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Plenary Paper Presentation 59 TEFLIN International Conference, 6-8 Nov. 2012, Surabaya

Materials and Methods for Extensive Listening

Dr. Willy A. Renandya

National Institute of Education
Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

Abstract
Unlike extensive reading which has been extensively researched, extensive listening
has received relatively scant attention in the L2 listening literature. This is rather
surprising, given the potential language learning benefits of extensive listening on L2
learners language development. These benefits include enhanced word recognition
skills, increased fluency in processing spoken language and improved listening
comprehension skills. Frequent and extensive exposure to listening materials may
also lead to the acquisition and internalization of formulaic expressions, which,
according to SLA researchers, play a key role in the later development of L2 learners
rule-based competence. In this paper, I provide a definition of extensive listening,
discuss the many language learning benefits of extensive listening, outline criteria
for selecting extensive listening materials and offer a number of strategies for
teaching extensive listening in the language classroom.
Keywords: L2 listening comprehension, extensive listening.

1. Introduction
Compared to extensive reading, which has been discussed extensively in the past
20 years or so, its counterpart, extensive listening has received scant attention.
The number of research articles and book chapters on EL is quite small; also no
one has written a book on it. ER on the other hand is a well-established area of
research and the language learning benefits have now been acknowledged by
second language researchers and practitioners alike. Literally hundreds of journal
articles and book chapters which discuss both theoretical and practical issues are
now available and systematically documented (see www.extensivereading.net).

This is rather surprising. If we believe that extensive exposure to language is a pre-

requisite to language acquisition (a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for
language learning), then it makes sense, from both theoretical and practical
perspectives, to provide our learners with extensive exposure to both written and
spoken language via extensive reading and listening respectively. The language
learning impacts of the combined exposure are likely to be more robust and long-
lasting.

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Plenary Paper Presentation 59 TEFLIN International Conference, 6-8 Nov. 2012, Surabaya

2. What is extensive listening?

In a recent article that appeared in the ELT Journal (Renandya & Farrell, 2011), I
define extensive listening as referring to:

... all types of listening activities that allow learners to receive a

lot of comprehensible and enjoyable listening input. These
activities can be teacher-directed dictations or read-alouds or
self-directed listening for pleasure that can be done outside the
classroom. The key consideration here is that learners get to do
a lot of meaningful listening practice. (p. 56)

As can be seen from the above definition, extensive listening can be done as an in-
class or out of class activities, but the important thing to remember is that
students get to do a lot of meaningful listening practice. In order for the students
to be willing to engage in sustained listening practice, the language must be
comprehensible and the contents of the materials interesting and enjoyable. It is
believed that this kind of sustained practice can provide learners with a cognitive
map, i.e., a network of linguistic information from which learners can build up
the necessary knowledge for using the language (Nation & Newton, 2009, p. 38).

In addition, from the perspective of a skill learning theory (e.g., DeKeyser, 2007),
language learning takes a lot of practice. The kind of practice afforded by
extensive listening enables L2 learners to move from the slow and controlled
processing of language elements (e.g., sounds, words, phrases) to the faster, and
automatic processing of these elements. This is particularly important where
lower proficiency learners of English are concerned. While they have acquired
some basic listening skills, their bottom-up processing skill is still at a level that is
not efficient enough to process normal speech. In order to be able to process
spoken language at normal speed, the students bottom-up processing skills will
have to be automatized through repeated practice so that its use becomes fully
spontaneous, effortless, fast, and errorless (DeKeyser, 2007, p. 3). Extensive
listening is well-suited to provide the kind of practice needed to develop this
automaticity in L2 listening.

