Teaching Listening Comprehension _~ Penny Ur

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CAMBRIDGE HANDBOOKS FOR LANGUAGE TEACHERS General Editor: Michael Swan This is a series of practical guides for teachers of English and other languages. Illustrative examples Atre usually drawn from the field of English as a foreign or second language, but the ideas and techniques described can equally well be used in the teaching of any language. In this series: Drama Techniques i't Language Learning—a resource book o/ communication activities for language teachers (New Edition) by Alan Maley and Alan Duff Once Upon a Time—using stories in the language classroom by John Morgan and Mario Rinvolucri Discussions that Work —task-centred fluency practice by Penny Ur Teaching Listening Comprehension by Penny Ur Games for Language Learning (New Edition) by Andrew Wright, David Betteridge and Michael Buckby.

Published by the Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB2 TRP 32 East s 7th Street, New York, NY 10022, USA 10 Stamford Road, Oakleigh, Melbourne 3166, Australia @ Cambridge University Press 1984 First published 1984 Reprinted 1984 Printed in Great Britain at The Pitman Press, Bath Library of Congress catalogue card number: 83—5173 British Library cataloguing in publication data Ur, Penny Teaching listening comprehension. — (Cambridge handbooks for language teachers) I. English language — Spoken English — Text-books for foreigners 1. Title PET 128 428.3'4 ISBN 0 521 25509 0 hard covers ISBN 0 521 28781 2 paperback English & Fore;- tass No A sssscaj' etional Cenoe.

Contents List of illustrations Vili Acknowledgements x Understanding spoken English Real-life listening 2 Part 1 1 2 3 1 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 Purpose and expectation 3 Response 4 Visibility of the speaker 4 Environmental clues 5 Shortness 6 Informal speech 6 Redundancy 7 'Noise' 7 Colloquial language 8 Auditory character 9 Listening to English as a foreign language 2.1 Hearing the sounds 11 2.2 Understanding intonation and stress 2.3 Coping with redundancy and 'noise' 2.4 Predicting 16 2.5 Understanding colloquial vocabulary 2.6 Fatigue 19 17 2.7 Understanding different accents 20 2.8 Using visual and aural environmental clues 11 20 Planning exercises 22 3.1 Listening materials 22 Producing suitable discourse Using recordings 24 3.2 The task 25 A pre-set purpose 26 Ongoing learner-response Motivation 27 Success 27 Simplicity 28 Feedback 28 22. 26.

3-3 Visual materials 29 Contextualization 29 Learning and motivation 30 Pictures and diagrams as task-bases 30 Part 2 4 5 Suggestions for classroom activities Listening for perception 35 4.1 At word-level 36 Oral activities Reading and writing activities 39 Meaning-based activities 40 4.2 At sentence-level 41 Oral activities 42 Reading and writing activities 43 Meaning-based activities 44 Listening for comprehension 47 5.1 Listening and making no response Following a written text 51 Listening to a familiar text Listening aided by visuals Informal teacher-talk Entertainment 5.2 Listening and making short responses 51 67 68 Obeying instructions Ticking oft items True/false exercises Detecting mistakes 80 Aural cloze 87 Guessing definitions Noting specific information 96 Pictures Maps 103 108 Ground-plans 116 Grids Family trees Graphs 124 91 5-3 Listening and making longer responses Repetition and dictation Paraphrase 129 Translation 132 133 Answering questions Answering comprehension questions on texts 33 127 136 Predictions Filling gaps Summarizing 139 142 145.

Contents 5-4 Listening as a basis for study and discussion Problem-solving 148 Jigsaw listening 152 Interpretative listening 160 Evaluative and stylistic analysis 164 A postscript: conversation 167 Bibliography 169 Index 173 148.

Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. 21 Fig. 23 Fig. 24 Fig. 25b Fig. Fig. 25C 25d Fig. 25f Fig. Fig. 25 g Fig. 26a Fig. 26b Fig. 26c Fig. 27 Fig. 28 Fig. 29 viii Illustrations Fig. II Fig. 22 Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. 2 3 4 5 6 7 f 9 a—f 10 12 14 15 r 6 a—d 17 18 a—d zoa—e Faces: people talking on the telephone Park scene 54 Four faces 55 The dog and the TV aerial 56 Island map 60 Town map 61 Stick-men in different positions 69 Cuisenaire rod models 71 Lego models 72 Child's drawing 74 Living-room scene 81 Slow boat to China McLachlan cartoon 88 The road sign 89 The castaway 90 Changes in landscape 97 Quarrelling couple Leopard, gazelle and man 99 Tom's career 100 Means of transport 101 Giles cartoon 102 Island map (with names) 103 Island map (with alterations) 106 River map 107 Ground-plan (plain) 108 Ground-plan (with pools) 109 Zoo 1 (ground-plan) 110 Zoo 2 (ground-plan) 112 Shopping centre (ground-plan) 113 Nursing home (ground-plan) 114 School (ground-plan) 115 Grid (empty) 117 'Acquaintances' grid (incorrectly filled) 'Acquaintances' grid (correctly filled) 'Murder mystery' grid 119 'Schools' grid 120 Simple family tree 122 50 117 118.

List of illustrations Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. 30 More complex family tree 3 la—b Pair of graphs 124—5 123 32b 33 34 Grid (empty) 15 3 'People' grid 154 'Flats' grid 156 'Couples' grid 158.

