CAMBRIDGE DELTA COURSE

LANGUAGE SKILLS ASSIGNMENT

PART 1
FOCUS ON

LISTENING

“Why do beginners find listening difficult?”

Candidate’s name: Paraskevi Andreopoulou

Centre Number: GR 108
Candidate’s Number:
Number of Words: 2505

Contents
1. What is Listening Comprehension?.............................................3

2. What is successful listening?..........................................................3

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3. Real life listening and its generalizations………………………….4
3.1.Purpose and Expectations………………………………………4
3.2.Response……………………………………………………….4
3.3.Visibility of the speaker………………………………………..5
3.4.Environmental clues…………………………………………….5
3.5.Shortness………………………………………………………..5
3.6.Informal Speech…………………………………………………5
3.7.Redundancy……………………………………………………..5
3.8.Noise……………………………………………………………..5
3.9.Colloquial language………………………………………………6
3.10.Auditory Character…………………………………………..6

4. Potential Problems in learning to listen to English………………..6

4.1.Hearing the sounds…………………………………………….6
4.2.Fatigue………………………………………………………….7
4.3.Intonation and Stress……………………………………………7
4.4. Redundancy and “noise”…………………………………………7
4.5. Predicting……………………………………………………….8
4.6. Colloquial Vocabulary…………………………………………8
4.7. Understanding different accents………………………………..8
4.8. Visual and Environmental clues…………………………………8

5. Remedies to learning to listen to English…………………………….9

5.1.Hearing the sounds……………………………………………….9
5.2.Fatigue……………………………………………………………9
5.3.Intonation and stress……………………………………………….9
5.4.Redundancy and “noise”…………………………………………..
10
5.5.Predicting………………………………………………………….
10
5.6.Colloquial vocabulary……………………………………………..
10
5.7.Understanding accents……………………………………………10
5.8.Visual and Environmental clues…………………………………..10

6. Why criteria for the selection recorded material are useful…………11

7. Summary……………………………………………………………..11

8. References…………………………………………………………12

1. What is Listening Comprehension?

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Generally speaking, we tend to take listening for granted. Imagine talking to a
friend on the phone and listening to their replies; we accomplish this, without
any noticeable difficulty (Anderson& Lynch 1988).
In reality, all this happens, because listening is the activity of trying to get
meaning from something we hear. To listen successfully, we need to be able to
work out what speakers mean, when they use particular words, in particular
occasions, and not simply to understand the words themselves.
(Underwood1989). No one really knows how listening works; it develops
easily for mother –tongue listening, but, requires considerable effort in a
foreign language (: ibid).

2. What is Successful Listening?

We normally listen to something with some idea of what we are going to hear;
we usually have some preconceived idea of the content, formality level and 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 cited in Ur, 1984). Our expectations may be often
linked to our purpose in listening.
With expectations and purpose in mind, we also need to consider component
skills in listening to convey and receive successful spoken messages:

• Discriminating between sounds

• Recognizing words
• Identifying grammatical groupings of words
• Identifying “pragmatic units”- expressions and sets of utterances which
function as whole units to create meaning
• Connecting linguistic cues to paralinguistic cues ( intonation and stress)
and to non-linguistic cues (gestures and relevant objects in the situation)
in order to construct meaning
• using background knowledge and context to predict and confirm
meaning
• recalling important words and ideas

Successful listening involves integration of these component skills

(perception, analysis and synthesis skills), what we call a person’s
listening ability (Rost, 1991) alongside “real time” decisions (situations,
plans for listening, important words and units of meaning and making
sense of messages)

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 Perception Skills Analysis Skills Synthesis Skills

Discriminating Identifying grammatical Connecting linguistic

Sounds units other cues
RecognizingWords Identifying pragmatic Using background
Units knowledge

LISTENING ABILITY

The listener’s role is to play an active part in the process by activating

various types of knowledge, and by trying to understand what the
speaker means (Lynch & Anderson, 1988).

