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Listening comprehension: The

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SYSTEM
System 34 (2006) 165182
www.elsevier.com/locate/system

Listening comprehension: The learners perspective

Suzanne Graham

Institute of Education, University of Reading, Bulmershe Court, Earley, Reading RG6 1HY, UK
Received 7 January 2005; received in revised form 17 October 2005; accepted 28 November 2005

Abstract
This paper reports on the ndings of an investigation into the perceptions held by English students aged 1618 years regarding listening comprehension in French and how they view the reasons
behind their success or lack of it in this skill. The study suggests that listening comprehension is the
skill in which students in the post-compulsory phase of education feel they have achieved the least
success. The main problems highlighted by learners were dealing adequately with the speed of delivery of texts, making out individual words in a stream of spoken French, and making sense of any
words identied. Furthermore, most learners attributed their diculties in listening to their own supposed low ability in the skill and to the diculty of the listening tasks and texts set, with little awareness shown regarding the role played by ineective listening strategies or skill application.
Suggestions are made for addressing problems regarding how students listen and their attitudes
towards listening comprehension.
2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Listening comprehension; Beliefs; Learner strategies; French as a foreign language

1. Introduction
The importance of listening for second or foreign language acquisition has been underlined by authors such as Feyten (1991). Yet is listening1 the skill with which learners feel
the most comfortable? There is evidence that the opposite is true. Arnold (2000) comments
*

Tel.: +44 0 118 3785885; fax: +44 0 118 3788834.

E-mail address: s.j.graham@reading.ac.uk.
1
Listening as discussed in this paper means unidirectional listening, in the sense that the hearer is unable to
interact with the speaker, as in the case of listening to a tape or video recorded text.
0346-251X/$ - see front matter 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.system.2005.11.001

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S. Graham / System 34 (2006) 165182

on how listening induces anxiety in learners, because of the pressure it places on them to
process input rapidly. Graham (2002), investigating the lack of popularity of language
learning in England, found that for intermediate learners, listening was the skill in which
they experienced the greatest diculty.
In many ways it is unsurprising that learners perceive listening as dicult. Buck (2001,
p. 29) emphasizes the complexity of the listening process, in which the listener must use a
wider variety of knowledge sources, linguistic and non-linguistic, to interpret rapidly
incoming data. The application of linguistic knowledge in comprehension is usually
termed bottom-up processing, whereby the sounds, words, clauses and sentences of a passage are decoded in a fairly linear fashion to elicit meaning (Rost, 2002). In top-down processing, the listeners knowledge of the topic, their general knowledge of the world and of
how texts generally work, will interact with this linguistic knowledge to create an interpretation of the text (Buck, 2001, p. 29). While it is generally agreed that listening requires
a combination of both forms of processing, their respective contribution to eective listening is still not clearly understood (Tsui and Fullilove, 1998).
Given this complexity and perhaps because the process is largely unobservable, it may
be dicult for learners to have a clear understanding of how they go about listening in a
foreign language, or, more importantly, how they might improve their performance.
Learners are likely, however, to have certain beliefs about listening, which may inuence
the way in which they approach it. While there is a growing body of research devoted to
learners beliefs about language learning in general, comparatively few studies have looked
at beliefs about listening. This article will argue that before they can hope to improve
learners listening skills, teachers need to be aware of the beliefs that learners hold, particularly where they perceive listening as a skill in which progress is dicult to achieve. The
aim of the present study is to shed light on such beliefs.
2. Background
2.1. Metacognitive beliefs and metacognitive knowledge
In her introduction to the 1999 Special Issue of System on metacognitive knowledge
and beliefs about language learning, Wenden (1999) comments on the framework proposed by Flavell (1979, 1987), which has been widely used by researchers investigating this
area (e.g., Victori, 1999). Flavell identies three aspects of metacognitive knowledge:
knowledge of person variables, what learners know about how humans in general learn,
as well as what they know about how they as individuals learn; task variables, what learners know about the nature of a task and the demands it might make on their knowledge
and skills; and strategy variables, learners knowledge of dierent strategies and their
appropriate deployment.
As Wenden (1999, pp. 435436) comments, the two terms, knowledge and beliefs, are
often used interchangeably. Belief implies a degree of subjectivity, in contrast with the
more objective connotations of knowledge, what one holds to be true rather than what
one knows to be true. This degree of subjectivity is reected in the framework put forward
by Paris and Winograd (1990), who refer instead to metacognitive beliefs. They suggest
that the latter have a strong inuence on motivation. This is underlined in the core dimensions that they propose: agency, learners beliefs about their own competences, encompassing elements of Flavells knowledge about person variables, but stressing more rmly the