Acknowledgements This book has benefited from a number of ideas given to me by many different writers, lecturers and colleagues, which I have adapted and used, though unable to remember their original source. To all such unknown contributors — my thanks and apologies. The author and publishers are grateful to those listed belpw for permission to reproduce material. Longman Group Ltd for Fig. 1 (from What do you think? by Donn Byrne and Andrew Wright) and the extract from Meeting people by Terry L. Fredrickson on p. 93; Edward Arnold Ltd for Fig. 4 (from The Goodbodys by Paul Groves, Nigel Grimshaw and Roy Schofield); Munksgaard for the extracts from Listen then! by Paulette Møller and Audrey Bolliger on pp. 86, 92, 94—5, 142 and 162—3; Bokförlaget Corona AB for the extract from Let's listen by John McClintock and . Börje Stern on p. 87 ; Punch for Fig. 13 ; the Sunday Express for Fig. 21 ; Penguin Books Ltd for Fig. 31a—b ('Chart 13: Production and yields of certain crops in Great Britain' from Facts in focus compiled by the Central Statistical Office, Penguin Reference Books 1972, p. 104) Crown copyright 0 197 z; the producers of Nature notebook (BBC World Service) and Prof. J. P. Hearn for the transcript on p. 131; Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd for the extract from First Certificate English 4: listening comprehension by W. S. Fowler on pp. 136—7; Macmillan Education Ltd for the extract from Points overheard by Matthew Bennett on p. 146. Fig. 2 was drawn by Jenny Palmer; the cartoons in Figs. 14 and 15 are by David Mostyn; Figs. 3 and 17—20 were drawn by Trevor Ridley; the other drawings are by Chris Evans..

Part 1 Understanding spoken English This book is about listening comprehension practice in the foreign-language classroom, and is intended primarily for teachers of English. It does not undertake a psycholinguistic, philosophical or communications engineering analysis of the process of listening and understanding; nor, on the other hand, does it consist entirely of a series of exercises. It is, perhaps, an attempt to bridge the gap between the two: to discuss what, in practical terms, successful foreign-language listening compre- hension entails; and on this basis to propose types of practice that may be effective in the classroom. Some of these may be found to be suitable for testing purposes also; but their primary aim is to teach rather than to test. I hope that the reader may emerge with some relevant criteria by which to evaluate, select and devise different kinds of exercises. The three aspects of the subject I shall consider in Part 1 are these: what sort of listening activities actually go on in real life? What are the particular difficulties likely to be encountered by the learner when coping with them? And how may we, as teachers, best help him to master these difficulties? * In other words, we need a clear idea both of where we are going (what we want our students to be able to do as the end result of their learning) and how to get there (what we need to give practice in and how). * The English pronoun system obliges me to choose between 'he' and 'she'. Since I and most of the English teachers of my acquaintance are women, I have chosen to refer to the teacher throughout ili the feminine, and the student in the masculine..

Real-life listening At this stage it would be useful if there were available a full-scale taxonomy of all the different kinds of listening situations there are, together with a statistical analysis of their relative frequen_ cies. However, I do not know of any such study — nor am I sure that its execution is at all a practical proposition, since the immense variety of societies, individuals, situations and types of oral discourse must defy classification. On a less ambitious scale, however, it is possible to list some examples of the types of listening we might expect reasonably educated people living in a developed country to be exposed to, and hope that an examina- tion of the results might yield some useful conclusions. Such a list is set out below, in random order. Not all of the examples are pure listening activities, but all involve some aural comprehension as an essential component of the communicative situation: — listening to the news / weather forecast / sports report / announcements etc. on the radio — discussing work / current problems with family or colleagues — making arrangements / exchanging news etc. with acquaint- ances — making arrangements / exchanging news etc. over the tele- phone — chatting at a party / other social gathering — hearing announcements over the loudspeaker (at a railway station, for example, or airport) — receiving instructions on how to do something / get some- where — attending a lesson / seminar — being interviewed / interviewing — watching a film / theatre show / television programme — hearing a speech / lecture — listening to recorded / broadcast songs — attending a formal occasion (wedding / prize-giving / Other ceremony) — getting professional advice (from a doctor, for example) — being tested orally in a subject of study 2.

Purpose and expectation Now this list is naturally rough and incomplete; nevertheless it is, I think, fairly representative. There are certainly some useful generalizations which can be drawn from it and which have some immediate implications for classroom practice. 1.1 Purpose and expectation Rarely if ever do we listen to something without some idea of what we are going to hear: only, perhaps, when we turn on the radio or television at random, or enter a room where a conversation is already in progress. Usually we have some preconceived idea of the content, formality level and so on of the discourse we are about to hear. Such ideas are based on what J. C. Richards calls 'script competence', that is the knowledge we possess in advance about the subject-matter or context of the discourse ('Listening comprehension', TESOL Quarterly 17:2). Our expectations may often be linked to our purpose in listening: if we want to know the answer to a question, then we will ask, and expect to hear a relevant response. In many cases this leads to our 'listening out' for certain key phrases or words. When we ask a question like: 'Where are you going to be? ', we then listen out for the expression of place. If the answer is, for example: 'I don't know, I haven't really decided yet, it depends what job I get, but I expect I shall end up in Boston' = then we shall wait for and note the last two words. If, however, the same answer is the response to the question: 'Are you definitely•going to Boston?' — then the last two words of the answer are virtually redundant, and we shall pay more attention to the first part. In discourse that is not based on the listener's active spoken participation, his expectations may be less strictly defined, but they are there nevertheless and again are connected with his purpose. If we listen to the news, it is from a desire to know what is happening in the world, and we shall expect to hear about certain subjects of current interest in a certain kind of language. If we are listening to a lecture, we usually know roughly what the subject is going to be, and either need to learn about it or are interested in it for its own sake. If none of these conditions is true then we shall probably not listen at all, let alone understand. Even when listening to entertainment such as plays, jokes or songs, we have a definite purpose (enjoyment); we want to know what is coming next, and we expect it to cohere with what went before. There is, moreover, an association between listener expecta- tion and purpose on the one hand, and comprehension on the 3.

