I posted a while ago about Dr Kedi Simpson's PhD thesis on listening in which she followed the progress of students in her high school in England at Key Stage 3 (age 11-14, working at A1 to A2 level). One key takeway for me was the degree to which students mishear simple utterances, for example interpreting what they hear coloured by their English phonological system. An example I recall is a student interpreting "bouteille d'eau" in French (bottle of water) as "potato". A second takeway from the thesis was, for me, that it's worth spending time asking students what they think they are hearing, to find out what's causing confusion. Is it simple lack of vocabulary knowledge? Mistaking words for English words? Being confused between similar-sounding target language words? Missing grammatical details which can alter meaning (see this post by Gianfranco)? Latching on to one or two words they understand and guessing the meaning of a whole utterance?
Her research method involved having students write down English translations of sentences. This immediately exposes both success and failure to interpret meaning. This is something teachers could spend more time doing in class. Instead of doing comprehension-style tasks such as true/false, tick the right sentences and questions in English, you could simply read aloud or play short sentences and ask students to write down (or say) what they heard. (Write down is better since all students have to commit to being active.) After students have written down their answer, they can feed back what they wrote then look at the written transcription on the board.
This serves a few purposes.
- The teacher gets immediate feedback on what is causing a breakdown. Is it not knowing a word? Knowing the word but not recognising it? Misinterpreting the word for another word in the target language or English? Misinterpreting a grammatical element such as a verb ending or pronoun?For less experienced teachers who may pitch the difficulty level too high, they would get this feedback, allowing them to adjust input. generally students understand less than we imagine.
- The student gets quick feedback, enabling them to see the detail of each utterance and what gave them a problem.
- It get students involved in metacognitive thinking. Why was that easy? Why was that hard? What was the blockage to understanding? How could I come up with alternatives rather than just going for my first hypothesis?
- It gets students to process the detail of language, including grammatical cues such as morphemes (verb endings, suffixes and prefixes, agreements). Thorough processing of language is likely to lead to better long-term acquisition as students build up their listening micro-skills.
- Because each utterance is short, students' minds are less likely to wander. Listening is careful and intensive.
- Students are kept busy, with everyone having to write down what they think they heard. When lesson planning an important factor to keep in mind is always whether ALL students are involved in processing or interacting with input.
Perhaps you can think of other advantages. Another from a practical teacher's perspective is that instant translation requires little or no preparation — a worthy consideration for busy teachers.
Incidentally, you might be thinking that dictation is another way of discovering what students are hearing. Two issues here: first, many students find dictation hard (especially in an orthographically opaque language like French) and their self-efficacy can quickly suffer if they have to write an accurate transcription — dictation requires complex processing involving comprehension, phonics knowledge and written accuracy. Second, dictation does not ensure that students have actually understood the message.
Any downsides to this sort of instant translation? Well, to me this feels like an occasional activity, maybe one inserted now and again in a lesson or lesson sequence, perhaps in short bursts. It is not communicative in the generally accepted sense of the word and I would always be looking to maximise input + interaction as far as possible. For less experienced teachers who may pitch the difficulty level too high, they would get the feedback mentioned above, allowng them to adjust input. Some teachers may even balk at using translation at all, if they adhere to a target language-only or 90% target language methodology. Some may also feel that this sort of activity is not fun and too passive — I would counter that not everything has to be fun and that careful listening is far from passive.
I would also add that it may be less useful for high-flying linguists whose comprehension and processing of detail is already fluent.
All of this sits within the framework of the process approach to listening (what Gianfranco and I call Listening-as-Modelling (LAM) — based on Field (2008). Kedi's thesis was also influenced by this approach. The process approach is about helping learners develop the skills needed to recognise words, decode sounds, and interpret meaning step by step. It stands in contrast to the comprehension approach or product approach. The two approaches are summarised below.
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Process approach = teachers design activities that train specific listening micro-skills, such as:
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decoding connected speech (e.g., weak forms, contractions, elision)
decoding individual phonemes and syllables
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recognising the boundaries between words, for example through prosody
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focusing on lexical retrieval and grammatical parsing
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building meaning progressively instead of focusing only on the final answer.
Traditional product approach = learners listen to a text, answer comprehension questions, and check if they got the “right answers.” This shows what they understood (the product), but it doesn’t help them improve the skills of listening.
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