S. Graham / System 34 (2006) 165182

167

role of self-ecacy, or belief in ones ability to accomplish a task; instrumentality, concerning learners perceptions of the relationship between the learning strategies they employ
and learning outcomes; control, students beliefs in their ability to control and direct their
thinking (Paris and Winograd, 1990, p. 29); and purpose, learners ability to value success
in an area of study.
Learners who have a strong sense of instrumentality might also be described as having
an adaptive attributional style, i.e., they believe that success or failure can be attributed
to factors that are internal and controllable, such as eort expended or strategies
employed, rather than to uncontrollable ones such as task diculty (Weiner, 1984). A
few studies of beliefs about language learning have looked at learners attributions (e.g.,
Tse, 2000; Williams and Burden, 1999; Williams et al., 2004). Others have investigated
the relationship between self-ecacy and learner strategies. Learners with positive selfbeliefs, strong self-ecacy, seem to have better control over and knowledge of learner
strategies (Cotterall, 1999; Victori, 1999) and to use a wider range (National Capital Language Resource Center, 2000; Yang, 1999), although the direction of the relationship,
between strategy use and self-ecacy, is not clear-cut.
In all of the literature discussed above, learner strategies occupy an important position.
These have been dened by Cohen (1998, p. 4) as action taken to enhance the learning or
use of a second or foreign language, through the storage, retention, recall and application
of information about that language. For listening comprehension, some authors prefer to
distinguish between listening skills (or sub-skills) and strategies, seeing the former as native
listener competencies that non-natives need to acquire, such as mastery of auditory phonetics, while strategies, by contrast, might be described as strictly compensatory (Field,
1998, p. 117), used to make up for learners imperfect knowledge of the L2 syntax and
vocabulary (Field, 2000, p. 189). Field (2000) acknowledges that not all commentators
would agree with these denitions and also suggests that the distinction between skills
and strategies should not be applied too narrowly (Field, 1998, p. 118). Space does
not permit a detailed discussion of how a strategy should be dened2. What seems important for learner beliefs is the extent to which learners are aware that how well they listen
depends to a large extent on what they do when listening, be it the application of strategies
or (sub) skills.
2.2. Beliefs about listening
Among the relatively few studies that have looked at beliefs about L2 listening, investigations into beliefs about the problems associated with the skill have predominated. An
early study by Powers (1986) approached the question from the perspective of Canadian
and US university educators of non-native speakers of English. A questionnaire gathered
the educators views on the importance of various listening activities for academic success
and the extent to which non-native speakers diered from native speakers in the diculties
they experienced. Educators believed that non-native speakers had greater diculties with
both top-down and bottom-up processing. So, for example, they were felt to have more
problems with deducing the meaning of words from context, and also with recognizing

The denition of the term learner strategy is currently an issue of debate and Cohens (1998) distinction
between strategies of use and strategies for learning the language is not universally accepted (see Cohen, 2005).

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S. Graham / System 34 (2006) 165182

the function of prosodic features such as change of pitch and sentence stress (Powers,
1986, p. 20).
Later studies have investigated perceptions of listening diculties more clearly from the
listeners point of view, and have also taken a wider perspective in trying to uncover learners insights into listening strategies. A series of papers by Goh (1997, 1999, 2000) discusses
these issues using data gathered from Chinese learners of English (average age 19). Her
1997 study investigated listening beliefs within Flavells (1979, 1987) framework and
reports that learners articulated their beliefs about three aspects of listening: their role
in the listening process; the demands of listening tasks; and the strategies they employed
while listening. In the rst area, learners identied a range of obstacles to listening, including their own presumed shortcomings, such as inecient memory and even personality. In
the second, they commented on factors relating to listening tasks that made them easy or
dicult, including dierent types of oral texts. In the third area, Goh claims that learners
showed an awareness of a range of strategies, both bottom-up and top-down. In her (1999)
study she re-examines the factors that learners believed inuenced their listening, relating
to the text, the speaker, the listener and the environment. Within these groups, ve factors
were mentioned by two-thirds of the learners: vocabulary used in the text, prior knowledge
of the passages theme, speech rate, type of input and speakers accent. Goh also found
that higher ability listeners cited a wider range of factors (12) than lower ability listeners
who listed only four, and who concentrated on text-based factors. Goh claims that higher
ability listeners saw the listening process as an interaction between the listener, the text and
the listening environment and thus displayed a wider range of metacognitive knowledge.
Finally, in Goh (2000), the framework for listening proposed by Anderson (1983, 1995)
is applied to a further analysis of the same data set. This framework presents listening as a
three-stage process, beginning with perceptual processing. Here attention is focused on the
text and phonemes are segmented from the speech stream (Anderson, 1995, p. 137, in Goh,
2000, p. 57). In the second stage, parsing, meaningful mental representations are formed
from words. In the last phase, utilization, information gathered in the previous two phases
is related to existing knowledge in the form of schemata (Goh, 2000, p. 57). Goh claims
that her learners reported 10 listening problems which related to all three phases of listening. One diculty involved understanding the words but not the intended message (Goh,
2000, p. 62) but over half of the problems were concerned with word recognition and
attention failure during perceptual processing. Lower-ability listeners reported more problems with low-level processing such as speech recognition.
Although Andersons framework has not received universal acceptance from current
listening theorists 3, Goh (2000) reaches valid conclusions regarding her subjects perceived
diculties. These were largely associated with bottom-up processing, with some associated
with ineective top-down processing, although she does not use this terminology. Goh
argues that the teaching of listening should include sucient attention to improving skills
of perception, combined carefully with strategy instruction that teaches learners how to
use top-down strategies such as inferencing from context.
Rather dierent conclusions about the relative importance of bottom-up and top-down
processing are reached by Hasan (2000), who investigated how Arabic students of English
perceived their diculties in L2 listening. Again, many problems were associated with