1 Real-life listening other. Heard discourse which corresponds closely to what the listener expects and needs to hear is far more likely to be accurately perceived and understood than that which is unex_ pected, irrelevant or unhelpful. Thus it would seem a good idea when presenting a listening passage in class to give the students some information about the content, situation and speaker(s) before they actually start listening. 1.2 Response In many, perhaps most, cases the listener is required to give some kind of overt, immediate response to what has been said. This may be verbal (the answer to a question, for instance) or non-verbal (action in accordance with instructions or a nod of the head, for example). Even a lecturer or orator gets some sort of feedback from his audience in the form of facial expression, eye-contact, interruptions, note-taking. Only if the message is coming via electronic equipment when the speaker is neither physically present nor addressing himself to the listener as an individual, is no overt response usually required or forth- coming. Yet many classroom listening comprehension exercises de- mand no response until the end of fairly long stretches of speech, so that when it comes this response is very largely a test of memory rather than of -comprehension. Occasional exercises like these, and others that demand no overt response at all certainly have their place — I do not mean to suggest that they should not be used at all (see 5.1 Listening and making no response) — but on the whole listening tasks should, I feel, be based on short, active responses occurring during, or between parts of, the listening passage rather than at the end. 1.3 Visibility of the speaker I think it is fair to say that we are nearly always in the physical presence of, or able to see, the person(s) we are listening to• Usually the visibility of the speaker coincides with the necessity for listener-response — but not always. There are cases where we can see the person we are listening to but are not expected to react to him personally (as when we watch a television programme); and there is, conversely, at least one common.

1.4 situation where we cannot see the speaker but must certainly respond to what he says (a telephone conversation). If the speaker is usually present in real-life listening situations, towards which we wish to train our students in the classroom, then perhaps we should think again about how much we ought to use recordings as the basis of our exercises. Perhaps we should revert to using live speakers, resorting to recordings only to attain specific objectives? For a fuller discussion of this question see 3.1, Using recordings. Environmental clues Apart from the speaker himself — his facial expression, posture, eye direction, proximity, gesture, tone of voice — a real-life listening situation is normally rich in environmental clues as to the content and implications of what is said. Often noises or smells or other sense-stimuli can contribute valuable back- ground information, but I think it is true to say that most environmental clues are visual. These may be deliberately introduced, as when a teacher or lecturer clarifies her exposition with diagrams or pictures, or a television documentary uses film extracts or stills to illustrate its commentary. Similar clues appear quite naturally in less formal situations, as when some- one gives us directions according to a map. Occasionally the general surroundings contribute information: if we are in a railway station, for example, and hear an announcement over the loudspeaker, we expect it to announce the arrival or departure of a train. Environmental clues are often more likely to provide informa- tion about the situation, speakers and general atmosphere than about the actual topic of discourse. If the listener/onlooker cannot understand the meaning of the words used in a family discussion, board meeting or political harangue, he will not be able to say much about the subject of debate. What he will be able to guess fairly accurately, however, are things such as the level of formality, the amount and kind of emotional involve- ment of the speaker(s), the kind of relationship existing between speaker(s) and listener(s), the prevailing mood — all of which afford him significant assistance in comprehending the sense of what is said once he actually understands at least some of the language. Sound recordings, broadcasts and telephone con- versations are relatively poor in such clues, but these normally comprise only a small part of our. total listening activity. 5.

In classroom terms, environmental clues are normally repre_ sented by visual materials (illustr Ions, diagrams, maps and so on) which are thus essential-to th effective presentation of most listening exercises. 1.5 Shortness Another characteristic of real-life listening is the shortness of the chunks into which heard discourse is usually divided. The usual pattern is a short period of listening, followed by listener- response (not necessarily verbal), followed by a further brief spell of listening with further response, and so on. In other cases, stretches of heard speech are broken up by being spoken by different people from different directions. Even when there are long periods of seemingly uninterrupted discourse — talks, instructions, anecdotes, guided tours, nagging and so on — these are often broken down into smaller units by the physical movement of the speaker, pause, audience reaction, changing environmental clues. More formal stretches of speech — lectures, ceremonial recitation, broadcast reports — are, however, usually less interrupted. 1.6 Informal speech It is necessary to draw a distinction between formal speech or 'spoken prose' and the informal speech used in most spon- taneous conversation. This is not, of course, a simple binary opposition: there are many intermediate gradations, ranging from the extremely formal (ceremonial formulae, some political speeches), through the fairly formal (news-reading, lectures), to the fairly informal (television interviews, most classroom teaching) and the very informal (gossip, family quarrels) *. But for the purposes of this discussion a firm division will be made: any types of discourse which fall more or less under the first two categories I will call 'formal', those in the last two 'informal'. Informal speech is usually both spontaneous and colloquial; formal speech is characteristically neither. Some intermediate types of discourse may be one but not the other: the speech Of a character in a play, as delivered by an actor, may use colloquial language but is not spontaneous; and a sermon may be delivered * Compare Joos's five divisions: frozen, formal, consultative, casual' intimate (M. Joos, The five clocks, Harcourt Brace, 1967). 6.

