in December got me thinking about a few different things. Firstly it illustrated - yet again - how when one is a fluent user of a language, it can be so easy to overlook areas which can cause confusion. To me, ‘j’ai onze ans’ was abundantly clear.
Looking more broadly, then, there is a little series of pedagogical implications which could be applied to a range of classroom experiences beyond the langage lesson:
It shows the importance as a teacher of showing curiosity about how students reached the answers or conclusions that they did. I could have simply said to the class ‘the answer is 11, tick it if you got it right’. A’s work would have probably been blank, and I would have been none the wiser as to her internal struggle.
By actually asking about this, and noticing A’s confused facial expression, I facilitated a moment of metacognition. In other words, A reflected on her learning - she thought about her thinking.It’s quite possible that others in the class had had the same experience too, and that they might have come away from that particular episode feeling slightly less lost as a result.
And all of this really demonstrates the importance of fostering a classroom atmosphere where the teacher is happy to stop the teaching and notice the miniature changes in body language, and foster a positive learning experience where students are open to discussing misconceptions: where a teacher is genuinely curious about the learning experience.
What now, then?
If, like many languages teachers, you find that L2 listening tasks in your classroom are not a satisfying experience for you or the students, start to look at the nature of the tasks. You can look at the input - can they manage it so they have more control over it? Can you play the sentences several times over? Pause and say them back yourself so they at least hear them with a different voice? Pause and get the students to repeat them so they begin to process the input? Listen and read at the same time?
You can also look at the nature of the task related to the input. We are very attached to ‘comprehension’ tasks (and next week’s blog post will be all about the Comprehension Approach) but really ask yourself: what does that give you and what doesn’t it give you. How else could you boost aural understanding as well as assess your students’ understanding? Dictation, paused translation, gapfills, faulty transcripts, paused imitation (stop and get the student to say back what they have heard) are a few ideas which might get you started.
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