I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for this comment on Andersons framework.

S. Graham / System 34 (2006) 165182

169

bottom-up processing, such as dealing with hesitation, unclear pronunciation and speedy
delivery. Hasan interprets the students perceived diculties as an indication that they
require more training in top-down strategies that would allow them to compensate for
their bottom-up weaknesses.
The dierence in emphasis given by Hasan (2000) and Goh (2000) reects the lack of
agreement that exists in the literature on listening strategies regarding the relevant importance of bottom-up and top-down processing for successful comprehension. While this is
an important question, perhaps of equal importance is the extent to which learners are
aware of how they might realistically address some of the listening problems that they perceive (Goh, 2000, p. 73). This conclusion is also reached by Vogely (1995), who investigated the listening beliefs of 83 English students of Spanish in a US university. She
looked at beliefs about: what makes a good listener; what makes an authentic listening
task dicult; and learners perception of their use of comprehension and repair strategies.
While students felt that text-level elements such as the combination of words into phrases,
recognizing words and recognizing grammatical structures had the most eect on the level
of diculty of an aural text, few reported using strategies that focused on and addressed
these diculties.
Vogely (1995, p. 46) comments that one of the biggest challenges teachers face is to
help the learner close the gap between recognizing the elements of diculty and eectively
engaging the appropriate strategies to overcome those elements. While knowledge of the
existence of strategies is not in itself a guarantee that learners will be able to employ them
successfully, there is some evidence in the literature of general educational psychology
(Schunk, 1994; Schunk and Swartz, 1991; Zimmerman and Martinez-Pons, 1992) that
both performance and self-ecacy can be improved when learners are encouraged to
see the link between their strategy use and learning outcomes, i.e., when their sense of
instrumentality is increased, to use the terminology of Paris and Winograd (1990).
Research has yet to determine whether such an approach would benet learners beliefs
about and performance in L2 listening comprehension.
3. The study
The present study sought to explore several of the issues discussed above. It forms part
of a larger project which investigated a range of questions concerning the perceptions of
learners of French (aged 1618) in England regarding language study in general (Graham,
2004). This paper reports on ndings from the study relating to learners beliefs about listening, in particular:
1. How successful did learners believe themselves to be as listeners, and to what did they
attribute their success or lack of it?
2. What strategies were they aware of employing when listening?

3.1. Methodology
3.1.1. Context and participants
All high schools involved in The University of Readings Initial Teacher Education
Schools Partnership for foreign languages were invited to take part in the study (plus

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S. Graham / System 34 (2006) 165182

one college) and 10 institutions agreed to do so. A total of 595 students took part in the
questionnaire section of the study, and 28 of these were interviewed. These 28 students
were chosen to give a broadly balanced sample in terms of gender, year group, prociency
(in terms of predicted and achieved examination results). Students were selected in consultation with their teachers and based on their questionnaire responses.
Learners were aged 1618. They formed three groups: (a) those in Year 11, the nal
year of compulsory schooling and compulsory language study4, who were taking the General Certicate of Education (the GCSE) examination at the end of the year; (b) students
in Year 12, who had opted to study French for at least another year, leading to the
Advanced Subsidiary (AS) examination; and (c) students in Year 13, who were taking a
second year of post-compulsory French, leading to the full Advanced Level (or A2)
examination.
Year 11 students had been learning French for approximately 6 years, Year 12 and 13
students for seven to eight years. Typically, Year 11 students would receive 23 h of language teaching a week, Year 12 and 13 students, 45 h.
The examination for which Year 11 students were preparing assesses their ability to listen for gist and the main points of a text in a variety of types of spoken language, while
candidates aiming at the highest grades need also to be able to recognize points of view,
attitudes and emotions and draw conclusions from texts using a range of tenses (QCA,
2000). All four skills of listening, reading, writing and speaking are given equal weight
in the examination.
For the Year 12 and 13 examinations, learners must comprehend a range of complex
spoken texts in a variety of registers, understanding detail and inferring meaning and
points of view, appreciating tense, mood, style and register (QCA, 2001).
While the above subject criteria suggest that both pre- and post-16 examinations are
assessing similar listening skills, in practice, learners are faced with quite dierent tasks
and texts. The GCSE exposes Year 11 students typically to scripted texts with nonabstract themes, under 100 words long, with pauses between dierent parts of the passage.
Short, often non-verbal responses to the text are required. By contrast, texts used in the
Year 12 and 13 examinations come from conceptually more challenging topics (e.g., political issues), are longer (up to about 400 words), less scripted and require a more complex,
personal response in writing. Thus students embarking on post-16 study have to adjust to
work of an increased level of diculty, and very rapidly, as the AS examination is taken
after just 8 months of post-16 work.
Chambers (1996) outlines what he sees as the typical approach to listening in foreign
language classrooms in England, to which most learners in this study would have been
exposed: learners listen to a text and complete an accompanying exercise, the correction
of which is the nal stage of the listening process. Listening is thus principally a test of
comprehension, focusing on the understanding of specic details rather than on the global
sense of the text. Graham (1997) found that Year 12 teachers rarely gave students instruction in how to listen, other than suggesting such approaches as repeated listening to a text.
The authors experience as an educator of foreign language teachers suggests that many of
the ndings of both Chambers (1996) and Graham (1997) are still valid several years later.