Informal speech extempore but is rarely very colloquial. Broadly speaking, the degree of colloquiality of speech affects its pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar and syntax, and the spontaneity affects its syntax and discoursal structure. Most of the discourse we hear is quite informal, being both spontaneous and colloquial in character; and some of the skills the learner needs to develop are closely bound up with the peculiarities of this kind of speech. Of these there are many, but I should like here to dwell on four: redundancy, 'noise', colloquial language and auditory character. Please note that the first two terms are used here rather idiosyncratically, as defined in the two paragraphs which follow. Redundancy In ordinary conversation or even in much extempore speech- making or lecturing we actually say a good deal more than would appear to be necessary in order to convey our message. Redundant utterances may take the form of repetitions, false starts, re-phrasings, self-corrections, elaborations, tautologies and apparently meaningless additions such as 'I mean' or 'you know'. This redundancy, however, is not as unnecessary as it would seem. Just as it enables the speaker to work out and express what he really means as he goes along, so it helps the listener to follow him by providing an abundance of extra information and time to think. The message of a piece of spontaneous talk is thus on the whole delivered much more slowly and repetitiously than that of rehearsed, read or planned speech. It is also, as we have previously noted, frequently interrupted by the listener's interpolations, the responses to which may serve as further redundant material. 'Noise' The opposite of redundancy (extra information) is 'noise', which occurs when information is not received by the listener because of interference. 'Noise', as I am using the term here, may be caused not only by some outside disturbance, bu,t also by a temporary lack of attention on the part of the listener, or by the fact that a word or phrase was not understood because it was mispronounced or misused or because the listener simply did not know it. In any such case, a gap is left which is filled, as far as the listener is concerned, by a meaningless buzz. What the listener has to do is try to reconstruct more or less what the information was that he missed. In an informal conversation he may request 7.

I Real-life listening What are the implications of all this for listening comprehension in the foreign-language classroom? It would seem reasonable to say that classroom practice should usually incorporate such characteristics of real-life listen- ing as those described above; yet many books of listening exercises I know do not include any of them at all. Such books are often made up of passages originally composed as written texts (extracts from novels, newspaper articles and so on) recorded onto tape; the learners listen to the text without knowing much about what they are going to hear or what they are listening for, and then have to answer comprehension questions, usually multiple-choice. This is a convenient class- room technique, and it does give a certain type of practice — but it does not provide any realistic preparation for real-life listen- ing. A learner who relies on this type of exercise is going to have a very rude awakening when he tries to understand native speech in natural communicative situations. It is not enough, however, to base classroom exercises only on an imitation of reality. We must also take into account the specific difficulties faced by the foreigner in learning to cope with heard English speech. 10.

2 2.1 Listening to English as a foreign language Some aspects of listening comprehension are easier for the foreign-language learner than others. Most learners need inten- Sive practice in some skills and seem to pick up others intuitive- ly. Below are some of the main potential problems, set out roughly in order of importance. In discussing them I have relied heavily on the analysis of spoken English given in Gillian Brown's Listening to spoken English; and I refer the reader to this excellent book for a fuller treatment of the subject. For a more detailed taxonomy of the listening skills themselves, see J. C. Richards' article 'Listening comprehension'. Hearing the sounds As a young teacher it took me some time to realize that my students actually did not perceive certain English sounds with any accuracy because these did not exist (at all, or as separate phonemes) in their own language. The sound /O/ as in 'think' for example does not exist in French; a native French speaker may very often therefore not notice at first that it occurs in English — he may simply assimilate it to the nearest sound familiar to him and both hear and say Js/ or /f/. Even after the distinction has been pointed out to him, and he has practised saying the sound himself, he may continue to confuse it with Is/ or If/ the moment he starts using the language for something other than pronuncia- tion practice. Even more difficulty is caused when the new sound does exist in the native language, but only as an allophonic variation of another phoneme. For example, both /1/ (as in 'pit') and /i:/ (as in 'peep') exist in modern colloquial Hebrew, but they are allophones, and the substitution of one for the other makes no difference to meaning, occurring only because of the location of the sound in the word or sentence. Thus the Hebrew speaker has difficulty in perceiving this difference as significant to meaning in English, and it takes a considerable amount of practice before he gets used to distinguishing between 'ship' and 'sheep' or 'fit' and 'feet'. The distinction between the dark and clear [l] in Russian causes similar problems to the native English speaker. 11.

2 Listening to English as a foreign language Sometimes the foreign learner of English may have difficulty with the sequences and juxtapositions of sounds typical of English words. Many students find consonant-clusters particu_ larly difficult to cope with. They may get thc consonants in the wrong order (hearing 'parts' for 'past'), or omit one of the sounds (Scrips' for 'crisps'), or hear a vowel that is not in fact pronounced ('littel' for 'little'). Another reason why sounds may be misheard is that the student is not used to the stress and intonation patterns of English and the way these influence both the realization of certain phonemes and the meaning of the utterance. One interesting point about all these difficulties is that it is often quite difficult to know, outside minimal-pair practice, whether students really have heard the sounds right or not, because they may guess the right meaning from the context. In the sentence 'It doesn't fit, it's too big', most students will understand the word 'fit' correctly even though they may have heard it as something approximating to their idea of 'feet'. Is there, then, so much importance in the correct hearing of sounds? Will learners not always be able to understand the word throuéh context, just as they will have to distinguish between genuine homophones like 'meet' and 'meat'? The answer is yes, there is importance. The number of homophones and homonyms (such as the noun bear and the verb bear) in English is small, while the number of words which can be confused or misunderstood by inaccurate perception is relatively large. Even if working out what the right word must be takes only a split second, it still slows down comprehension fractionally — and spoken discourse goes by so fast that the foreign listener simply cannot afford a moment's delay. He may sometimes even understand the word according to what it sounds like (to him) in spite of the fact that his interpretation does not fit the context simply because he does not have the time to stop and work it out. It is therefore essential for the learner to achieve familiarity with the common phonemes of the target language as soon as possible if he is to be an efficient listener. I am not concerned here so much with his own pronunciation, but it is certainly true that if he learns to pronounce the sounds accurately himself, it will be much easier for him to hear them correctly when said by someone else. 12.

