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Listening Comprehension and

Acquisition
LSA 1 Background Essay

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Word count:
2062

Table of Contents
1.

Introduction....................................................................................................... 3

2.

Analysis............................................................................................................. 3
I.

Activating Schemata...................................................................................... 4

II.

Top-down Approach........................................................................................ 4

III.

Bottom-up Approach...................................................................................5

IV.

Integrating Bottom-up and Top-down approaches......................................5

3.

Issues and Solutions.......................................................................................... 7

I.

Issues with Cognitive Processing...................................................................7

II.

Suggested Solutions...................................................................................... 8

4.

Teaching Approaches and Evaluation..............................................................10

I.

Pre-listening skills:....................................................................................... 10

II.

While Listening skills:...................................................................................11

III.

Post listening skills:...................................................................................12

Bibliography:......................................................................................................... 13

1. Introduction
Listening for many learners has been an under-practiced skill, where
not much attention was invested in it through most school settings,
mainly in the Middle-East. Assessment was mostly content-oriented but
not skill-oriented and not concerned with the students developmental
skills; whether that was in first or second language acquisition.
According to Richards (2008), listening was mainly focused on
mastering micro-skills such as recognizing reduced forms and cohesive
devices. Views on listening later developed and adopted a more
cognitive approach to teaching listening, which introduced methods
such as top-down, bottom-up and activating schemata during
comprehension (Brown, 2006). Therefore, it is possible to help second
language learners with developing their listening as a process of well
orchestrated skills, rather than a product.

2. Analysis
Brown (2006) discussed the aspects of the cognitive view of language
learning on listening as a skill. He mentioned that it is possible to
develop the learners listening skills through the cognitive approach,
even in later stages in life. This can be done through activating prior
knowledge, thinking of the purpose of the listening tasks, which would

serve the purpose of listening for comprehension. Furthermore, to

develop listening for acquisition, the teacher needs to devise wellstructured follow-up speaking tasks, to help expose the learners to
interactive listening as well (Richards, 2008). In this section, the
cognitive approach to teaching listening is closely investigated.
I. Activating Schemata
Activating schemata, also known as prior knowledge, is an integral part
of teaching listening. It directly affects learners cognition and helps
them understand new experiences. Cook (2008) mentions that our
background knowledge sometimes overrides the acoustic signals we
hear (p.22), since listening is temporal and cannot be revisited;
therefore, learners rely more on prior knowledge to patch up what they
might miss out from the listening segment. OMalley et al. (1989)
further support that more effective listeners use prior knowledge to
infer meaning rather that working it out from the text itself. It is
therefore considered as a feature of successful and skilled listeners
when they demonstrate their ability to contextualize their guesses
and predict the script of a given schema (Brown, 2006).
II. Top-down Approach
The top-down approach is listener-based, where s/ he depends on
using prior knowledge and experiences to process the newly presented

information. In other words, this is what the learner comprehends in

mind before the listening task (Wilson, 2008). In this approach, minimal
information is sufficient to enable the participants to understand what
happened. When applying a learners prior knowledge about things,
the actual discourse heard is used to confirm the learners
expectations and to fill out details (Richards, 2008). Examples of topdown tasks would be listening for gist, inference, and prediction.
III.

Bottom-up Approach

Bottom-up on the other hand is text-based, where the learner uses the
information about sounds, words meanings and discourse markers to
assemble her/ his understanding of what s/ he hears one step at a
time. Richards (2008) views it as a process of decoding. The learners
lexical and grammatical competence is the key to decoding the input.
To understand input through bottom up processing, the learners tend
to mentally break down its components into what Richards (2008)
refers to as chunks, which guides them to the core meaning of the
input. The learners competencies in grammar and lexis provide the
means to finding the appropriate chunks. Examples of bottom-up tasks
would be listening for details or specific information such as; cloze
listening, multiple choice questions, true or false statements after
listening.

IV.

Integrating Bottom-up and Top-down approaches

In real world listening, both top-down and bottom-up approaches are integrated
together, where one or the other dominates depending on the level taught in the
classroom, the purpose of the listening task, the familiarity with the topic, and many
more factors upon which the teacher needs to make the decision on which approach
to dominate the listening lesson.
When looking at the staging of the lesson, there are always possibilities to use both
approaches and to integrate them according to the learners needs. Pre-listening
might include activating prior knowledge and/ or pre-teaching new lexical items.
While-listening can include listening for gist and/ or listening for details. Postlistening usually focuses on listening as acquisition rather than comprehension, so
the learners have a chance to individualize the topic of the listening and work
collaboratively to provide another chance for interactional listening.

3. Issues and Solutions

As highlighted before, listening is a complicated skill. Understanding
the nature of the skill and choosing the right approach do not eliminate
learners issues. This section presents some possible learners issues
and provides proposed solutions to overcome them.
I

Issues with Cognitive Processing

Throughout my teaching experience in the Middle-East, I came to find

that the most common issues reported by my students during classes
are closely related to the cognitive processing of listening as a skill. It
is worth noting that in the aforementioned teaching context, learners
receive no skills training in first language listening. If they get any
second language listening, it usually takes the form of routine, if not
skipped altogether.
In the beginner and elementary levels, learners tend to depend
expansively on bottom-up skills, depending on the poor formation of
the chunks due to their limited lexical, grammatical and phonological
proficiency. Goh (2002) highlights several issues that I find true with
most learners that I have taught over the years. Some of these issues
are:
Learners quickly forget what is heard.