This was the case at the time of the present study. Since September 2004, however, foreign language study is
compulsory in England only up to 14 years of age.

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171

3.1.2. Instruments
3.1.2.1. The questionnaire. The questionnaire was developed from one used in an earlier
major study of UK Year 12 students (Graham, 1997) and incorporated elements adapted
from Chan (1996) and Williams and Burden (1999). It went through two pilot stages, in
which a dierent group of students completed the questionnaire with the researcher, commented on its clarity and their understanding of the wording used.
In constructing the questionnaire, a number of issues were taken into consideration.
Recent investigations into attributions made by foreign language learners (e.g., Tse,
2000; Williams et al., 2004) have favoured a qualitative, open-ended elicitation approach.
Williams et al. (2004) comment that studies that present learners with a limited range of
attributions and ask them to indicate how far they feel these are possible causes of their
success or lack of it, determine and restrict participants responses. On the other hand,
one might argue that a more closed approach allows the researcher to investigate the
extent to which a given range of attributions, which previous research has claimed to be
valid representations of learners attributions, are in fact perceived to be important by a
group of students in a particular context.
In an attempt to address both arguments, items were developed to explore students
attributions combining closed and open-ended questions. So, after a number of items
relating to learners perceptions of their overall level of achievement in French, students
were asked to complete sentences to describe reasons for doing well or not so well in
French in general, so that they had the opportunity to explain in their own words what
they felt the reasons for their achievement in French overall might be. Attributions for perceived success or lack of it in specic skill areas were then investigated. Respondents were
asked to indicate on a six-point scale (1 = disagree strongly) the extent to which they
agreed that various factors were plausible reasons for their learning outcomes. These factors were expressed in language that the pilot study suggested was understandable for
learners of this age range. For the area of most success, the reasons given were as follows:
Im just good at that kind of thing
Its just luck
I try hard
I use good techniques or strategies
Were given easy work
These reasons were chosen as the attributions most commonly considered in the literature (Chan, 1996). The option for Ability was worded to indicate an entity view of ability (Dweck, 1987), i.e., something that is xed and limited. Students in the piloting of the
questionnaire indicated that this wording was perceived as intended. For the area in which
students felt they had achieved the least success, the sentences were simply put in a negative form, e.g., I use poor techniques and strategies.
In addition, space was given for respondents to write an alternative or additional explanation, to ensure that other possible responses were not being closed o. Any issues not
fully explored through the questionnaire were then followed up in the interviews.
3.1.2.2. The interview. A semi-structured interview schedule was drawn up after an initial
analysis of the questionnaire data, focusing on important themes that emerged (Appendix
A). These included: students beliefs about why they had been successful or unsuccessful in
the particular skill area they had identied; how they believed they employed any strategies

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S. Graham / System 34 (2006) 165182