3. Real Life Listening and its Generalizations

In real life, when we listen to something, we definitely listen for a reason to be
able to respond and convey messages successfully; there are some
generalizations, though, that define it (Ur, 1984):
a. Purpose and Expectations

Our expectations are often linked to purpose in listening; if we are listening to a

lecture, we usually know what the subject is going to be and need to learn about
it. If none of these holds true, then, we shall not listen or understand at all. Even
when listening to entertainment, such as jokes, there is a definite purpose
(enjoyment).

b. Response
We need to give immediate response to what has been said, either verbal
or non-verbal in the forms of facial expressions, interruptions or note-
taking.

c. Visibility of the speaker

The visibility of the speaker coincides with the necessity for listener-
response- but, there are cases when we can see the person we are
listening to, but, not to react to him personally; and there is one
common situation where we cannot see the speaker but, must certainly
respond to what he says (telephone conversation).

d. Environmental clues

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 A real life listening situation is rich in environmental clues as to the
content and implications of what is said. Noises, smells or other sense-
stimuli can contribute valuable background information, such as visuals
and the general surroundings. The level of formality, the amount and
kind of emotional involvement of the speakers, the kind of relationships
existing between speakers and listeners, the prevailing mood –all of
which afford significant assistance in comprehending messages.

3.5 Shortness
Another characteristic of real life listening is shortness of chunks into which
heard discourse is usually broken down into smaller units by the physical
movement of the speaker, pause, audience reaction, changing environmental
clues.

3.6 Informal Speech

Informal speech is both “spontaneous” and “colloquial”. The degree of
colloquiality affects its pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar and syntax,
and the spontaneity affects its syntax and discoursal structure.

3.7.Redundancy
Redundant utterances may take the form of repetitions, false starts, re-
phrasings, self-corrections, elaborations, tautologies and meaningless
additions, such as “I mean”, “you know”. 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 time and
information to think.

3.8.Noise
Noise occurs when information is not received by the listener because of
interference, or by the fact that a word / phrase were not understood,
because it was mispronounced, or because the listener simply did not
know it. What the listener has to do in an informal conversation is to
request clarification (“Sorry, I didn`t quite catch…”); for non-native
speakers it is often difficult to cope with it.

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 3.9 Colloquial language
It is confined to informal conversation with expressions, such as “a lot”,
“get to”, “for ages”, “stuff”, “guy”, than their more formal equivalents
“much/many”, “reach”, “for a long time”, “material”, “man”, making
actual vocabulary and structures different from those of prepared texts.
The reader of transcripts of spontaneous conversations is struck.

3.10 Auditory character

Spontaneous conversation is jerky, has frequent pauses and overlaps,
goes intermittently faster and slower, higher and lower, with hesitations,
interruptions, exclamations, emotional reactions of surprise, irritation or
amusement. They cause an uneven changing rhythm of speech; even
one person is speaking for a long time and has not thought out carefully
what to say beforehand means that he has to rely heavily on vocal
emphasis to make his meaning clear (: ibid).

4. Potential Problems in learning to listen to English

4.1. Hearing the sounds

Several students do not perceive certain English sounds with any accuracy
because they do not exist as separate phonemes in their own language, i.e. (/θ/
as in think), which does not exist in French; a native French speaker may often
not notice at first that it occurs in English- he may assimilate it to the nearest
sound familiar to him and say and both hear and say /s/ or /f/. Sometimes
foreign learners of English may have difficulties with the sequences and
juxtapositions of sounds typical of English words consonant-clusters in the
wrong order, i.e. hearing “parts” for “past” or omit one of the sounds “crips” for
“crisps” or hear a vowel that is not pronounced “little” for “little”.