Understanding intonation and stress 2.2 Understanding intonation and stress The English systems of stress, intonation and rhythm, though perhaps less obviously difficult than problems of the actual sounds, can interfere with the foreign learner's proper under- standing of spoken English. It is, therefore, worth drawing our students' attention to the existence of certain general patterns. Primary among these is the division of utterances into tone- — strings of syllables run together to form a single groups sequence and generally characterized by one heavily stressed 'tone'. The rhythm of speech is based on these 'tones' and to a lesser extent on other minor stresses, and intervening lightened syllables may be pronounced very fast so as not to break this rhythm. It takes roughly the same time to say 'the CAT is INterested in proTECTing its KI wrens' as it does to say 'LARGE CARS WASTE GAS', though the number of syllables each sentence contains is very different (examples taken from the article 'Listening comprehension' by J. C. Richards); whereas in most other languages, twice as many syllables simply take twice as long to say. As to intonation: its importance derives from the great extent to which it often influences the meaning of an utterance: a significant word is often stressed simply by being pronounced in a higher 'key', for example; and such things as certainty, doubt, irony, inquiry, seriousness, humour, are im- plied by characteristic intonation patterns as much as by choice of words. Having demonstrated some of the standard patterns, we can usefully do some classroom exercises whose object it is simply to sensitize students to their existence (see pp. 37—45). Beyond this, I do not think there is much useful teaching to be done in this field: the stress, intonation and rhythm patterns of spoken English are so varied, so idiosyncratic and so unpredictable that it would be of dubious value to give or practise any more detailed models. Having, as it were, pointed our students in the right direction, it is probably best to leave them to acquire intuitively more detailed knowledge through exposure to plenty of informal native speech. 2.3 Coping with redundancy and 'noise' When listening to someone speaking, we usually have to put up with a certain amount of 'noise'. Some words may be drowned by outside interference, others indistinctly pronounced. The foreign-language learner, whose grasp of meaning is slower than.

2 Listening to English as a foreign language that of a native and demands more of an effort, finds these gaps far more difficult to take in his stride. He is, it is true, used to coping with them in his own tongue, but when he has to do the same in another language, he finds he cannot do so with anything like the same facility. This is for three main reasons. First, the sheer number of gaps is much larger: there are some items he cannot understand simply because he does not know them, many others which he is not yet sufficiently familiar with to grasp during rapid speech (though he could probably recog- nize them if faced with them in writing or in slow, carefully pronounced formal talk). Second, he is not familiar enough with the sound-combinations, lexis and collocations of the language to make predictions or retroactive guesses as to what was missing. A native speaker, for instance who hears only /sprln/ can guess that the final phoneme will be /t/, making the word 'sprint'; or if he hears the phrase 'He was in a towering .. .', he can predict that the last word will be something like 'rage'. But a learner cannot normally be expected to have the information necessary to enable him to guess in this way (for further discussion of the practical implications of this, see pp. 16—17). Third, even when the number of gaps is not much larger than those they would encounter in their own language, many foreign-language learners run into a psychological problem: they have a kind of compulsion to understand everything, even things that are totally unimportant, and are disturbed, discour- aged and even completely thrown off balance if they come across an incomprehensible word. It is this third problem — the apparent need of the foreign- language learner to perceive and comprehend everything he hears even though he would not do so in his native language — whose significance is not always realized. In the early stages of foreign-language learning, when the learner hears usually only single words or short sentences, he has to understand them all. Later, listening comprehension passages get longer, but in most cases (unless the teacher is aware of the problem and adapts her material accordingly) they are still graded to suit his level, taken slowly and pronounced carefully, and he is still expected to understand everything. He assumes that successful comprehen- Sion is total comprehension, and finds it very difficult to get used to the idea that he can be a perfectly competent listener with less than TOO per cent perception and/or understanding of what is said. The same phenomenon, incidentally, occurs in reading. A learner who is at the transition stage from intensive to extensive reading also has to learn to grasp the meaning of a sentence even when it includes a word or two he does not know. The reader' 14.

Coping Wit re un ancy an noise however, has the advantage of time: he can stop if he wishes and try to make an intelligent guess as to the meaning of the missing items. The listener has to take the gap in his stride and be satisfied with the rough idea conveyed by the rest of the utterance, or hazard a quick intuitive conjecture. A foreign-language learner who tries to understand every single word that is said to him will be handicapped both by his failure to do so and also, in a way, by his success. On the one hand he is distressed and discouraged by his 'defective' compre- hension, has the feeling that he has missed vital words, and may tell you 'I didn't understand a thing' when in fact he has, or could have, understood quite enough for communicative pur- poses. On the other hand, even if he does perceive and understand every single word he hears, he may find this actually counter- productive: for effective listening is aided by the ability of the listener to ignore or 'skim' unimportant items. Much of what we hear is redundant, and we have to recognize it as such. We need — and have, in our native language at least — a mechanism which tells us: 'I don't need to listen very carefully to what is coming now, it's obviously going to be more or less "x'". For example, if someone says: 'You don't need to meet my train; if it's raining then perhaps yes, but if not ... ' then it does not really matter if the last few words are going to be 'don't bother' or 'I can walk' or simply 'don't'. The listener can safely 'switch off', more or less, and look forward to what is coming next. The foreign- language learner who listens carefully for the exact sense of such redundant phrases and attaches importance to it is actually hampering himself. He is not taking advantage of a natural rest or break in the stream of significant information in order to ready himself for what is coming next, nor is he sorting out significant from insignificant content as he goes along. He is concentrating very hard — too hard — on understanding the words or phrases as they come up, and not relaxing enough to gather the main message. He is in danger, as it were, of not seeing the wood for the trees. The ability to make do with only a part of what is heard and understand the main message is a vitally important one for effective listening in a communicative situation. It is a mistake to think that this ability will be automatically carried over from the native language. Once the learner has moved over from intensive to extensive listening in the foreign language and got used to coping with 'noise' and recognizing redundancy, his own native language skills will come into play; but he needs conscious practice in making the transition (see 5-3, Filling gaps and Summarizing). 15.