when approaching these skill areas. Within the group of 28 students interviewed, six students identied listening as the area in which they felt they had achieved the most or the
least success.
3.1.3. Procedures
Students completed the questionnaire in class. They were assured of anonymity and
informed that their participation was entirely voluntary. Interviewees signed a consent
form, giving them details of the purpose of the study and informing them that they could
withdraw at any time. They gave permission for the interviews to be recorded.
3.1.4. Analysis
The questionnaire data were analyzed quantitatively. For the skills identied by students as areas of the most or least success, simple frequencies and percentages were calculated. A v2 test was used to see if there was a signicant dierence in the number of
students identifying each skill.
For the responses made to each attributional statement by students who saw listening
as their area of either most or least success, the scale was collapsed to create three categories: students who agreed with each statement (points 5 and 6), disagreed with it (points 1
and 2) and those who were relatively uncertain (points 3 and 4). Simple frequencies and
percentages for responses in these categories were then calculated.
The Friedman two-way analysis of variance test was used to ascertain whether overall
there was a signicant dierence in the level of agreement for dierent attributions. The
Wilcoxon signed-ranks test5 was then used to explore more precisely where these dierences lay, investigating in particular those attributions accorded most importance by
respondents (ability, eort and strategy use in the case of success, and ability, task diculty and poor strategy use for lack of success).
All interviews were transcribed verbatim and analyzed qualitatively. For the six interviewees who are presented here, several preliminary readings were conducted, to gain an
overview of the data. The transcripts were then analyzed in detail, for what they revealed
about three areas: students perceptions of the reasons behind their success or lack of it in
listening; their knowledge of dierent strategies and their appropriate deployment; the
strategies that students claimed to use. The software package QSR*NUDIST was used
to help categorize sections of the transcripts into these three themes. To provide an element of reliability, the analysis was put aside for several months and then carried out
again from scratch. The initial categorization held good in the second round of analysis.
4. Results
4.1. Learners beliefs about themselves as listeners, and their attributions for success or lack
of it: the questionnaire
Students responded to the questionnaire in the numbers shown in Table 1. Tables 2a
and 2b indicate that post-16, few students saw listening as an area of strength. Indeed,
5
In order to avoid obtaining signicant results by chance, for multiple comparisons, a Bonferroni adjustment
was made (see Bryman and Cramer, 2001), by dividing the alpha level (0.05) by the number of comparisons made
(3), adjusting the alpha level to 0.017.

S. Graham / System 34 (2006) 165182

173

Table 1
Numbers of respondents to questionnaire by year group and gender

Male
Female
Totals

Year 11

Year 12

Year 13

131
156
287

57
145
202

33
73
106

Table 2a
Areas of most success, by year group
Skill

Listening
Speaking
Reading
Writing
Grammar
Other

Year 11

Year 12

Year 13

54
43
103
77
3
7

18.8
15.0
35.9
26.8
1.0
2.4

19
43
60
59
20
1

9.4
21.3
29.7
29.2
9.9
0.5

14
36
20
25
11
0

13.2
34.0
18.9
23.6
10.4
0

Table 2b
Areas of least success, by year group
Skill

Listening
Speaking
Reading
Writing
Grammar
Other

Year 11

Year 12

Year 13

59
73
17
65
69
4

20.6
25.4
5.9
22.6
24.0
1.4

68
49
12
41
29
3

33.7
24.3
5.9
20.3
14.4
1.5

32
25
4
21
24
0

30.2
23.6
3.8
19.8
22.6
0

these older students perceived it as the area of least success (Year 12, v2 = 88.403; df = 5;
p < 0.000; Year 13, v2 = 20.509; df = 4; p < 0.000).
Among the small number of students in each year group who identied listening as their
area of most success, the main reasons given were ability and eort (Table 3a). Table 4
indicates that for Year 11 and 12 students, eort was signicantly more important than
strategy use.
For those who identied listening as their area of least success, there was most agreement with statements referring to task diculty and low ability as reasons for failure
(Table 3b). For Year 11 and 12 students, low ability and task diculty were accorded signicantly more importance than poor strategy use as reasons for lack of success in listening (Table 4).
The above suggests that many students believe they are simply no good at listening, a
skill in which they believe the diculty of the task set is something which can not be tackled by appropriate listening strategies.
The questionnaire provided learners with the opportunity to give other reasons for their
lack of success, in addition to or instead of the ve statements. Nineteen Year 11 students

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S. Graham / System 34 (2006) 165182

Table 3a
Attributions for success in listening, by year group (Ive been most successful in listening because. . .)
Rating

Disagree
(1 or 2)

Uncertain
(3 or 4)

Agree
(5 or 6)

No
response

Year 11 (N = 54)
Good at that kind of thing
Luck
Try hard
Good techniques or strategies
Easy work

11
28
7
16
32

20.4
51.9
13.0
29.6
59.3

29
19
21
30
17

53.7
35.2
38.9
55.6
31.5

14
7
26
8
5

25.9
13.0
48.1
14.8
9.3

Year 12 (N = 19)
Good at that kind of thing
Luck
Try hard
Good techniques or strategies
Easy work

0
12
0
3
11

0
63.2
0
15.8
57.9

9
5
11
10
6

47.4
26.3
57.9
52.6
31.6

10
2
8
6
2

52.6
10.5
42.1
31.6
10.6

Year 13 (N = 14)
Good at that kind of thing
Luck
Try hard
Good techniques or strategies
Easy work

0
12
1
2
9

0
85.7
7.1
14.3
64.3

2
2
6
7
4

14.3
14.3
42.9
50.0
28.6

12
0
7
5
1

85.7
0
50.0
35.7
7.1

(or 32% of those who had identied listening as their weakest skill) took this opportunity,
with some referring to more than one cause for their diculties. Many comments alluded
to problems of perception, particularly regarding the speed of delivery of texts (14 stuTable 3b
Attributions for lack of success in listening, by year group (Ive been least successful in listening because. . .)
Rating

