Article Review 3: Second Thoughts On Teaching Listening

This is a review of " Second Thoughts On teaching Listening by Dr. Jack Richards.

to read the original article click here.


Nowadays listening from being a neglected skill relegated to passing treatment as a minor strand within a speaking course, has appeared as a core course in many language programs. One reason for the increased attention to the teaching of listening is a pragmatic one: many learners need good listening skills to support the demands made on them in social, work, travel or other settings. As Rost (1994: 141-142) points out, listening is vital in the language classroom because it provides input for the learner. He provides three other important reasons for emphasizing:

• Spoken language provides a means of interaction for the learner. Moreover, learners' failure to understand the language they hear is an impetus, not an obstacle, to interaction and learning.

• Authentic spoken language presents a challenge for the learner to attempt to understand language as native speakers actually use it.

• Listening exercises provide teachers with the means for drawing learners' attention to new forms (Ibid: 141-142).

In order to make clear the reasons of importance of listening, the writer first examines listening from two perspectives:

- listening as comprehension: from a current perspective, listening and listening comprehension are essentially the same thing. In classroom materials a variety of strategies and techniques are used to practice listening as comprehension, such as practicing the meaning messages, identifying keywords and ignoring key words while listening and so on. Tasks employed in classroom materials seek to enable listeners to recognize and act on the general, specific or implied meaning of utterances. A typical lesson sequence involves a three part lesson sequence consisting of pre-listening, while listening, and post listening.

- listening as acquisition: here the question is that "what is the relationship between listening and language acquisition?"

Scmidt (1990) argues that we don't learn anything from input we hear and understand unless we notice something about the input. Krashen proposed the comprehensible input hypothesis which states that people acquire language best by understanding input that is slightly above their current level of understanding.

In order to for language development to take place, more appears to be required that simply noticing features of the input. The learner has to try to incorporate new linguistic items into her language repertoire.

There is a two-part cycle of teaching activities as the basis for the listening as acquisition phase of a lesson:

a) noticing activities

b) restructuring activities

In contexts where comprehension and acquisition are the two goals of a listening course, a two part strategy is appropriate in class teaching and instructional materials:

phase 1: listening as comprehension:

use of the materials with a lesson plan.

Phase 2: listening as acquisition

The listening texts used in phase 1 are now used as the basis for acquisition activities, making use of noticing activities and restructuring activities.

As Nuan has mentioned in his book (1999: 200), two views of listening has dominated language pedagogy over the last twenty years: top down and bottom-up processing. An important theoretical underpinning to the top-down approach is schema theory (ibid: 201).

There are many different types of listening. We can classify these according to a number of variables, including listening purpose, the role of the listener, and the type of text being listened to (Ibid: 204). He also introduces us with another classification of listening: reciprocal versus nonreciprocal listening (Ibid: 215).

Chastain (1988: 183) has noted the components of listening:

1. Discrimination

2. Auditory memory

3. Perception of message

4. Comprehension

And as a conclusion, the ability to comprehend the spoken second language plays an essential role in second-language learning and use. It is one of only two sources of new linguistic data and general information and It is the more important of the two skills involved in all types of oral exchange.