2 Listening tp English as a foreign language nounced differently in informal speech from the way it is sai formally, or was said when it was learnt, the listener may simpl not recognize it as the same word, or may even miss its existenc completely. This problem can be defined as one of vocabulary a much as of pronunciation, since the foreign-language learner, i my experience, assimilates many of the new forms as fresh, variant lexical items. He seems to learn that 'don't' means 'd not' in very much the same way that he has to learn 'a lot' for 'much'. Chief culprits here are the frequently occurring small function words like 'for', 'to', 'him', 'is', and 'has', which, when unstressed (as they usually are), are heard as /fo/ (American English /fr/), /to/, /lm/, /z/, /z/: the so-called 'weak' forms. Some words may disappear completely. 'Where are you going?' may quite acceptably be pronounced exactly like 'Wher you going?' without a grammatical mistake being either made o heard. Even more confusing for the foreigner is the occasional disappearance of an apparently vital negative: witness the sentences ('They aren't going', 'I can't come'), where an almost imperceptible hesitation or slight glottal stop (represented here in transcription by the symbol P) takes the place of the negative 'n 't'. Of course, the native speaker knows that were the sentences positive the auxiliary verbs 'are' and 'can' would be pronounced differently by most people — but how is the learner supposed to know that? He expects to hear the negative word as he has been taught to say it himself. Longer words too may be pronounced differently from the foreign listener's expectation not because of their placing in the utterance, as in the examples above, but because their normal colloquial pronunciation does not accord with their spelling. Often the vowel in an unstressed syllable is shortened or changed. Such a vowel may sound like /1/, as in /dl'sald/ ('decide') or /'mæn1d3/ ('manage'); more commonly it may be reduced to the neutral vowel sound or 'schwa' (W): /kan'trool/ ('control'), /lfæmoll/ ('family'), /lpensol/ ('pencil'). In some cases, vowels may disappear altogether: such words as /Ived3tabl/, /'cnmftabl/, /'sekratrl/ ('vegetable', 'comfortable', 'secretary') are often very difficult for foreigners to decode. Sometimes the juxtaposition of two words means that one Of the sounds at the junction point has assimilated to the other or even disappeared: /'tem'pi:pl/ for 'ten people', /slldaon/ for 'sit down', /lo:lralt/ for 'all right', /istelpmon?/ for 'statement'. In any case, the result is sufficiently removed from the original expected sound of the words in question to confuse the foreign listener: he may think there is only one word where there are two or more, or fail to recognize a perfectly familiar item. Even 18.

Using visual and aural environmental clues What is the problem? There is certainly no question of the students being unable to perceive and interpret visual or other stimuli as such — they do so perfectly well in their own language. Thus I see no value in practising this skill in isolation: exercises such as listening to a conversation in order to discover how many participants there are, or watching a film extract and describing the emotions or relationships of the actors — these may be fun, and the intellectual student may enjoy analysing how he comes to his conclusions, but they do not improve his ability to understand foreign discourse in context. For the problem is not the lack of skill in perceiving and interpreting extra-linguistic clues, but the ability to apply it when listening to the foreign language. And the reason why the foreign-language learner has difficulty here would seem to be because his receptive system is overloaded. He has to work much harder at decoding than the native listener and, as described on pp. 14—15, tries to interpret every detail as it comes up instead of relaxing and taking a broader view. He simply does not have the time and attention to spare for absorbing information beyond the actual semantic significance of the words themselves. These difficulties will not be overcome simply by drawing the learner's attention to the presence and importance of environ- mental clues; on the contrary, such action is liable merely to increase the number of details he feels he has to take in, and make him even more strained and frustrated. What we need to do is encourage him to relax, gather what he can from the information he can readily decode, and use his common sense and the discourse skills he carries over from his native language to help him understand the whole. Exercises aimed at training students to skim for specific information, to ignore details and gather general import, to cope with redundancy and 'noise', and all these to listen for recreation and pleasure (see Part 2) — encourage a relaxed, holistic approach to the understanding of heard discourse and may therefore provide the best means of helping to free the foreign listener to perceive and exploit all available clues to meaning. 21.

3 3.1 Planning exercises When planning listening exercises it is essential to bear in mind the kind of real-life situations for which we are preparing students, and also the specific difficulties they are likely to encounter and need practice to overcome. But we also need to take into account a further complex factor: the nature of th classroom teaching—learning process itself. There are physica considerations such as the size and arrangement of the class room, or the number of students; technical ones such as may b involved in the use of tape recorders or other equipment; and mass of pedagogical ones: how to improve student motivation, concentration and participation; how to correct, or give feedback; how to administer exercises efficiently, and so on. A a practising teacher, I am constantly exasperated by the lack of attention paid by many materials writers to such aspects of the language teaching—learning process; exercises that look lovely on paper often do not work in practice simply because some obvious feature of classroom practice has been overlooked. It i these practical features which in the last resort determin whether an activity will do its iob effectively or not. What I shall try to do in this last chapter of Part I is to combine the theoretical considerations discussed in previous chapters with the practical factors mentioned above in order t outline some characteristics of the kind of listening exercise that will give maximally effective and relevant practice in th classroom. Listening materials Producing suitable discourse Many listening comprehension exercises used today in the classroom are still based on formal spoken prose, in spite of th fact that, as we have seen, most heard speech is in fa spontaneous and colloquial in character. There is, it is true, certain amount of spontaneous teacher-talk in the foreig language in the course of other language-learning activitie 22.