Disagree
(1 or 2)

Uncertain
(3 or 4)

Agree
(5 or 6)

No
response

Year 11 (N = 59)
No good at that kind of thing
Bad luck
Dont try very hard
Poor techniques or strategies
Dicult work

15
37
44
17
10

25.4
62.7
74.6
28.8
16.9

23
19
10
34
27

39.0
32.2
16.9
57.6
45.8

21
3
5
6
22

35.6
5.1
8.5
10.2
37.3

Year 12 (N = 68)
No good at that kind of thing
Bad luck
Dont try hard
Poor techniques or strategies
Dicult work

18
52
48
24
15

26.5
76.5
70.6
35.3
22.1

30
13
18
36
31

44.1
19.1
26.5
52.9
45.6

19
2
2
8
22

27.9
2.9
2.9
11.8
32.4

1
1

Year 13 (N = 32)
No good at that kind of thing
Bad luck
Dont try hard
Poor techniques or strategies
Dicult work

8
28
19
11
8

25.0
87.5
59.4
34.4
25.0

14
3
11
15
14

43.8
9.4
34.4
46.9
43.8

10
1
2
6
10

31.3
3.1
6.2
18.7
31.3

3.4

1.5
1.5

S. Graham / System 34 (2006) 165182

175

Table 4
Post hoc multiple comparisons between key attributions for listening (within-subjects, Wilcoxon matched-pairs
Signed-Ranks test)
z

Signicant

Success attributions
Year 11 (n = 54)
Eort vs. strategy use
Ability vs. strategy use
Eort vs. ability

3.511
0.986
2.437

0.000*
0.324
0.015*

Year 12 (n = 19)
Eort vs. strategy use
Ability vs. strategy use
Ability vs. eort

2.623
2.016
0.060

0.009*
0.044
0.953

Year 13 (n = 14)
Eort vs. strategy use
Ability vs. strategy use
Ability vs. eort

1.040
2.228
1.112

0.298
0.026
0.266

Failure attributions
Year 11 (n = 59)
Low ability vs. poor strategy use
Task diculty vs. poor strategy use
Task diculty vs. low ability

3.273
4.183
0.961

0.001*
0.000*
0.337

Year 12 (n = 68)
Low ability vs. poor strategy use
Task diculty vs. poor strategy use
Low ability vs. task diculty

2.861
2.845
0.504

0.004*
0.004*
0.614

Year 13 (n = 32)
Low ability vs. poor strategy use
Task diculty vs. poor strategy use
Low ability vs. task diculty

1.834
1.300
0.044

0.067
0.194
0.965

Note. In each pair, the rst attribution given is the one with the higher score, indicating a higher level of
agreement with the attributional statement.
*
Signicant at p < 0.017, after Bonferroni adjustment.

dents). Other factors mentioned were diculties caused by missing or mis-hearing supposedly vital words (three students). One learner claimed that focusing on individual words
meant that subsequent information was often missed and another reported panicking if
everything was not understood. Three students referred to problems in identifying words
because of the speakers accent, perhaps indicating a lack of exposure to authentic listening texts or instruction in pronunciation and intonation features of French.
Thirty-seven Year 12 students (or 54% of those who had identied listening as their
weakest skill) made additional or alternative comments about listening (again, some identied more than one cause for their lack of success). The most frequently mentioned reason
was lack of practice (12 references). As for Year 11 students, speed of delivery was seen as
an important contributing factor to diculties (nine mentions). Eight students claimed that
they were often unable to make out individual words in a stream of spoken French, that
they all sounded the same, again suggesting a lack of awareness of pronunciation and intonation features that are crucial for perception (cf. Vanderplank, 1988, 1993). Six others
wrote that they found it dicult to visualize words when they were spoken.

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S. Graham / System 34 (2006) 165182

For Year 13 students there was rather less agreement among the 11 (34%) who cited
other reasons for their lack of success in listening. The most common reason given was
lack of practice, either currently or in the past (four students). Speed and poor quality
of tapes were mentioned by only one student, perhaps suggesting that by Year 13 students
have developed strategies to cope with these problems.

4.2. Learners beliefs about themselves as listeners, and their attributions for success or lack
of it: the interview
During the interview, six students gave further details about how they viewed the reasons behind their success or otherwise in listening, and about their understanding and
employment of listening strategies. Table 5 gives details about the students in question,
showing that of the six, four named listening as the area in which they had experienced
the least success in their language learning.
4.2.1. Attributions
Table 5 indicates that for most of the interviewees for whom listening was an area of
least success, task diculty was an important attribution. Students elaborated on this in
the interview, with four of them (Students A, B, C and D) emphasizing the perceived speed
of texts they were given. Student B repeatedly commented that listening was dicult
because of its eeting nature, contrasting it with understanding written texts. Two students
(A and D) perceived problems with accents or dialects.
Another important reason given for not doing well in listening was being no good at it.
Student B spoke at length about this. She held a low opinion of herself as a learner of
Table 5
Students who participated in the interview: questionnaire responses
Student

