Listening-Based Methods of Teaching

So far listening has been taken as a process of decoding speech -- working out the message from the sentence you hear just as a spy decodes a secret message by using a code he or she already knows. However, the main focus in recent discussions of teaching methodology has been on listening as a way of learning language rather than as a way of processing language. Logically, L2 learners cannot learn a language if they never hear it the sounds, the words, the structures, have to come from somewhere. !his process can be called codebreaking listening means working out the language code from the message just as a cryptographer works out an unknown code from an intercepted message. "ecoding speech has the aim of discovering the message using processes that are already known. #odebreaking speech has the aim of discovering the processes themselves from a message. $ne of the first to interpret listening as codebreaking was %ames &sher's total physical response method (!)*+ (&sher, ,-./+, which claimed that listening to commands and carrying them out was an effective way of learning a second language. & specimen !)* lesson reported by &sher (,-./+ consists of the teacher getting the students to respond to the commands0 1alk to the window. !ouch the window. 1alk to the table. !ouch the table. %uan, stand up and walk to the door. %aime, walk to the table and sit on the table. and so on. !he students follow the directions the teacher gives. !)* came from psychological theories of language learning and e2tensive research has been carried out into it. 3ts uni4ue feature is the emphasis on learning through physical actions. &s &sher puts it, 3n a sense, language is orchestrated to a choreography of the human body. "uring the early ,-.5. there was much talk of listening-based methods, summed up under the slogan as 6Listening 7irst8 (#ook, ,-./+. )ostovsky (,-9:+ had described how students who were taught *ussian by methods that emphasi;e listening were better than students taught in a conventional way. &ccording to <ary and <ary (,-.,a ,-.,b+ the benefits of concentrating on listening are that students do not feel so embarrassed if they do not have to speak, the memory load is less if they listen without speaking, classroom e4uipment such as tape-recorders can be used more effectively for listening than for speaking, and so on. #lassroom research has confirmed that there are distinct advantages to listening-based methods, as we see in the collection by 1init; (,-.,+. $ne of the major schism. in contemporary teaching methodology is between those who re4uire students to practise communication by both listening and speaking and those who prefer students to listen for information without speaking. =rashen brings these listening-based methods together through the notion of comprehensible input. He claims that ac4uisition can take place only when people understand messages in the target language' (=rashen and !errell, ,-.>+. Listening is motivated by the need to get messages out of what is heard. L2 learners ac4uire a new language by hearing it in conte2ts where the meaning is made plain to them. 3deally the speech they hear has enough old language that the student already knows and makes enough sense in the conte2t for the new language to be understood and absorbed. How the teacher gets the message across is not particularly important. )ointing to one?s nose and saying. !his is my nose, working out nose from the conte2t in 6!here?s a spot on your nose, looking at a photo of a face and labelling it with nose, eyes, etc.,8 all of these are satisfactory provided that the student discovers the message in the sentence. Steve @c"onough (,--A+ neatly summari;es the process as the accretion of knowledge from instances of incomprehension embedded in the comprehensible. =rashen claims that all teaching methods that work utili;e the same fundamental pedagogical principle of providing comprehensible input0 if 2 is shown to be good for ac4uiring a second language, 2 helps to provide #3 Bcomprehensible input, either directly or indirectly (=rashen, ,-. lb+. =rashen?s codebreaking approach to listening became a strong influence on language teachers in the ,-.5s. 3t is saying essentially that L2 ac4uisition depends on listening0 decoding is codebreaking. 3t did not, however, oddly enough, lead to a generation of published listening-based main course books. Cut this theory does not say what the processes of decoding are and how they relate to codebreaking. !he statement that teaching should be meaningful does not get us very far by itself. @ost teachers have already been trying to make their lessons convey messages. #omprehensible input is too simplistic and too all-embracing a notion to produce anything but the most general guidelines on what a teacher should do. 3t pays little heed to the actual processes of listening or learning but promises that everything will be all right if the teacher ma2imi;es comprehensible input. &s advice this is too vague the teacher can do anything, provided the students have to make sense of the language that is addressed to them. &t least anything but

make the students produce language, thus eliminating most of the Critish communicative methods. L2 Learning &nd Listening )rocesses L2 listening is an active process involving background schemas, etc. Coth 6top-down8 and 6bottom-up8 parsing are involved. 3neffective L2 students rely too much on bottom-up parsing. !eaching Dses !eaching involves both decoding messages from language and codebreaking the language system from what is heard. !ask-based listening may be dangerous if it is too task-specific.