Listening materials (explanations, instructions, comprehension questions), and much of it provides incidental listening practice. But this is not enough; and listening comprehension exercises as such are usually based on a text prepared in advance and read aloud by the teacher or on tape, which obviously does not give the kind of practice needed. Theoretically, there is no justification for this. In practice there is very good justification indeed: that it can be very difficult technically to plan and administer stretches of spontaneous speech, whether live or recorded. The use of recordings of authentic unrehearsed discourse has two main drawbacks. First, being authentic, the speech used in such recordings is ungraded and the language is often very difficult, suitable only for the highest levels. Second, anyone who has listened to recordings of natural conversation knows how difficult they are to understand; without seeing the speak- ers it is very hard even for a native listener to disentangle the thread of the discourse, identify the different voices and cope with frequent overlaps. These two disadvantages together mean that sound recordings of authentic conversations have only limited value as bases for listening exercises. Video-tapes might be better, and may provide some useful practice for high-level learners — but relatively few institutions have the facilities, and even when these are available, their use often entails a daunting amount of planning, coordination, timing and technical prepa- ration on the part of the teacher. In any case, the problem of the relative difficulty of such material remains. Some authentic material can of course be adapted for classroom use, but usually only after careful selection and editing. If we abandon the idea of using recordings of authentic conversations as basic texts, then we must also abandon our attempt to achieve complete spontaneity, because obviously as soon as people start thinking about how they are going to sound, and about the words they are using, they will not be quite spontaneous. But is complete spontaneity so necessary? Does hearing authentic discourse really provide the best training for real-life listening? I would say not. Students may learn best from listening to speech which, while not entirely authentic, is an approximation to the real thing, and is planned to take into account the learners' level of ability and particular difficulties. With regard to recorded material: if the texts are carefully enough graded, prepared and administered, then the final transition from 'imitation' authentic to 'genuine' authentic speech should take place smoothly. There may be various degrees of approximation to authenticity. We can have easy 23.

3 Planning exercises written texts read aloud with as natural a rhythm and pronun ciation as possible; or we can use texts deliberately composed i colloquial idiom and read as nearly as possible as if they wer being made up on the spot. We may have our speakers em broider a skeleton text or notes, using their own words bu controlling the difficulty of the language. Finally, we can giv only a basic situation, and invite speakers to improvise thei own interpretation — guiding or editing if necessary. If listening material is presented 'live' then it is of course muc easier to control the level of difficulty and formality (for discussion of the relative merits of recorded and 'live' discourse see Using recordings below). The teacher can take the informa tion she wants to convey to the class and deliver it in her ow words, simplifying and slowing down a little perhaps to suit he students' level, but providing nevertheless a reasonable model o spontaneous natural speech. Teachers who are experienced native speakers, and well acquainted with their students can d this fairly easily; but those who lack one or more of thes attributes may have difficulty — or think they have. They ma feel uneasy about improvising, unsure if they are speakin correctly or using an appropriate variety of the language, the ... in short, they often feel muc may be tense and hesitant happier if they have a text in their hands to read. Reading from a text is an easy way out that should be avoide if possible. Spontaneity is far more important than accuracy and in any case, students who learn from native English speaker do not necessarily seem to acquire noticeably better accents tha those who learn from non-natives. Any teacher with a reason able command of English can improvise listening material in th classroom (if she cannot, she should not be teaching Englis anyway), and should make a conscious effort to do so as often a possible. Some advice on doing this can be found on pp. 47—51. Using recordings It seems to be taken for granted these days that listening practic should be based on (cassette) recordings; and sometimes one has the feeling that this assumption is encouraged for reasonS irrelevant to their actual efficacy, such as the financial interest of the people who produce them, or our own odd illogica guilt-feelings: 'If we can use up-to-date electronic equipment then we ought to'! Let us look objectively at the pros and cons• Taped listening passages can be prepared in advance, thu saving the teacher work in the actual lesson. When the teacher' pronunciation is noticeably foreign, recordings may provide th 24.

3.2 The task students with some valuable exposure to native accents; and their use also makes available a far greater range of language situations: different voices and accents, moods, registers, back- ground effects. Moreover, it may seem rather difficult for a single teacher to present dialogue effectively in the classsroom using only her own voice — a recording can solve this problem. Finally the absence of a visible speaker forces the students to focus on the actual sounds, thus•giving more concentrated aural practice. On the other hand, as we have seen, the speaker is actually visible to the listener in most real-life situations, and his facial expression and movements provide some material aids to com- prehension, so that it does not seem right to consistently deprive the learner of his presence in classroom exercises. Also, if the speaker is (as is generally the case) the teacher herself, then she can adapt the material as she goes through it, varying, pausing and repeating parts to suit the needs of her students. A further disadvantage of recordings is their technical quality: even professionally-made tapes are not always as distinct as they should be, and their clarity may be further impaired by faulty or inferior playing equipment. Finally there is the inconvenience of getting, bringing and setting up the recorder, plus the occasional hitches that go with the use of any automatic machine. The obvious conclusion is that both recorded and live speech should have a place in classroom exercises. However, to my mind live speech doeson the whole seem to be a more useful and practical basis for practice and should be used more often, particularly if the teacher can bring other English speakers into the classroom. Recordings should be used for definite specific purposes: to make available types of discourse, accent or listening situations that are difficult to present live, to make students concentrate on aural perception of the foreign sounds, intonation or stress patterns, or for testing. The task As a general rule, listening exercises are most effective if they are constructed round a task. That is to say, the students are required to do something in response to what they hear that will demonstrate their understanding. Examples of such tasks are: expressing agreement or disagreement, taking notes, marking a picture or diagram according to instructions," answering ques- tions. 25.

