Review ~ Teaching Second Language Listening

Teaching Second Language Listening

In contrast to grammar and phonology, picking up a book on listening or reading is usually guaranteed to make my heart sink. Identifying this as a weakness in my knowledge and getting a freebie review copy finally caused me to flick through and then sit down and read this new volume by Tony Lynch. I’m very glad I did, because it is full of new information and teaching ideas, and surprisingly easy to read.

The book is divided into four parts- Background Issues, Listening Processes, Teaching Second Language Listening, and Learning Second Language Listening. The title of the last section gives an idea straightway of how up-to-date the approach of this book is, with much more emphasis on self-study and using the internet than older books I have read had. This is even clearer in the titles of the bits that quarter of the book is divided into, being chapters on Learner-centred Listening and Listening Beyond the Classroom and including sections like Collaborative SAC Listening and Bringing the World into the Classroom.

You might assume that a chapter on Teaching Second Language Listening would be less different from the books on this skill I was forced to read nearly ten years ago when I did my Cambridge DELTA, but in fact the writer emphasizes and extends recent ideas on how traditional classroom techniques are just testing listening comprehension rather than teaching it. That doesn’t mean that he has simply replaced comprehension questions with more trendy ideas, and he doesn’t go as far as echoing the quote “[since] the standard comprehension question is inherently malignant… the learner must ask the questions” (Whitaker 1983: 329 “Comprehension questions: About face!” ELT Journal 37/4, quoted on pg 135). Section titles like Can Listening Strategies be Taught? and Critiquing Listening Materials show he retains the same critical skills when looking at more fashionable teaching ideas.

One quote which gives a taste of this questioning and realistic attitude is “Each new generation of technology… has excited predictions that this is the one that will bring really radical advances in language teaching. However, the hardware has tended to run ahead of the pedagogic purposes to which teachers might want to put it.” (pg 7). One more specific one that had me cheering was “Researchers have now found some evidence of a relationship between second language listeners’ strategic awareness, strategy use, and listening performance. However, there is much less evidence for the positive effects of strategy training, in terms of improved listening” (pg 82).

These critiques are linked to the earlier theoretical sections, making reading the whole book through (maybe backwards if you like) rewarding and worthwhile. Lots of mentioning which later parts of the book will expand on topics and make them more practical helped a lot with this, e.g. “Here we face the paradox: the availability of non-audio information, which makes it easier for the listener to understand what is said, may at the same time make it more difficult to learn… We will come back to this in Chapters 7 and 10” (pg 9). Topics with titles such as Levelt’s Model of Spoken Language Use might make you tempted to skip these more theoretical bits, but for me they were by far the most thought-provoking and interesting. I also found that I got through the scary sounding sections on Communication Theory, Information Processing and Social Constructivism with a lot of learning and no pain at all. This is helped by the great use of anecdotes, such as the very personal three page A Listener’s History that starts the book. This approach also usefully echoes the reflection on your own beliefs that I have to use and get other teachers using for CPD in my school. I did skip some of the tables and diagrams, suggestions for further reading (but I’ve learnt so much just reading this- do I really have to read more- and less interesting- stuff??), and Discussion and Study Questions, but “Paul Seedhouse claims that conversation- spontaneous, non-directed talk with equal opportunities for listeners to speak- is not possible in a second language lesson. Do you agree? Is there any point in letting learners ‘just talk’?” (referring to Seedhouse, P. 1996 “Classroom interaction: Possibilities and impossibilities” ELT Journal 50/1 16-24) did catch my attention. These sections would also be invaluable if I had to write an essay or give a workshop on the topic.

I must admit that the book has not yet had a lot of impact on how I treat listening in my classroom, apart from making me give students more links to online materials. This is partly because some of the ideas are quite huge projects rather than little teaching tips (unsurprising in a book that deals with the theory in such detail and tries to link techniques to that rather than taking a recipes approach). Two great ideas that I just somehow can’t see myself using unless I go back and teach in the UK with a lot more classroom hours per class are “The teacher helps the students to select the social situations and speech events which are relevant and problematic, and which they want to study in depth… Learners go out into the world… and record interaction in those situations… The recordings are brought to class and everyone is involved in transcribing them… The learners as a group analyse what was being achieved through language use in the interaction” (pg 146) and a worksheet to use with party political broadcasts.

A second reason for a lack of practical impact in the short term is that I still have to use textbook listenings in some way or another, but perhaps the main one is that the author is careful not to give recommendations when he thinks that the question is still open (often!) For example, he echoes my ambiguity on advice for students (“our approach in PROFILE… is to pass on, in the Options section of each unit, all the options recommended by our international students and to offer them as techniques that our readers should try out for themselves…” pg 150) without giving me an obvious route to progress from the point I am at where I don’t really seem to be putting my faith in the theory that he has just led me through but rather leaving it all up to the students.

The book did give me justifications for some of the things I had started doing recently, make me rethink others, and make me think more carefully about how much emphasis I put on this skill. More importantly for me, it was an easy-to-read book full of things I had never even heard of before and which mostly seemed to be relevant to my teaching life. Although it is not the book of teaching recipes that some might be looking for, I would basically recommend this book to anyone. It is not just a great book on listening, but I hope a model for future books on other topics too. For example, I have yet to read a book that is better in the ways that it deals with the opposites of the theory and the practical and the general and personal without unjustifiably claiming links between those things.