4.2. Fatigue
Learning a foreign language is tiring to listen to and interpret unfamiliar
sounds, lexis and syntax for long stretches of time. In listening, the pace is set
by someone else, and the breaks may or may not occur where the listener needs
them. Many foreign-language learners work much harder than necessary aiming
for accurate perception and interpretation of every word they hear; in a long

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listening comprehension exercise, a learner’s grasp of the content is much
better at the beginning and gets progressively worse as he goes on. This is
partly due to psychological phenomenon but, it is also very largely because of
fatigue: the listener runs out of energy necessary to absorb and interpret the
strange sounds.

4.3. Intonation and stress

The English system of stress, intonation and rhythm can interfere with the
foreign learner`s proper understanding of spoken English (Ur, 1984). More
specifically: (ELT Journal Volume 38/1 Januay 1984)
1. The language used to convey the message: phonological features, including
stress, intonation, weak forms (especially in conversation), lexis, syntax,
cohesion, etc.
2. Difficulty of content and concepts, especially if the material is abstract,
abstruse, highly specialized or technical, esoteric, lengthy, or poorly
organized.
3. Acoustic environment: noise and interference.
4. Amount of support provided by gestures, visuals, etc.

4.4. Redundancy and “noise”

The foreign language learner demands more effort, because he is used to coping
with them in his own language for three reasons: first, he cannot grasp things
during rapid speech- secondly, he is not familiar with the sound-combinations,
lexis and collocations of the language to make retroactive guesses as to what is
missing, i.e./sprin/ as opposed to /sprint/ with the last phoneme missing. Third,
the need of the foreign language learner to perceive and comprehend everything
he hears, even though he would not do so in his own language.
[A] I couldn’t hear which sound it was.
[b] I couldn’t separate the sounds into words.
[c] I heard the words but couldn’t remember their meaning quickly enough.
[d] This word was new to me.
[e] I heard and understood the words but not the meaning of that part of the
sentence. (ELT Journal Volume 57/4 October 2003)

4.5. Predicting
Prediction is a key process in understanding spoken language, as many writers
(for example, Brown 1978:57-9) have shown. Native speakers use their
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perception of the key features of context (Hymes 1964) and their knowledge of
the world to predict what they are about to hear. This ability to predict, before
and during the auditory input, means they do not have to actively process, every
phoneme, syllable, word, phrase, or even tone group of the message (ELT
Journal Volume 41/2 April 1987). For the foreign language learner, intonation
and stress play an important part for supplying ground for certain kinds of
expectations.

4.6. Colloquial Vocabulary

Much of the vocabulary used in colloquial speech may already be known to the
foreign listener; but, this does not mean that he is familiar with it. More
specifically, in an experiment for a university course, technical words like
‘grain boundaries’, ‘transducers’, and ‘dendritic’ caused no problems, because
they were written on the blackboard and explained with diagrams when
necessary. But commonly used words that were taken for granted were a source
of difficulty (ELT Journal Volume 39/3 July 1985).

4.7.Understanding different accents

Flowerdew (1994) summarizes several studies supporting the view that
unfamiliar accents, both native and nonnative, cause difficulty in
comprehension for both native and nonnative speakers (Anderson-Hsieh &
Koehler, 1988; Bilbow, 1989; Brown, 1968; Ekong, 1982; Richards, 1983).
Eisenstein and Berkowitz (1981) reported that ESL learners more easily
understood Standard English than either foreign-accented English. One
possibility is that learners have an advantage in listening comprehension and
intelligibility when the speaker shares the listener’s accent (Flowerdew, 1994).
(TESOL QUARTERLY Vol. 36, No. 2, Summer 2002).

4.8.Visual and Environmental clues

Listeners are able to predict and interpret language by analogy with past
analogy similar experiences. In other words, they have a range of
stereotyped expectations of particular people, places, situations, and text-
types (cf. de Beaugrande and Dressler 1981:184) which they can call up and
use as points of comparison with what is currently being heard and
experienced (ELT Journal Volume 41/2 April 1987).

