Making the case for micro-skill teaching

One of the assumptions we make in our forthcoming book about teaching listening, is that it's possible to analyse all the sub-skills required to listen, then design teaching to enable students to improve their use of these skills to comprehend messages more effectively. Micro-skills include spotting the difference between phonemes such as the /i/ in ship and sheep, recognising how intonation patterns give clues to meaning, being able to segment the sound stream (spot gaps between words) and parse sentences (work out the grammatical structure). Put another way, it's about breaking down the skills involved in listening, then bulding them back up.

J. Wilson looks at this issue in detail in a Chapter called Listening Micro-Skills in the TESOL Encyclopedia of English Language Teaching (2018). He notes that traditionally we have not shied away from analysing micro-skills of speaking, reading and writing, but that listening has been neglected - hence the occasionally used term 'Cinderella skill'.

He gives the example of a student who, when listening to a text, says they don't understand.The teacher replies "Which part don't you understand?" The student identifies a section, the teacher replays the audio and then asks further questions to find out what's causing the problem. The student says that one part just sounds like noise - a flow of sound which can't be broken down. The teacher replays it, then pronounces it slowly, breaking down the noise into clearer speech (without features such as elision or assimilation). The teacher clarifies where the word boundaries are and gradually the student is able to work out what's going on.

That description by Wilson sums up quite neatly what we mean in our book about "teaching listening", rather than just testing it with comprehension exercises. Is there evidence that this approach, if we extended leads to better outcomes and exam grades? Well, not exactly, since from out research no scholarly study has been done over a long term to demonstrate improved performance. However, there has been research in other associated areas, for example into the issue of listening and self-efficacy and anxiety (e.g. by Suzanne Graham at Reading University). Not surprisingly students tend to dislike listening, finding it hard and off-putting, notably since it's too hard and uncontrollable (you can't listen as many times as you'd like). With that in mind, it makes sense to scaffold the process of listening carefully, use accessible texts and do activities which break the process down - practise the micro-skills, if you will. If this means students build up confidence and mastery, they will fear listening less and be more motivated to work at it.

Wilson makes the point that these kinds of activities often focus on quite detailed areas of language and risk being dull, so he recommends, as do we, that they are best done in short bursts as part of your broader listening programme. If they can be made fun, that helps. Wilson sums things up nicely in this quotation:

"Without a focus on either listening strategies or micro-listening skills, listening is something of a zero sum game: either you get it, or you don't. When micro-skills come into play, teachers can probe the reasons for student difficulties and draw up detailed syllabi that focus on the specific challenges of listening in real time."

Reference: Listening Micro-Skills. Chapter from The TESOL Encyclopedia of English Language Teaching (2018).

Our book Breaking the Sound Barrier: Teaching Language Learners How to Listen is out in July on Amazon.