Listening, the Most Important Skill for Language Learning

Hi Everyone,

Thank you so much for taking the time to visit our blog post. I’m Adrian and I’m the Director of Studies at Easy School of Languages here in Valletta the beautiful and historic capital city of Malta.

I am also one of the trainers on our groundbreaking new teacher training course Methodology for the Contemporary English Classroom.

Today I want to talk about listening. When we ask our students which skill is the most important for them, most students will say speaking, and yes speaking is an important part of communication. The reason that people choose to study a language is to be able to communicate better.

The communicative approach is the bedrock of all the English courses that we offer here at Easy School of Languages whether they are teacher training courses or general English lessons. However, let’s think about communication for a moment and how we use language in our daily lives.

 Course Methodology for the Contemporary English Classroom.

We wake up in the morning and as we are having breakfast we listen to the news or a show on the radio. When we are standing on the train platform, we listen for announcements to check that our train is running on time. At work we receive a call from a client who gives us a lot of business but can be quite demanding. We listen to what they have to say to better meet their expectations and to make sure that they are happy with the service that our company provides.

Over lunch we listen to a colleague who tells us about their weekend break in Paris and in the afternoon sales meeting we listen to what our colleagues have to say. On our commute home maybe, we listen to a podcast and when we get home we listen as our partner or our kids tell us about their day. As we unwind with a glass of wine at the end of a busy day we listen to our favorite series on Netflix.

Listening is the skill that we use the most in our daily lives. Studies have shown that the average person spends 40% of their time listening, 25% speaking, 15% writing, and 10% reading.

But as English teachers do you actually teach listening? Most course books will have a listening exercise followed by comprehension questions, but this is just testing the student’s ability to listen it is not teaching them how to listen. So how can we teach our students listening skills? In order to do this we need to look at how the expert user listens.

For the expert listener there are four stages that take place unconsciously as they process the language that they hear.

Stage 1: Bringing their external knowledge to the listening situation.

This includes their linguistic knowledge, their life experience, their world/cultural knowledge, their knowledge of the topic and their knowledge of the genre. By doing this they can make a fairly accurate prediction of what the speaker is going to say.

Stage 2: Decoding: recognising the words and sounds the speakers use.

The listener is exposed to and decodes a whole range of phonological features that occur in natural speech Most expert listeners are unaware of this stage because it usually occurs automatically and subconsciously. For example,

‘That’s mainly all I wish….’

/ðætsmeɪnlijɔːlaɪwɪʃ/

‘That is’ is said using the weak form that’s there is the intrusive [j] sound between mainly and all and catenation occurs between all and I so that the five words when spoken resemble one long word. The expert listener, however, is able to separate this sound back into its’ constituent parts.

Stage 3: Constructing meaning

At this stage expert listeners process words and inference to construct meaning. Even if they haven’t heard every word most expert listeners can use their knowledge of the subject and the language to infer meaning. Using these techniques, the expert listener can generally predict words before they are spoken.

For example, when listening to somebody talking about something terrible that happened to a close family member the expert listener can predict that the end of the utterance

‘I wish that it had …….’

before it is said

‘I wish that it had……. happened to me

Stage 4: Revising understanding as new information comes in.

Expert listeners are adept at revising their understanding as they continue listening. Misheard statements are quickly revised, and full comprehension continues.

For instance, the listener may initially hear ‘live chaining’ but continued listening makes this collocation illogical in the context

‘It was a live chaining experience’

and so, the listener reprocessed the words to ‘life changing’ and the sentence becomes meaningful.

So how can you educate your students to utilise these stages so that they can learn to listen like an expert user? Join us on our Methodology for the Contemporary English Classroom and find out.