Misunderstanding Comprehension – ELT Research Bites

In this article, Swan & Walter (2017) assert that “the current orthodoxy regarding ‘teaching listening’ and ‘teaching reading’ operates in an evidence-poor zone.” They criticise training solely in skills and strategies for reading and listening, stating that with lower-level learners “the approach offers the wrong solution to a real problem” and that with more advanced learners “it offers a solution to a non-existent problem.” The article explains the criticism of this and other approaches to teaching general reading and listening comprehension, counteracting some of the articles that have previously been summarised on Research Bites, and highlights what it might be more effective to focus on instead.

Here’s a summary of the problems with the approaches they discuss:

Approach to teaching reading/listening	Problems	References
Comprehension questions	No support in published literature Tests rather than teaches Provides no insight into problems leading to incorrect answers	Siegel 2014 Nation 2009
Strategies & skills e.g. cognitive strategies: activating schemata, identifying key vocabulary; inferencing, moving from gist to detail. e.g. socio-affective strategies: asking for clarification, asking for help, managing frustration e.g. metacognitive strategies: planning, monitoring, evaluating use of strategies	Terms not well defined/ distinguished L2 learners have these skills/strategies from their L1, so problems in comprehension must lie elsewhere Evidence of efficacy only in limited/specific contexts (e.g. more effective at post-secondary level) (May be useful for learners needing to do tasks in L2 that they haven’t done in L1, e.g. in EAP.)	Plonsky 2011 Bensoussan & Laufer 1984 Jensen & Hansen 1995
Extensive reading/listening	Little support in research literature for comprehension improvement Greater exposure would be needed for extensive approaches to work Top-down processing is often not the problem.	Renandya & Farrell 2011 Yamashita 2008

Swan & Walter argue that learners may instead need training in decoding and parsing, to enable them to achieve a level of accuracy and fluency that makes their existing comprehension skills and strategies usable.

With reading, for example, L2 learners may need training on digesting particularly complex sentences or other grammatical features of a certain text type or genre, or they may need help identifying and understanding the discourse and stance markers.

With listening comprehension, the biggest problems Swan & Walter identify are with learners’ ability to cope with the speed of speech and the phonetic features of connected speech. They praise Field’s (2008) work on training learners to decode the ‘speech jungle’, full of assimilation, omission and linking/intrusion.

In conclusion, Swan & Walter state that:

Teachers of receptive skills have a threefold concern: to identify which of their learners have real problems with understanding written or spoken texts; to establish exactly what is causing these problems; and to provide whatever help is needed for the learners in question to overcome them.

Practically, then, when a teacher notices difficulties with listening or reading comprehension despite sufficient general language competence and subject knowledge, the teacher should look for the problems with accuracy and/or fluency in decoding and parsing that might be causing them. Lesson activities and tests should be targeted towards identifying these specific problems, rather than practising strategies and/or skills which students may already command or which rely on the exact bottom-up processing which is lacking.

[This summary has been read and approved by the original text’s authors; Michael Swan and Catherine Walter.]

References

Bensoussan, M. and B. Laufer. 1984. ‘Lexical guessing in context in EFL reading comprehension’. Journal of Research in Reading 7/1: 15–32.

Jensen, C. and C. Hansen. 1995. ‘The effect of prior knowledge on EAP listening-test performance’. Language Testing 12/1: 99–119.

Nation, I. S. P. 2009. Teaching ESL/EFL Reading and Writing. Abingdon: Routledge.

Plonsky, L. 2011. ‘The effectiveness of second language strategy instruction: a meta-analysis’. Language Learning 61/4: 993–1038.

Renandya, W. A. and T. S. C. Farrell. 2011. ‘“Teacher, the tape is too fast!” Extensive listening in ELT’. ELT Journal 65/1: 52–9.

Siegel, J. 2014. ‘Exploring L2 listening instruction: examinations of practice’. ELT Journal 68/1: 22–30.

Swan, M. & C. Walter. 2017. ‘Misunderstanding comprehension’, ELT Journal ,71/2, 228-236.

Yamashita, J. 2008. ‘Extensive reading and development of different aspects of L2 proficiency’. System 36/4: 661–72.

Clare Maas

Lecturer in EFL and EAP at Trier University (Germany)

Clare holds post-graduate qualifications from the University of Wales and Trinity College London. Before moving into tertiary education, she taught English at German grammar schools, and English for Specific Purposes at several language academies in the UK and Germany. Her professional interests include EAP materials development and CPD for teachers. She also blogs at ClaresELTCompendium.wordpress.com.