Sex
Year group
Own grade prediction a
Teacher prediction b
Doing well in French?
(6 = very well)
Area of most success
Area of least success

Male
11
A*
A*
6

Female
11
D
B
3

Female
12
A/B

Female
12
B/C

Female
13
B
A
4

Male
13
B/C
D
4

Speaking
Listening

Reading
Listening

Reading
Listening

Reading
Listening

Listening
Speaking

Listening
Writing

Attributions for success

in listening

Ability
Luck

Ability
Eort
Strategies

Attributions for lack of success

in listening

Task

Task
Low ability
Low eort
Poor strategies

Task
Low ability
Bad luck

For the GCSE examination, grades A* to G are awarded, with A* the highest. For AS and Advanced Level,
grades range from A (the highest) to E (lowest).
b
When the questionnaire was completed (November), not all Year 12 students had received a grade prediction
from their teacher.

S. Graham / System 34 (2006) 165182

177

French, as the discrepancy between her own and her teachers grade prediction in Table 5
suggests. Her perceived inability to cope with the eeting nature of spoken French seemed
to be aecting her motivation. She explained in the interview that she did sometimes try in
listening, but . . .then I just give up because I cant, usually they play it twice, that isnt
enough for me. She also commented that she was unsure whether the listening texts she
was given in class were dicult or not, feeling that they were for her but were probably easy
for others. An element of passivity regarding possible improvement in listening was even
displayed by Student C, a Year 12 learner whose predicted end of year examination grades
suggested that overall she was an eective language learner. She had not agreed with any of
the attributions suggested in the questionnaire, instead adding her own about lack of practice. She commented that simply trying harder at listening was unlikely to help, stating that
. . .perhaps however much I do there Im still going to be weaker.
Being good at listening was an important attribution for the two students who identied it as the area in which they had experienced the most success. Student E commented
that success in a certain area of French was down to a kind of inborn ability and in a sense
to luck, as she commented, just chance that one happened to be good at it. Student E
similarly talked about having a knack for understanding spoken texts.
4.2.2. Students beliefs about and awareness of their strategy use
None of the students had attributed much importance in the questionnaire to the use of
strategies, eective or otherwise. In the interview questions were asked in order to probe
how much learners were in fact aware of the role of strategies in listening and whether they
felt they employed any.
Among those who saw themselves as less eective listeners (Students AD), while some
were able to talk about the strategies that they employed while listening, their insight was
limited and their comments suggested a degree of uncertainty and resignation. Student C
commented that she did not have any listening strategies. The only strategy students A, B
and D were able to identify was what they called listening out for key words, a strategy
frequently used by learners in Grahams (1997) study. Think-aloud data there, however,
suggest that by key words, students did not mean items that held the key to the meaning
of the passage, but rather words they recognized, which might or might not be important
for understanding the text. In the present study, listening for key words led to a narrow
focus on individual words for Student B:
. . .usually I just nd a word I know, try and make it out. . .Doesnt always work, cos
its so fast and I nd Im still concentrating on what is said before when it moves on
to the next bit.
Student B was thus aware of the limitations of this approach but seemed unable to try
out alternative strategies. Likewise, Student D claimed that her lack of success was not
caused by poor strategies, because she had been given strategies by her teacher. When
asked to describe these, however, she displayed a lack of condence in them, and an inability to adapt them after judging them to be not always eective:
Interviewer: What do you do then, when youre listening, to try and work out things?
Student D: Pick out key words. . .but if there are no key words, that you cant understand, because of the diculty, you know, the dialect. . .I mean, its hard. . .I dont
know, yeah, that kind of thing.