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5. Remedies in learning to listen to English

5.1.Hearing the sounds

In order to discriminate between similar sounds, teachers draw up a list of
sounds students have trouble in distinguishing between /p/ and /b/, /k/ and /g/,
/d/ and /t/ and writing them on a large sheet of paper, in word lists and
sentences.
In order to recognize particular sounds, i.e. the sound /i:/, teachers prepare one
picture and construct an imaginary description of job, hobbies, likes and
dislikes for the person in the picture. The particular sound should appear
frequently in the description (White 1998).

5.2.Fatigue
To remove some of the stress from listening,
a. teachers might act out five sounds and ask the students to identify what
they are
b. students, in groups, might construct a story which will include all the
sound effects
c. Students tell the story, including the sound effects (:ibid).

5.3.Intonation and Stress

To recognize which words are stressed in sentences, a good idea is to find a
short excerpt from an “audio book”, give each student a copy and ask them to
mark the words they think the reader on the tape will stress; then, to compare
their answers, in pairs, to pool them and to discuss why they think these words
will be stressed, eliciting the idea that it is “content” words (nouns, verbs,
adjectives and adverbs), which receive stress.

5.4.Redundancy and “noise”

To pick out information in a situation with background noise, two listening
passages of roughly equal length, to play at the same time , several times and
students are equipped with comprehension tasks to do ; they must try to ignore
the other passage and concentrate on their own (:ibid).

5.5.Predicting

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To predict what will happen next, the teacher should stop the listening transcript
every now and then, and ask from the learners to suggest what will happen
next.

5.6.“Colloquial” vocabulary
To identify particular words in the stream of speech, learners might use two
sections of a reader on a cassette; half the class listens to the half of the story
and decides on ten key words which help them retell the story to the other
group, using their list of key words and the other group listen for the words on
their list and decide on the order they hear them in and then, they compare their
lists and decide on grade of difficulty for each word (:ibid).

5.7.Understanding different accents

According to Hadfield J. & Ch. (1999), many learners find it difficult to

develop the listening skill, since they may not often hear or understand spoken
English outside the classroom; the best way is to provide them with regular
listening practice and it is good for them to have practice in listening to a
variety of voices speaking English so as to understand non-natives.

5.8.Visual and Environmental clues

To activate previous knowledge of a topic to understand a listening passage,
learners may do a survey on a topic (eating) and then, they listen to a recording,
which mentions some of the ideas gathered beforehand.

6. Why criteria for the selection recorded material are useful

It is important to measure any recorded texts which can be obtained, so that

decisions can be made about whether any particular part is suitable for a
certain group of students.
Before listening to pieces of discourse, we need to pay attention to its
language, length, content, style and speed of delivery.

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 These criteria assist teachers in deciding what steps they should take to
compensate for any deficiencies learners find in listening transcripts and
“how close to real speech” they are and the quality of the recording
(UnderWood, 1989).

7. Summary
Listening is an essential skill for useful communication. Effective
listeners utilize a wide range of information sources simultaneously. In
grading listening exercises we have to bear in mind the three principal
aspects of listening:
a) The type of input
b) The support provided by the listening context
c) The kind of task involved
It is important to provide foreign learners with training specifically directed at
listening skills (Anderson & Lynn).

References

Anderson A. & Lynch T. “Listening” © Oxford University Press 1988

Hadfield Ch. & J. “Simple Listening Activities”© Oxford University Press

1999

UnderWood M. “Teaching Listening”Published in the United States of America

by Longman Inc., New York © Mary UnderWood 1989

Rost M. “Listening in Action” © Prentice Hall International (UK) Ltd. 1991

Ur P. “Teaching Listening Comprehension” © Cambridge University Press

1984
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White G. “Listening” © Oxford University Press 1998

ELT Journal Volume 57/4 October 2003 ©Oxford University Press

ELT Journal Volume 41/2 April 1987 © Oxford University Press 1987

ELT Journal Volume 39/3 July 1985 187

ELT Journal Volume 38/1 Januay 1984

TESOL QUARTERLY Vol. 36, No. 2, Summer 2002

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