Second Language Listening

Listening comprehension plays a key role in both first and second language acquisition, and although out of the four communication skills listening takes up more time than any of the others (45 percent according to one estimate), it is nevertheless often considered to be the Cinderella of the group in terms of both research and pedagogical practice. It is also worth noting that the importance of listening in the real world is increasing with the development of new media such as Zoom, YouTube, podcasts, and other online communication tools and genres. This second-class situation for the listening skill is ironic, because important early approaches to language teaching, such as the direct method and the audio-lingual method made listening primary. Based on a belief that children learn to speak only after intensive and extensive exposure to aural input, the direct method, for example, emphasized the exclusive use of the target language and extensive comprehension activities before speaking was introduced. Similarly, based on the conviction that language learning follows a natural order of progression from listening to speaking and then reading and writing, the audio-lingual method began with intensive listening to phonological, morphological, and syntactic patterns, only then followed by oral repetition; this in the belief that repeated exposure to such linguistic patterns would lead to acquisition of the language. Since these early approaches, communicative pedagogy has been grounded in interaction-based theories of language acquisition—that is to say, the idea that listening and speaking lead to acquisition. That is not to say the unidirectional approaches to listening (where the hearer listens, but does not interact with an interlocutor) have been abandoned, especially given the increasing interest in academic listening and its focus on listening to lectures. Current understandings are that the listening comprehension process occurs in a combination of top-down and bottom-up processes. Top-down processes engage schemata, (knowledge structures based on past experience)—including prior knowledge of the topic—and the more immediate linguistic context, while bottom-up processes involve the word-by-word decoding of the incoming stream of sound. These two facets of the comprehension process are reflected in listening pedagogy, where teaching may focus on some combination of these processes according to different degrees. Early approaches tended to focus more on bottom-up decoding, while more recent classroom applications have tended to put increasing emphasis on top-down inferencing, although it is not clear what an appropriate balance might be.