3 P annm A pre-set purpose In real life when we listen to someone talking we have a definite non-linguistic reason for doing so. In the classroom the genuine reason for listening is purely linguistic (to improve the students' listening skills), and a non-linguistic purpose has to be con- sciously superimposed in the form of a task. The task is in fact the realization of the twin ideas of purpose and expectation in practical classroom terms. If the learner knows in advance that he is going to have to make a certain kind of response, he is immediately provided with a purpose in listening, and he knows what sort of information to expect and how to react to it. Ongoing learner-response The task also provides a framework for immediate response by the listener which as we have seen on p. 4 is a characteristic of most listening situations. Intermittent listener-responses also have the effect of breaking up the heard discourse into 'gobbets', more naturally and easily perceived and absorbed than long stretches of unbroken speech. However, classroom realities do not allow us to simulate typical real-life responses. For example, the typical real-life response to a spoken stimulus is a spoken reply — but obviously no teacher can cope with a classful of students all giving their own individual spoken answers at the same time, let alone check and correct them. If we want all the students to perform the task and their results to be available for checking, then most of the responses will have to be silent: action, marking, drawing or writing. However, tasks that involve a lot of reading (such as answer- ing multiple-choice questions) or writing (such as taking notes) have one disadvantage that should be noted. There is a huge difference between the time taken to understand heard informa- tion (and draw conclusions from it), and that taken to read possible paraphrases or write one's own. Even many native speakers find it quite difficult to do multiple-choice listening exercises or make notes from lectures simply because of this problem; and when all is said and done, such exercises probably do more for the written skills than for listening. At later stages, when listening is being practised together with the other skills in general fluency activities, these exercises come into their own; but if we want to concentrate on aural comprehension itself, it is best to base the task on easily grasped visual material (pictures, 26.

3 Planning exercises Learning and motivation Visuals have an important function as aids to learning, simply because they attract students' attention and help and encourage them to focus on the subject in hand. It is relatively difficult to concentrate on spoken material that is heard 'blind', far easier if there is something relevant to look at. If this something is conspicuous, colourful, humorous, dramatic or in motion — so much the better: striking and stimulating visual aids are likely to heighten students' motivation and concentration. The teacher can be her own visual aid, of course, by acting or miming — but there is such a thing as overdoing it. I have known students so entertained by the antics of their teacher that they were actually distracted from what was being said! Pictures and diagrams as task-bases A distinction must be drawn between visuals-based exercises and visuals-aided ones. In the latter, the visual may appear in the form of one big poster, and provides information on which the teacher can base the listening text; whereas in visuals-based exercises, each student has his own copy of the material and uses it not only to get information but also as an answer-sheet on which he is to mark his responses to tasks, such as noting inconsistencies, filling in missing items, making changes and so on. Examples of visuals-aided tasks can be found in the first seven sections of 5.2 Listening and making short responses; visuals-based tasks appear in the last six sections of 5.2. Visuals-based exercises are interesting to do and potentially very effective, so recently published listening-comprehension books usually include a number of examples. The trouble is that an illustration once marked cannot usually be used again, so that constant use of books like these can become expensive. For this reason I use a lot of home-made materials duplicated on the school's copying machine, keeping my designs as simple as possible. Some basic sketches can be duplicated en masse and then used for many different purposes (see 5.2 Ground-plans); and even very detailed materials can usually be exploited in more ways than one. PICTURES Picture-based activities are suitable on the whole for younger learners. Pictures used should be clear representations of objects, people and scenes whose description is more or less within the lexical range of the class. They should include enough detail and 30.

Visual materials variation to allow for plenty of description and imaginative elaboration. Black-and-white cartoon-type sketches are best as they are usually very clear and easily reproduced. DIAGRAMS I am using the word diagram here in a slightly wider sense than is usual, to denote any representation of information in dia: grammatic form — not just graphs or family trees, but also maps, plans, tables and so on. Older students are usually familiar with diagrammatic conventions and can 'read' such material readily. The advantages of diagrams as bases for task-centred activities derive from the fact that they (diagrams) are designed to convey a large number of facts clearly and quickly without necessitating a heavy load of reading. Hence one simple diagram can generate a large amount of language to explain, describe or comment. Moreover, diagrams can repre- sent information on a wide variety of topics and express many different relationships, so that much more varied subject matter is made available than would be possible using only pictures. An excellent selection of diagrams suitable for English teaching can be found in the books Cue for a drill and Cue for communica- tion by Shiona Harkess and John Eastwood. Both pictures and diagrams should be simple enough to be grasped at a glance. Over-detailed pictures are confusing and difficult to scan. Complicated diagrams are even worse: faced with elaborate graphs or maps students will have to spend some minutes working out what it all means before they can even begin to think about listening, and will also be delayed during the listening passage itself finding their way about the material in order to make appropriate responses. Similarly, any writing on a diagram should be kept to a minimum. Simply drawn symbols with lines to show relationships between them are quickly grasped; reading words takes much longer. A few isolated written words, it is true, are almost inevitable in many diagrams, but full sentences should be avoided. Like the over-complex tasks described on pp. 27—8, over- elaborate visuals occur frequently in published task-centred listening exercises. The teacher is advised to check this point carefully before presenting such exercises in class. 31.