Gianfranco and I have both felt for many years that listening is the most neglected skill in many language classrooms. Listening is as natural as walking and talking for humans and should, we believe, be an integral part of every teacher's curriculum plan. Far from being a passive skill, it involves complex mental processes and skills which can be deliberately developed and practised. Having both read John Field's seminal work Teaching Listening in the Languages Classroom (2008) we decided we could marry the principles of that book with more practical classroom implementation, especially for modern language teachers. No other book has done this. For over a year we have been reading as much as possible, assembling ideas, writing, proofing and editing. My wife Elspeth Jones acted as proof-reader, editor and formatter, ensuring the text makes sense for our intended readership. This is not intended primarily as a scholarly work for academic researchers, but as a handbook for teachers written by teachers.
John Field believes, along with other writers, that to teach listening better we need to break down what the skill consists of into "micro-skills", then design tasks which develop each of these skills, in order to make students feel much more confident about the process. So it's about breaking listening down and building it up again. Traditionally, listening is a classroom activity which pupils don't enjoy that much. "Is this a test?" they often say. It frequently makes them anxious, and overly hard exam listening tests don't help. In addition, text books tend to focus on comprehension exercises which often encourage superficial listening and a degree of guesswork. So the emphasis is on correct answers, or. as Field puts it, product not process. Pupils do an exercise, get a mark and move on, without being able to carefully process the language, in essence working on listening in enough detail. So our book moves away from a comprehension model of listening, to a process model.
Our book examines the micro-skills John Field describes, e.g. phonological decoding, lexical retrieval, grammatical parsing and meaning making. We then describe many activities which help develop these micro-skills. There are separate chapters therefore on phonology/phonics, lexical retrieval and using grammatical knowledge to make meaning. Anxious for the book to be balanced, we describe some more mainstream communicative activities and tasks which put the emphasis on listening. So there are chapters entitles Interpersonal listening and Task-based listening, along side those focusing on sounds, lexis and grammar.
Furthermore we examine the issue of using strategies to help with the listening process, as well assessment issues. There are also two chapters which look in detail how activities of the book can be applied in actual lesson sequences and when applied to using songs. Our final chapter suggests how language departments might go about developing their focus on listening. Chapters usually begin with some research background, followed by clearly described numerous classroom tasks. Examples are in English, French, Spanish, German and Italian. All are adaptable to any language.
When putting together the index of the book, it was interesting to see which words and phrases came up most. "Comprehensible input" featured most often, and it's true that the activities we suggest are firmly rooted in the notion that we acquire languages best when we are exposed and can interact with meaningful language - language we understand. But the book is also strongly rooted in the tradition of skill theory, which claims that we can can better at things by having them explained then practising them repeatedly in an engaging manner. Micro-skills, we argue, can be practised and automatised.
By the way, it's hard to write about listening without referring to general language acquisition issues, so we have made a point of explaining some key concepts such as skill theory, comprehensible input, memory, cognitive load, dual coding theory, interaction and input processing. We have also been at pains to include specific advice about preparing students for examinations and helping them develop their cognitive and metacognitive strategies to maximise their existing knowledge.
We could easily have called our book "Interactive Listening" since nearly all the tasks described involve both listening to and speaking with others, or listening plus other skills. We stress how important it is when planning to integrate the four language skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing. Our book is one you can dip into or read end to end and is aimed mainly at modern language teachers working in secondary schools, teaching pupils up to intermediate level (GCSE in England, A2/B1, using the CEFR). English language teachers (ESL) will also find lots to interest them. We hope it will become a go-to text for teachers in training.
Do go and have a look! We believe teachers and their students will derive great benefit from many of the activities we suggest. The book would make a useful addition to any personal or departmental library. Look out for the odd extract from the book to appear on this blog in coming weeks.
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