Denise Santos

Exploring the relationship between listening development and strategy use

This article reports on an investigation into the development of the listening proficiency and strategic behaviour of 15 lower-intermediate learners of French in England. We consider whether listeners remain in the same listening proficiency group after six months, and whether changes in strategy use are related to movement or non-movement between listening proficiency groups. We also examine whether learners’ strategic behaviour reflects their teachers’ approaches to listening. Data were gathered at two time points from a recall protocol which learners completed after listening to short passages and from verbal reports made by learners while they completed a multiple choice listening task. Teacher interviews provided information on how listening had been presented in learners’ classrooms. We detected little movement by students across the listening proficiency groups between the two time points. In spite of some changes in frequency of strategy use, we also observed stability in manner of use by some learners. Differences in strategy use were more evident between groups (non-movers, improvers and decliners) than between uses from Time 1 to Time 2. We conclude by discussing the pedagogical implications of these findings.

Strategy clusters and sources of knowledge in French L2 listening comprehension

Abstract This article reports on an exploratory investigation into the listening strategies of lower-intermediate learners of French as an L2, including the sources of knowledge they employed in order to comprehend spoken French. Data from 14 learners were analysed to investigate whether employment of strategies in general and sources of knowledge in particular varied according to the underlying linguistic knowledge of the student. While low linguistic knowledge learners were less likely to deploy effectively certain strategies or strategy clusters, high linguistic knowledge levels were not always associated with effective strategy use. Similarly, while there was an association between linguistic knowledge and learners’ ability to draw on more than one source of knowledge in a facilitative manner, there was also evidence that learners tended to over-rely on linguistic knowledge where other sources, such as world knowledge, would have proved facilitative. We conclude by arguing for a fresh approach to listening pedagogy and research, including strategy instruction, bottom-up skill development and a consideration of the role of linguistic knowledge in strategy use.

Second Language Listening Strategy Research: Methodological Challenges and Perspectives

Abstract This paper explores methodological issues related to research into second language listening strategies. We argue that a number of central questions regarding research methodology in this line of enquiry are underexamined, and we engage in the discussion of three key methodological questions: (1) To what extent is a verbal report a valid and reliable way of eliciting information about strategies? (2) Should we control for learners’ level of linguistic knowledge when examining their listening strategy use? and (3) What are the problems surrounding the analysis of data gained through verbal reports? We discuss each of these three methodological issues within the framework of a research project investigating listening strategies deployed by learners of French in secondary schools in England. Implications from these findings for future research are discussed.

Teaching learning strategies: what do teachers learn?

This article reports on a distinctive form of continuing professional development that emerged from a classroom-based collaborative research project between university researchers and teachers of French. We shall argue that one of the outcomes of this particular form of collaboration is a relatively unexplored, yet potentially important, approach to foreign language teacher development in general and to research into learning strategies in particular. Specifically, we will consider the extent to which a group of Y12 French teachers, who contributed to the implementation of a two-year long investigation into listening and writing strategies with their students, developed professional knowledge and skills as a by-product of their participation in the university-led project.

Language learning in the public eye: an analysis of newspapers and official documents in England

This article considers the issue of low levels of motivation for foreign language learning in England by exploring how language learning is conceptualised by different key voices in that country through the examination of written data: policy documents and reports on the UKs language needs, curriculum documents and press articles. The extent to which this conceptualisation has changed over time is explored, through the consideration of documents from two time points, before and after a change in government in the UK. The study uses corpus analysis methods in this exploration. The picture that emerges is a complex one regarding how the ‘problems’ and ‘solutions’ surrounding language learning in that context are presented in public discourse. This, we conclude, has implications for the likely success of measures adopted to increase language learning uptake in that context.

Selective listening in L2 learners of French

This paper considers the issue raised in 2008 by Gillian Brown in her article ‘Selective listening’ regarding whether nouns are ‘privileged’ in memory over verbs during listening tasks, and whether attention to nouns, at least in the early stages of L2 learning, is a desirable strategy to be taught to learners, as Brown suggests it might be. The question of verb/noun recognition was explored in the present study using data from 30 lower-intermediate learners of French in England. Learners completed a listening task on two occasions, six months apart, producing recall protocols for short oral passages in French. We also explored learners’ attentional strategy use by asking them to report on this in writing immediately after the recall task. An analysis of verbs and nouns recognised indicated that verb recognition was lower than that of nouns, and that progress in verb recognition over six months was negligible. A qualitative analysis of learners’ strategy use indicated that learners with a more balanced verb/noun recognition profile took a broader focus, tending to focus their attention consciously at phrase/sentence level rather than at word level. These findings are discussed in terms of the development of listening skills over time, and the implications of this for L2 listening pedagogy.

What Teachers Say About Listening and Its Pedagogy: A Comparison Between Two Countries

In this chapter, the authors compare teaching practices between teachers in Brazil and England by exploring their beliefs about and justifications for using certain listening activities in the classroom. Findings are discussed in relation to strategy development and the role of metacognition. The authors also address the issue of teaching and learning how to listen in contrast to teaching and learning listening task management.

Introduction: ‘Doing’ Listening or ‘Teaching’ Listening?

There is evidence in the literature suggesting that language teachers find the teaching of listening particularly challenging (Chambers, 1996; Field, 2008) and that they may be ‘unsure of how to teach listening in a principled manner’ (Vandergrift & Goh, 2012: 4). In this book, by listening we mean primarily uni-directional listening, that is, where the person seeking comprehension does not interact with the speaker(s), as when listening to a lecture, radio broadcast or to an announcement, for example. Other forms of listening occur in classrooms, of course, but are not our main focus here. From exploratory interviews we conducted with teachers of French in the final years of secondary schools in England in the 2000s (Graham et al., 2011), we have concluded that those teachers tended to talk about classroom listening development in terms of what they did in the classroom, with little or no indication of why those steps were followed. Teachers’ reports also signalled that such focus on ‘doing’ was predominantly shaped in the form of comprehension tasks, as the following excerpt summarises: ‘I would incorporate it [listening] into a lesson, a topic area that I’m doing and then perhaps do a blank filling, or a cloze task, that kind of thing’ (p. 449). In other words, these early conversations with language teachers did not indicate any theoretically-oriented, reflective or informed approach to the teaching of listening, at least not in our sample.

What Teachers in England Say and Do about Second Language Listening

Part I outlined a number of important issues regarding the teaching of second language listening, including: the difficulties learners experience; the role of strategies and the extent to which listening can be improved through listening strategy instruction; the place of metacognition in listening and the importance of fostering it in the classroom, among others.

Teaching Listening Strategies in the Second Language Classroom

In this chapter we consider whether and how listening strategy instruction can improve learners’ ability to listen. It is important to acknowledge first of all, however, that there have also been other kinds of approaches to improving listening that have been evaluated through research and which are worth considering here. Many of these are summarised in Vandergrift (2007). They include approaches that offer training in bottom-up areas, that is, the ability to perceive and recognise words, or, as Siegel (2014a) usefully puts it, activities that involve ‘phonemic perception, syntactic parsing, and intonation. Bottom-up activities target learners’ abilities to process the acoustic input they receive’ (p. 24). Such activities might involve training in perception (Hulstijn, 2003), prosody (intonation/stress patterns) (Harley, 2000) and dictation (Kiany & Shiramiry, 2002). The outcomes of empirical studies using bottom-up approaches have been largely positive, at least in the short-term. Space does not permit a detailed consideration of the studies but interested readers should consult Vandergrift (2007). Further practical examples of what training in perception might look like in the classroom can be found in Field (2008).