They dont recognize the word they know.

They understand the words, but not the intended message.
The neglect the next part when thinking about the meaning.
Unable to form mental representations from words heard.

Rost (2011) attributes some of these learner difficulties to the following

factors:
Elision, assimilation and intrusion: each has its own independent
definition, but they are mostly interpreted when the learner
knows the word individually but cannot recognize it within such
features of connected speech, because they are used to seeing
the word rather than listening to it in real aural input.
Chunking: a learner who is highly proficient in grammar, lexis and
phonology can easily form proper chunking of the listening input
to serve the purpose needed from the tasks at hand. It is an issue
when the learner does not have good command of those
systems, which leads her/ him to form chunks that are mostly
confusing rather than serving the right purpose for the task
delegated.
Orthography versus sound: some languages have an opaque
relation between orthography and sound, and others are quite
transparent on the other hand. It depends mainly on the transfer
of this relation from the learners first language, which helps her/
him overcome it.

V. Suggested Solutions
Richards (2008) advises that it is never late to train adult learners to
listening skills to provide them with the ability to communicate
effectively in a second language. He proposes that a successful learner
does not only focus on the content of a text, but also considers how to
listen. This highlights on the importance of training the learners on
metacognitive as well as cognitive strategies to master the listening
skill.
During planning, a teacher needs to consider the listening task and the
development of strategies when determining the objectives of a
lesson. Goh (2000) proposes two teaching strategies that would
address the issues previously stated. She suggests that we could help
learners directly by providing them with training of selected sounds,
pronunciation and content words that might appear problematic while
listening, and might hinder comprehension. In addition, learners also
need to be aware of listening as meaning not only as perception and
recognition of sounds and intonation. For the purpose of enhancing
listening comprehension, three groups of strategies need to be learned
cognitive, metacognitive, and social-affective. As stated by Goh
(2000)

Cognitive tactics act directly on the input to make sense of

it; metacognitive tactics manage cognitive processes and
difficulties during listening; social tactics involve other
people in achieving understanding; affective tactics
manage unproductive emotions during comprehension.
(p.71)

4. Teaching Approaches and Evaluation

Based on the approach to teaching listening proposed by Brown
(2006), the following presentation integrates his ideas to provide an
effective and well structured listening lesson.
This section presents the required skills for each listening stage guided
by the interactive model for low learner students. Each stage covers
the aim of the stage, the required skills, the teacher role, the students
role and the importance of the stage. The listening skills can be divided
into three main areas; pre-listing, while-listening and post listening.
I

Pre-listening skills:

The pre-listening stage exists before listening and it requires using of

students background information and prediction skills. The aim of the
stage is to give students a chance to prepare for the listening task, and
understand the task aim (listening for aim). A big part of the listening
success depends on the organization of this stage. The teacher
introduces the learners to the listening task using visuals or exercises
(e.g. opinion gaps or information gaps). Students have a good chance
to explore and gain better understanding of the task during this stage.
This is the most crucial stage, as they should gain information as much

as possible during this task to fill in their linguistic gap (grammar

forms, vocabulary etc).

VI.

While Listening skills:

While-listening stage starts after playing the listening for the first time,
and it requires extensive and intensive listening skills. The aim of the
stage is to give students an opportunity to listen for gist-extensive
listening (e.g. the main idea) and listen for details-intensive listening
(e.g. specific information). This stage is important because it helps the
students raise their confidence and enhances their enthusiasm. The
teacher sets the task and monitors the students performance.
Students can listen to the passage more than one time according to
the number of tasks they are asked to perform and according to
students need, as long as they get different task for every listening.
There are other factors that decide the number of opportunities to hear
the passage like; reducing students anxiety, difficulty, length and
pedagogical focus. Teachers need to be careful not to get students
bored, though. During this stage peer-teaching and peer-correction is
required, and they may listen again to check answers. Peer teaching
and peer correction is good for learners, although some researchers do
not advise to do it not to spread mistakes among students. Sometimes
students learn from each other more than they learn from the teacher,

though. The learners may get a chance to see the text while listening
in this stage, to recognize the written form of words and notice the
difference between the written and spoken forms of words.

VII.

Post listening skills:

This is the typical last stage of a listening lesson, where the lesson
transitions from listening for comprehension to listening for acquisition.
The aim of the stage is to consolidate students understanding of the
passage through comparing answers with colleagues or the teacher do
this in plenary (with the whole class). Also, in this stage, the unknown
vocabulary is discussed and the responds to the content of the
passages are done (they could be orally or written. The aim of the
stage is to give students a chance to reflect on what they have learnt.
This stage requires summarizing and passage mining for grammatical
aspects or new language expressions. Students are expected to
perform some role-play or group discussions based on the listening.

Bibliography:
Brown, S. (2006). Teaching listening. Cambridge University Press.
Goh, C. (2000). A cognitive perspective on language learners' listening
comprehension problems. System, 28(1), 55-75.
O'MALLEY, J. M., Chamot, A. U., & Kpper, L. (1989). Listening
comprehension strategies in second language acquisition. Applied
linguistics, 10(4), 418-437.
Richards, J. C. (2008). Teaching listening and speaking. Cambridge
University Press.
Wilson, J. 2008. How to Teach Listening. Longman.