BACKGROUND(Listening)

 

Listening

 

◈ THE LISTENING PROCESS: RELEVANT BACKGROUND AND RESEARCH 

▣ BACKGROUND 

■ In the early 1980s, it was popular to assume that only top-down skills needed to be enhanced to improve L2 listening comprehension. However, it is now more generally acknowledged (cf. Peterson, 1991) that both top-down and bottom-up listening skills should be integrated and explicitly treated pedagogically to improve L2 listening comprehension. 



■ We can see that many factors related to the L2 listener are relevant to his/her success or failure: among these are the learner's language learning experience, i.e., L2 proficiency in general and L2 listening ability in particular, including experiences with listening to a variety of speakers who have different accents and who speak different dialects while engaging in a variety of speech situations. This exposes learners to the reality of language variation. Also relevant are factors such as the listener's prior knowledge, the listener's memory and attention, and his/her general problem-solving ability (i.e., the ability to come up with the best interpretation out of several possible ones in a given context as well as an ability to predict what might come next or later in a given instance of oral discourse.)



■ We must also consider the compensatory strategies and communication strategies, which good L2 listeners have and which weak ones lack: strategies such as asking questions of one's interlocutor, getting the other speaker to slow down, tape recording, and relistening to a lecture, watching a movie a second or third time, and various other strategies. In ongoing conversations, good listeners can recognize a problem and alert the interlocutor appropriately if they have not processed the input well enough to interpret; they are thus in a position to negotiate a repetition and clarification. Implementing such strategies helps the listener whose listening comprehension is not yet native-like, and thus such strategies should be part of oral skills training. 



■ There are also situation-specific factors external to the listener: the quality of the acoustic signal and the amount of background noise. Similarly, there are nonlinguistic situation-specific factors such as room temperature, distractions, or being in a test-taking situation, and listener-internal factors such as lack of interest in the speaker or topic, lack of attention, etc. In any given situation, these factors may impair listening comprehension, which is something complex, dynamic, and somewhat fragile to begin with because of the transitory nonpermanent nature of the speech signal. 



■ As Lynch (1998) points out, all listening experiences can be placed along a continuum from nonreciprocal (e.g., listening to a radio news broadcast) to reciprocal (face-to-face conversation). At the reciprocal end of the continuum, the L2 listener's oral communication strategies are critical; however, L2 listeners must use their own top-down and bottom-up processing skills without benefit from any interaction with or at the nonreciprocal end of the continuum feedback from the speaker. L2 learners generally agree that nonreciprocal listening tasks are more complicated than everyday ones. 



■ Nida's (1953) notions of general versus selective listening are still relevant today. A good listener can do the listening needed. Both types of listening can be significant depending on the situation or task. Teachers, therefore, must give learners realistic opportunities to engage in both types of listening.