As explored in a previous blog, listening as a macro skill is often undeveloped in class, and yet is perhaps one of the skills students need to work on the most. In this article I will consider two areas of listening that teachers do well to try and implement in their classes- the top down and bottom up approach.

The bottom-up approach focuses on seeing comprehension as a matter of listeners first decoding (or understanding) the smallest elements of what they hear – the sounds. The message is assembled ‘piece by piece from the speech stream, going from parts to the whole’ (Newton & Nation, 2009 p.40) /p/ is recognised as being /p/ and not /b/, /i:/ as being /i:/ and not /i/ or /e/ and so on. These sounds are then combined and the individual words are decoded. In a non exhaustive list, bottom up listening includes:

• Recognising individual phonemes
• Recognising phoneme sequences which form words
• Recognising word boundaries
• Recognising stressed syllables
• Recognising intonation contours
• Recognising syllable reduction due to weak forms and/or elision
• Recognising assimilation

 

Bottom up listening is relied upon in certain listening contexts; for example, when listening to directions to a friend’s house, comprehension is achieved by dividing and decoding the sound signal bit by bit. The ability to separate the stream of speech into individual words becomes more important here, if we are to recognise, for example, the name of a street or an instruction to take a particular bus.

The top-down approach is distinctly different to its counterpart. It is based on using previously acquired knowledge or schema of the world which is then applied to the text to give it meaning.  Comprehension starts from the listener’s background knowledge of the non-linguistic context and works down towards the individual sounds going from the ‘whole […] to the parts’(Newton & Nation 2009). Listeners must interpret what they hear in terms of their understanding of the situation and the world in general. For example, imagine you hear the words:

Tom brought me another present today. It was too late to save it so I buried it in the garden. I think I’m going to have to put a bell round his neck.

You certainly understood all the words in this passage, but did you understand the meaning? The first sentence was probably fairly straightforward. But there was more than just decoding of words going on; subconscious expectations were forming in your mind based on your knowledge of the world – Tom is probably a friend or a partner, the present will be something nice etc. The existence of these presuppositions is shown by the fact we were quite surprised by the second sentence: why would one bury a gift? And at that point, we started to search quite consciously for the meaning.

If you worked it out at the end- that Tom is a cat- it was knowledge of the world: that cats wear bells around their necks, have a habit of taking home small animals, which helped you understand – not what was in the actual text.

A good listener needs to be able to use a combination of sub-skills simultaneously when processing spoken language; the skills they will need at any particular moment will depend on the kind of text they are listening to and their reasons for listening to it.

Top Down and Bottom Up listening: Problems and Solutions

Problem 1) Sounds in connected speech.

Many learners, even of higher levels, are used to hearing very careful, clear pronunciation of words. Once words are said in connected, natural utterance, they can become harder for learners to identify

The three main types of change in sound which cause listening problems are:

• Weakening of vowels

When said in isolation, vowels receive their ‘full’ pronunciation. However, in an unstressed position in connected speech, vowels weaken and often are represented by the schwa / ə/

For example in isolation: you / ˈju:/

To / ˈtu:/

Of / ˈɒv/

Said unstressed in connected speech:

Will you come? / wɪl jə ˈkʌm/

I’ve got to go / aɪv gɒt tə ˈgəʊ/

A piece of paper / ə ˈpi:s əv ˈpeɪpə/

• Elision

This is the loss of sounds which occur in rapid speech, for example the past tense marker is omitted in this sentence:

They discussed the problem- / ðeɪ dɪskʌs ðə ˈprɒbləm/ instead of

/dɪskʌst /

• Assimilation

This is the way speakers modify their pronunciation to save effort. For example, in pronouncing the phrase ‘ten bikes’, / ten baɪks / in careful speech becomes / tem baɪks /. Here, the speaker avoids making the movement from /n/ which is a dental sound to /b/ which is a bilabial sound as more effort is required. Instead, the speaker makes both the final sound of ‘ten’ and the first sound of ‘bikes’ with their bilabial. /ten/ becomes /tem/

Other features such as volume, pitch, tone of voice, speed and stress also give clues about meaning, for example how the speaker is feeling. These variables can also be problematic.

Solution 1) The listener needs to adapt to the unfamiliar characteristics of L2 phonology and other prosodic features. These can be practiced in micro listening sessions where the teacher provides examples of specific pronunciation. A short section can be played several times, special attention being given to the types of change in sound in connected speech. Demonstration is useful in helping learners decipher the sounds of a particularly difficult part of a passage. I’ve found this quite effective in my own classes. An entire class seemed to be having difficulty with a particular passage in a listening text. I demonstrated several versions of the sentence, from the reduced version which they heard on the tape, to a much slower clearer, emphatic version. This clarification helped the students identify what happened to the sentence in rapid speech, and alerted them to what to expect in other listening texts.

Problem 2) An over reliance on bottom up processing

When using authentic listening texts in the classroom and in the students own experience of real life listening, there are times when the actual words used in a text fail to provide the entire meaning, shown in the example above of Tom the cat. This is especially true when a student doesn’t understand a particular word. At this point, many students just tune out or get caught up in an internal dialogue trying to translate a specific word. Some students convince themselves that they are not able to understand spoken English well and create problems for themselves. This often leads to panic and the learner may lose thread of what is being said and give up.

Solution 2.1) Rather than giving up when they fail to immediately understand a word, learners should be encouraged to try to guess the meaning of unknown words from context An exercise that can help train the student to do this might be to give them a sentence or two from the passage they will hear in written form, but with some key vocabulary items deleted. Students are given an opportunity to predict what they expect to hear in the gaps. The context should make it clear what kind of word the speaker should expect to hear, or its meaning. Even if they don’t know the actual word in English itself, students will have an ‘image’ of the word in mind which will aid the comprehension of the text as a whole. Work like this is valuable in preparing the students to guess the meaning from context in real life listening, and boosts their confidence.

2.2) The activity suggested above works on more than one level- it also encourages students to try to build up expectation of what they will hear and use this as framework for the listening. This can be based on world knowledge of the topic or what they’ve already gleaned from the listening itself. An experiment conducted by Clark and Clark (1977) supported the importance of using prediction. A recorded phrase is said unclearly with a lot of background noise and other interference. At this stage, the listener can make out nothing. Then he is given a small number of phrases and is told one of them is in the recording. With this helpful hint, he is able to listen again and choose the correct one. On subsequent playing of the tape, he seems to ‘hear’ the phrase more and more easily. Experiments such as this lend support to the sort of teaching that encourages students to form their own expectations about what they will hear. They seem to recognise more than if they listen to a passage ‘cold’ without any advance preparation.

2.3) At times though, in real conversations, responsibility lies with the interlocutor and students fail to understand meaning because of excessively poor pronunciation, misuse of a word or unclear meaning of what is being said. This is not unique to L2, things like false starts, backtracking, repetition and other features of spoken discourse mean clarification is needed in L1. We should help students understand that asking for something to be repeated or clarified or other such repair strategies are useful. Students must put aside their inhibitions and ‘interrupt’ the interlocutor when needed.

Listening is not an easy skill to develop. However, there are very real strategies and techniques that can be employed to assist a weak listener. It’s important to do this as listening competence or rather a lack of it  often creates negative backwash, leading to a defeatist attitude amongst the learner who understands nothing said by the native speaker. Teachers have the very real responsibility of giving listening the important place it deserves in any language course and in so doing, fulfil their responsibility to their students.

 

Daniellar Amoah

UK Academic Manager