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It seems that any strategies that these listeners used were employed without any overarching metacognitive strategy to monitor the eectiveness of their use, and were
employed in isolation, rather than in combinations with other strategies. By contrast, Student E, a successful listener, spoke of how she used dierent strategies together. She
appeared to use intonation to help with segmentation and perhaps initial decoding, complemented by listening for gist and noticing cognates:
I can work out like intonations and stu. . .I can pick up the gist of it and then, you
know, get a few words and then, like, cos my teacher taught me how to, like, if
youve got a French word and you dont know what it means, try to nd an English
word which sounds similar, and theyre often kind of Latin based ones.
Yet Student E had not identied successful strategy use as a reason for her success in
listening. She claimed she had a poor image of herself as a language learner at that point
of her French course, nding it dicult to make the transition to the more dicult work in
Year 13. It is possible that greater awareness of her ability to employ strategies eectively,
and guidance in how to develop such strategies in areas of weakness, might have boosted
her self-condence and shown her how to take control of her own language learning (see
also Vandergrift, 2002).
5. Discussion
In this study, many learners see themselves as less successful in listening than in other
language areas. The main diculties identied are coping with speed of delivery of texts,
making out individual words in a stream of spoken French, and making sense of any
words that have been identied or understood. Furthermore, most learners attribute their
diculties in listening to their own supposed low ability in the skill and to the diculty of
the listening tasks and texts they are set. As argued earlier, making such attributions indicates a sense of passivity and helplessness in learners, in that little or nothing can be done
about the diculty of the work one is given or ones ability, if this is perceived as innate
and unchangeable. Students in the interview displayed little insight into what strategies
might be appropriate for listening and the need to monitor and evaluate any strategies that
they did employ. Without a sense that change and improvement are possible, by adopting
more appropriate strategies, learners may become demotivated, resigned to being less
eective listeners or resorting to more and more practice, that is not focused but merely
involves the diligent student in longer hours of independent study. Ridgeway (2000, p. 183)
argues that practice is sucient to improve students listening, as the sub-skills will take
care of themselves as they become automatized. Yet practice in itself does not address the
issue that learners need to feel a sense of control over their listening, that improvement is
possible. As Field comments, for the learner who nds listening dicult, oering this listener more listening passages will simply add to their sense of failure (Field, 2000, p. 187).
There is thus a need for language teachers to address both how their students listen, and
their beliefs about listening comprehension and about themselves as listeners. Addressing
the how of listening should include activities which focus on both bottom-up and topdown processes, i.e., those that allow learners to become more procient in perceiving
the signal (Field, 2003, p. 325) and those that allow them to use their non-linguistic
knowledge to overcome any gaps in their linguistic knowledge. Activities that help in lexical segmentation and in determining sense groupings would seem to be particularly

S. Graham / System 34 (2006) 165182

179

important for English speaking learners of French such as those in this study. Goh (2000)
describes a range of activities that could be adapted. As far as top-down strategies are concerned, it is important that learners are made aware of the need to balance the application
of, say, background knowledge of the texts theme to interpret a word, with careful listening to the text to conrm or disconrm any hypotheses formed (see Mendelsohn, 1994,
1995 for practical examples).
A clearer picture from research of the combination of top-down and bottom-up strategies most benecial to teach to learners, and with which kind of texts and tasks, would
enhance the approach just outlined. This should then be fed into language teacher education, so that teachers are able to teach listening rather than just exposing learners to texts.
In addition, in order to address learners beliefs about listening and themselves as listeners,
teachers arguably need to provide them with opportunities to evaluate the cause of their
listening diculties (Field, 2003; Goh, 2000; Wilson, 2003), to try out certain strategies or
dierent kinds of skills practice and to subsequently reect on the impact of such remedies on their listening performance. An important starting point would seem to be an
exploration by both learners and teachers of the reasons the former attribute to lack of
success, in order that the negative eect of maladaptive attributions can be highlighted
and initial steps taken to suggest more positive ones. The belief that improvement in ones
performance is possible through improved strategy use or skill application may well-protect students sense of self-ecacy and levels of motivation in the face of what seems like
limited progress (Schunk, 1996), as is often experienced by learners as they make the transition to more advanced language study (Graham, 2004).
6. Conclusion
This paper has raised a number of issues regarding the teaching of listening comprehension. It has argued that gaining insights into the beliefs about L2 listening held by learners
is an important rst step for teachers who wish to help their students address the problems
they experience. Further research is needed to discover the extent to which a combined
approach of addressing maladaptive beliefs about listening as a skill in which improvement is dicult to achieve, and instruction in strategy use and skill application, can have
lasting benets for listening achievement.
Acknowledgement
The research reported in this paper was carried out with funding from the University of
Reading Research Endowment Trust Fund. I thank Ernesto Macaro for his helpful comments on earlier versions of this article.
Appendix A
Extracts from the interview schedule.
Note. This was adapted according to the interviewees questionnaire responses. Only
questions relevant to this article are given.
 I asked you to say how well you were doing in French, and you ticked [Nos. 16]. Can
you explain why you put that?

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S. Graham / System 34 (2006) 165182

 You expect a good grade, yet you say you are only doing reasonably well/badly. Why is
that?
 Your teacher thinks you will get grade X in your examination, and you said you
expected to get grade Y. Why the dierence?
 What have you found particularly easy about . . . [language learning skill identied in
questionnaire]?
 What have you found particularly hard about . . . [language learning skill identied in
questionnaire]?
 When I asked you to say how much you agreed with certain reasons to explain your
success, you put . . . [level of agreement shown with statements referring to ability,
eort, luck, strategies and task ease]. Can you tell me a bit more about it? What is
the most important reason? Why? Are there other reasons? Are some more/less
important?
 Similarly for reasons to explain your lack of success. Why did you put what you did?
What is the most important reason? Why? Are there other reasons? Are some more/less
important?
 You say you use good/poor strategies for [specied skill]. Which strategies do you use?
 How could you do better in French, do you think?

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