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Plenary Paper Presentation 59 TEFLIN International Conference, 6-8 Nov. 2012, Surabaya

3. What are the language learning benefits of extensive listening

Extensive listening can improve our students listening comprehension primarily
because it enables them to process spoken language more accurately and fluently.
In a chapter on extensive listening (Renandya, 2011: 32-33), I discuss a number of
language learning benefits associated with extensive listening, some of which I list
below:

It can enhance learners ability to deal with normal speech rate, which for
many beginning L2 learners is perceived to be too fast. Beginning students
often complain about the difficulty of understanding spoken language, not
because the content is difficult or the language is too hard, but because it
is too fast (Renandya, 2012).
It can improve their word recognition skill. Students report that they can
often recognize words in writing, but not in speech. Again, lower
proficiency students seem to have problems recognizing words in speech
and frequent listening practice seems to facilitate the development of
automaticity in sound-script relationships.
It can enhance their bottom-up listening skills, in particular the skills of
recognizing word boundaries. In speech, words often take on different
forms from when they are said in isolation. Speech phenomena such as
assimilation (e.g., in class ing class), contractions (e.g., going to gonna),
resyllabification (e.g., bend it ben dit) are common in speech and known
to cause listening problems to lower proficiency learners.
Finally, extensive listening can give students a lot of opportunities to
experience a high level of language comprehension. What we want our
students to experience is a deeper degree of comprehension when they
listen to spoken text, because it is this type of comprehension that is more
likely to lead to acquisition. There is some research evidence that shows
that repeated listening of the same material (called narrow listening) can
lead to deeper comprehension. Dupuy (1999), for example, found that for
her beginning learners of French as a foreign language, a higher degree of
comprehension (95% and above) is possible only after the third or fourth
listening.

4. How do we select EL materials

At the heart of extensive listening is the selection and use of listening materials.
Without the use of appropriate materials, our L2 learners wont be motivated to
do extensive listening practice. One of the reasons our learners are not interested

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in listening is that the materials are often above their head. They are simply too
hard for our L2 learners.
It should be pointed out that the main goal of extensive listening is to provide our
students with a massive amount of comprehension practice. Ridgway (2000:184)
argues convincingly that our students need to practice listening comprehension,
not listening incomprehension (emphasis added), as is often the case in many
listening lessons in L2 classes. Thus the listening materials should be pitched at
the right level.
For many of our lower proficiency learners of English, the right level often means
easy or easier listening materials. This is because these learners normally have
limited experience listening to spoken language so it seems sensible to give them
a lot of early success experiences in order to build their confidence. Once they
have built up sufficient listening fluency, they can move on and work with the
more challenging material. The key here is that the students should be able to
listen and comprehend the material on their own, ideally without any external
help from the teacher. The use of easier material will ensure that our students
receive large amounts of practice in listening comprehension.
Another key consideration in the selection of extensive listening materials is that
they should be highly interesting and personally meaningful to the students. By
providing a wide selection of listening materials, students will be able to find
listening materials that are both comprehensible and enjoyable.
The following questions can be used as a guide for teachers when choosing
listening materials (adapted from Nation & Newton, 2009 and Waring, 2008):

Criteria Yes No
Is the material personally meaningful to the learners?
Does the material contain interesting information that
attracts the learners attention?
Can the students comprehend over 95-98% of the language
in the material?
Can the students listen and/or view the material without
having to stop and replay the audio or video material?
Can the students understand 90% or more of the content
(the story or information)?
Does the material contain language features (words, phrases,
collocations) that can engage the students attention?

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A yes answer to all these questions would mean that the materials are suitable
for extensive listening activities. A negative answer to these questions means that
the materials are either incomprehensible and/or uninteresting.

5. How do we go about teaching extensive listening?

Because the journey to developing fluency in listening is long and requires many
hours of practice, the listening activities should be enjoyable and fun to do. The
fun factor is of utmost importance here. One of the reasons professional athletes
are willing to spend hundreds, or even thousands, of hours of practice is because
they enjoy what they are doing. Wayne Douglas Gretzky, a retired top ice-hockey
player, famously says: The only way a kid is going to practice is if it is total fun for
him ... and it was for me. (Mindes, 2009).
There are many things we can do to give our students more listening practice in
the classroom. Dictation, for example, can be an enjoyable listening activity in
which, instead of focusing on the writing element, the teacher can productively
engage the students in listening to the same material several times, thus giving
them the needed word recognition or lexical segmentation practice. The students
can first listen to the material read at normal speed and record their level of
comprehension in percentage form (e.g., 60%, 70%). They then listen again to the
material read at slower than normal speed and record their comprehension (e.g.,
80%). This continues until the majority of the students reach 98% - 100%
comprehension, by which time the material must have been heard 5 or 6 times. A
variation of this activity is for the students to do a paired dictation activity, where
the students take turns reading the materials instead of the teacher.

