The Comprehension Approach

 ‘Now, class, we’re going to do some listening. Everyone quiet’. The teacher shares a task - perhaps a series of questions to answer, perhaps a series of statements to which the student needs to dichotomise (true / false. Positive / negative. Bob / Katie). Then the teacher presses play on their device, and students listen - probably twice - and note down answers. 

Finally the teacher recaps. Some might simply give the ‘answers’ (more later on why this is in inverted commas), others might elicit answers from students in various ways. Some might ask the students to note a mark out of five in their books. And then we move on to another task (frequently a speaking exercise in which the students are asked to produce output similar to what they have just heard.)

This is a scenario played out in language lessons across the world. It’s what John Field calls ‘The Comprehension Approach’ in his 2008 book Listening in the Language Classroom. (An aside. It’s a brilliant book, rigorously researched but never stuffy or difficult to understand. Every languages department should own a copy).  

And what has gone on in this scenario? Has any member of the class been taught anything? Field would say no - he would say that what has happened here is that understanding has been tested. There is minimal teaching or learning going on.

 Assumptions made by the Comprehension Approach

A teacher, or a course, or course-book who repeatedly uses this approach to listening in the classroom is probably guided by years of practice. As a teacher-educator I see new teachers falling into this approach because this is what they are encouraged to do by their classroom mentors, in observations, and in following any number of course-books. The approach is entrenched, and there is little time in the teacher’s schedule to really consider what it achieves. It’s the way we’ve always done it. The resources are made for us. Easy peasy.

 However, all that’s really happening is that the students are getting one text after another - quick show of hands who got the ‘right answer’, OK kids, here are the right answers, write them in in green pen if you didn’t get them. Rinse and repeat. And where in productive skills (ie speaking and writing) we might break down exactly what we do to make progress, achieve more highly next time around, by taking the Comprehension Approach to listening, the underpinning idea is simply: ‘the more you do it, the better you get at it, but you don’t need any additional instruction.’

 Oh, but there’s progression! You might argue. At the start of year 7 the student is hearing a series of people talk about their brothers and sisters very simply; by year 11 the student is hearing longer, more complex texts about the same characters including a range of tenses and opinions. Over to John Field on this point:

 

 ‘This smacks of an obstacle race in which the organiser keeps raising the height of the barriers without ever showing the runners how to get over them. As the barriers get higher, some listeners will find their own way of dealing with the increased challenge; others will simply decide that what is being demanded of them is too difficult and withdraw their cooperation.’ (Listening In The Language Classroom 2008 p29)

 The Right answer

Think back to the last time you ‘did’ (note, not taught!) a listening passage in the classroom. Did a student who got all the ‘answers right’ really show that they were good at listening? What about a student who got the ‘answers wrong’? Did they fail to understand the passage? Below are the first two questions in the new GCSE French sample 1 listening paper from AQA:

 

Come up with the answers now! Go on, guess! No, I’m not going to give you the link to the audio, or even the transcript, because yes, I’m driving home a point. The answers for both were B. If you had chosen B at random just now, of course that didn’t mean you had full 100% understand of what you had heard, because you didn’t even hear the thing. So comprehension is clearly not really being tested, or assessed, or even taught, by this beloved approach

 By teaching listening like this, we drive home an idea that answers are right or wrong. It might give us the most superficial of impressions on a student’s listening skills, but it sure doesn’t tell us how they came to this answer, or where they find listening difficult. In my PhD I had four case studies, and all talked about the idea of getting listening ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. Ryan was a student with additional educational needs who struggled a lot with French, and for whom, in fact, I could not statistically show any progress from the start of year 7 to the end of year 9. (I did manage to show some progress qualitatively). In an interview I had with him a little way into year 8, we had the following exchange: 

 Me: Let’s imagine Mrs A has said ‘OK, we’re going to do a listening now’, we’ll look at page 12 exercise 2. And then she’s about to press play on the machine...

Ryan: I’m… when I look at the page before she presses it, I already know the answers.

Me:  So how do you already know the answers before she’s played the track? 

Ryan: Because the first time I look at the page it just comes into my head. Well most of the time I know them. 

Me: So you sort of make up the answers?

Ryan: Yeah. Most of the time they’re correct. For some weird, weird reason. And I’ve never missed one wrong. All the time we’ve done listening in year 7 and year 8. I’ve always got them all right. Not one wrong. 

 By contrast, Helen was an academically able student. Yet even in year 7 she was preoccupied with the idea of ‘I need to get it right’. Fran told me ‘you had better get it right or people will judge you. And only Theo, probably the most academically proficient student in my cohort of 80, was the only one who, half way through year 9, had begun to pick up on an inadequacy of the Comprehension Approach, telling me, ‘now I’m listening so I can learn and improve, compared to listening to get a right answer. I’m taking in more things.’

 Is there any hope for the Comprehension Approach?

Yes, probably. Field says that it has its place - in terms of allowing the student plenty of exposure to hearing the target language, with a range of voices, types of text and various levels of authenticity. He also says, perhaps cynically, that it ‘enables students to pass exams’, acknowledging that most exams do take a Comprehension Approach because it’s a reliable testing system (even if I’ve shown above that it might not be particularly valid as a teaching approach). Look out for a future blog on what is being done to shift the paradigm on this, and what further should be done, and what we can do.

 What now, then?

If you are a languages teacher, by all means carry on with the Comprehension Approach, but bear in mind that what you are doing is simply testing listening - and probably placing those obstacles in ever more difficult spots. So…

1. If you do only do Comprehension Approach type listening, consider hard how you deal with the feedback element of the task. ‘Hands up if you got 5/5’ really isn’t going to cut it. Probe your students - how did you come to that answer. How many people guessed? What other tactics did we use to come to the various answers? Share ideas around strategy, so that the next time you do a Comprehension Approach listening, you can come back to those strategies and begin to teach listening rather than just testing it. 
2. Look at different approaches to listening that don’t involve comprehension questions. I have already written about paused translation or paused transcription (in other words, dictation). Stop a passage and get all the students to write on a mini-whiteboard the last three words they heard - use this as a ‘hinge’ moment in the lesson to see where it takes you next depending on what you see. Explore minimal pairs (where two words sound very similar and might catch you out - eg in French ‘j’ai douze ans / j’ai dix ans’). Give students a ‘faulty echo’ (idea courtesy of Gianfranco Conti and Steve Smith) where they hear the same sentence twice but with one change in it: can they detect it?
3. Consider use of more interactive listening-and-speaking together in a communicative approach - look out for a future blog on listening in the context of conversation.

 A final word

Students very often say that listening is the hardest of the four skills. But perhaps this is partly because as a profession we’ve unthinkingly perpetuated a way of doing listening in the classroom without ever actually teaching it? We are beginning to move away from this, but a  lot more needs to be done before we can put our learners in a position where they are given the chance not to find it so hard. Let’s stop just raising the hurdles and begin instead to think about how to teach our students to get over these obstacles with confidence and ease.