How can we really help learners to

develop their listening skills?

Rachael Roberts, Navigate author

In a famous book for young adults, The Wizard of Earthsea, the central character says, ‘For a word to
be spoken, there must be silence. Before, and after.’ If all words were spoken in this way, with
silence before and after, few students would have any problems with listening comprehension
(though conversations might take rather a long time!).

The problem is that words are, in fact, almost never spoken in isolation. Instead our words run
together in a stream of speech, meaning that what students hear is often very different from what
they might expect.

Most teachers have experience of letting learners look at the audioscript to check something they
didn’t understand and finding that in fact the learners did know all the words in the tricky section –
they simply didn’t understand them when they heard them.

This could be partly because they haven’t understood the context, but it’s more likely to be a
problem with decoding the actual sounds and words, and recognizing the boundaries between
words. For example, the learner who hears ‘in a bit of a mess’ as ‘nabitervermess’ and fails to
recognize the meaning.

Context can, of course, help here. The learners who knows that the audio is about ‘hoarding’ has a
better chance of working out the meaning of this phrase, which is why it is usual practice to set the
scene before listening. However, top down skills can only get us so far. We can’t just keep, as John
Field says, “giving them a text and giving them another text and giving them another text and
checking to see if they got the comprehension questions right or wrong.” We have to help learners
get better at decoding the sounds they hear, from the bottom up.

In the third lesson of every unit of every level of Navigate there is a focus on a bottom up listening or
reading skill. The skill is explained in a box entitled, 'Unlock the Code'. The lesson starts in the usual
way, with a lead in, setting the scene, encouraging prediction and activating schemata, but then
learners focus intensively and thoroughly on the bottom up skill before going on to see how the skill
can help them to understand the text.

In terms of developing listening skills this means focusing on such areas as consonant vowel linking,
weak forms, or how we omit or change sounds at the end of words.

For example, in Unit 10 of level B2, the topic is the so-called fifth taste, ‘umami’ (you can find
Student Book pages and audio at the end of the article). Students use the pictures to lead into a
discussion on different tastes, and make some predictions about the topic. They then listen to a
short extract, and check their predictions. So far, so traditional. But then there is a focus on some of
the features of assimilation – the way that sounds at the end of a word can change to ‘come closer’
to the first sound of the next word. E.g. ‘ten boys’ can sound like ‘tem boys’. The students read (and
listen to) some information on assimilation and then carry out some focused practice. They listen to
some examples of assimilation, write down the words they hear and circle the sound that might
change.

For more like this sign up to Teaching Adults

www.oup.com/elt/teaching-adults
Next they listen to the short extract again and complete a gap-fill. Each gap is an example of
assimilation, so they are really putting their new-found awareness into practice. The students then
listen to the rest of the audio and answer questions, some of which will, again, require them to
understand assimilation.

In this way, students are not just learning to understand this text, but are also learning skills which
will help them to listen better to the next text, and to all texts.

As you can see, in Navigate the work is done for you, with decoding skills carefully built into the
listening (and reading) lessons. However, the kinds of activities we’ve used in Navigate can, with a
little preparation, be applied to any spoken text.

Learners often have difficulties both with identifying where words begin and end and in ‘hearing’
reduced or weak sounds. Try asking learners to count the number of words they hear in a sentence
(contractions count as two words). Alternatively, play or dictate short chunks of language, especially
formulaic chunks, such as ‘What do you mean?’, where the sounds are usually reduced further still,
and ask them to write down the full form.

Get learners to listen to a sentence of two and write down either only the stressed words, or only
the unstressed words. You could divide the class to do both tasks and then compare notes.

Use tools such as tubequizard.com (also short-listed for an ELTON this year) where you can search
YouTube videos for examples of particular features of language that are often pronounced very
weakly (e.g. ‘and’ or ‘of’) and use the tool to make gap-fills.

As a follow up activity to listening, make good use of any transcripts and ask learners to mark main
stresses, the schwa or features of connected speech. Encourage them to listen again while reading,
so that they can see the differences between the spoken form and the written form.

None of these activities are about teaching students to produce all these features, but about raising
awareness of the impact they have on the stream of speech. The effect of students suddenly
realising why they didn't catch what was being said can produce something of a lightbulb moment.
See it happening here in a lesson I taught using Navigate B1, and then go and experiment with
creating your own lightbulb moments in class.

Enjoy the following Student Book pages and audio referenced in the article:

Student Book pages

Audio

For more like this sign up to Teaching Adults

www.oup.com/elt/teaching-adults