Teacher read-alouds can be a great source of listening activities in the classroom.

The key is to do this regularly so that the impacts of frequent listening can
contribute significantly to the students listening fluency development. Here are
some teacher read-aloud activities:

Listen and Draw activity. This can be a lot of fun to do and provides a lot of
listening practice in the listening classroom. However the listening material should
be such that the chance of the students getting the drawing right the first time
round is minimised. A good listening material for this activity should encourage
the students to listen attentively several times without them feeling bored.

Listen and predict activity. The teacher stops at interesting points in the story and
encourages the students to predict what will happen next. This technique
supports learner thinking and helps learners to think ahead and predict the

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contents of the next portion of the story. This is an important skill that good
listeners use to enhance their comprehension.
Tell and check activity. The students are paired up and assigned as either a teller
or a checker. The teacher reads aloud a section of the story and asks the teller to
retell that portion of the story to the checker. The checker checks if the teller has
included all the relevant details. This technique keeps the students on task when
listening to the story as they have to do the telling and checking afterward. The
telling and checking can be done in either English or in the pupils first language.
To increase the amount of meaningful listening practice, the teacher can motivate
the students to engage in narrow listening or viewing of audio and video materials
outside the classroom. Narrow listening or viewing refers listening or viewing
materials of the same or similar genre. The key language learning benefit of
narrow listening is that the students get to encounter similar language (words,
idiomatic expressions, grammatical structures and other text features) repeatedly.
Popular TV series are examples of materials for narrow viewing. Anecdotal
evidence suggests that language learners who regularly watch popular sitcoms
(e.g., Friends, Monk), often with the English subtitles turned on to facilitate
comprehension, seem to develop a higher level of listening skills than those who
do not.

6. Conclusion
Many learners of English, especially those with lower proficiency levels in the
language, find that of all the skill areas of English, listening seems to be the most
difficult for them (Thorn, 2009). One of the reasons for this is that to them, the
spoken language seems like a wave of sounds without borderlines (Hulstijn,
2003: p.413). Words tend to blend with the surrounding words, thus blurring the
boundaries between words. On top of that, speech is fast and has to be processed
in real time, thus compounding the levels of difficulty in listening. Extensive
listening seems to be well-suited to help our learners develop familiarity with the
features of speech, which in turn may help them comprehend spoken language
with ease and accuracy.

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7. References

DeKeyser, R. M. (2007). Introduction: Situating the concept of practice. In R.M.

DeKeyser (ed.), Practice in a second language: Perspectives from applied
linguistics and cognitive psychology (Pp 1-18). Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Dupuy, B. C. (1999). Narrow listening: An alternative way to develop and enhance
listening comprehension in students of French as a foreign language. System,
27, 351-361.
Hulstijn, J.H. (2003) Connectionist models of language processing and the training
of listening skills with the aid of multimedia software. Computer Assisted
Language Learnng, 16 (5), pp.413-425
Mindes, M. (2009). Be Exceptional Wisdom from the quotes of Wayne Gretzky.
http://michaelmindes.com/wisdom-wayne-gretzky-quotes. Accessed 29
March 2012
Nation, I. S. P., & Newton, J. (2009). Teaching ESL/EFL listening and speaking. New
York: Routledge.
Renandya, W. A., & Farrell, T.S.C. (2011). Teacher, the tape is too fast: Extensive
listening in ELT. ELT Journal, 65 (1), 52-59.
Renandya, W.A. (2011). Extensive listening in the second language classroom. In
Widodo, H.P., & Cirocki, A. (Eds.), Innovation and Creativity in ELT
Methodology (pp. 28-41). New York: Nova Science Publishers.
Renandya, W.A. (2012). The tape is too fast. Modern English Teacher, 21(3), 5-9.
Ridgway, T. (2000). Listening strategiesI beg your pardon? ELT Journal, 54, 179-
185.
Thorn, S. (2009) Mining Listening Texts. Modern English Teacher, 18 (2), pp.5-13.
Waring, R. (2008). Starting extensive listening. Extensive Reading in Japan, 1(1), 7-
9.