The Ups and Downs of Listening Instruction

Fluent listening involves both the bottom-up process of segmenting the boundaries between words, automatically recognizing morphological endings and using other linguistic cues to parse meaning. Likewise, fluent listening also involves top-down processes such as using prior knowledge, expectations, and context to aid in understanding. This occurs “in harmony” in L1 and advanced L2 listening but can be a struggle for lower-proficiency learners. What is the best way to address this in the classroom? Does it require a focus on top-down approaches (e.g. strategy instruction), bottom-up approaches, or both? There is a great deal of research on top-down listening instruction but scant research on bottom-up approaches. Therefore, Yeldham and Gruba (2013) used multiple case studies to look at the effectiveness of bottom-up approaches and how these might interact with learners’ listening approaches.

Approaches

There are three general approaches to listening instruction:

  • strategy instruction, focusing on skills such as guessing meaning (cognitive), evaluation (metacognitive), and handling one’s anxiety (affective). Strategy instruction, while it may include some bottom-up strategies, typically favors top-down processes;
  • lower-level processing such as word recognition and mental model building;
  • interactive instruction combining the two.

Purpose of Study

Unfortunately, there is no research comparing the three (at the time of writing) and little research focusing on bottom-up instruction. Therefore, the authors sought to utilize a bottom-up listening skills courses to evaluate the effectiveness of the approach. What’s more, they also looked at how bottom-up instruction interacts with learners preferred approaches to listening (whether they employ more top-down or bottom-up strategies.

The Study

The study consisted of case studies for five (initially six, but one dropped out from possible boredom) Taiwanese university EFL learners enrolled in a 22 hour bottom-up skills course, attending 2 times a week for over 1.5 semesters. The case studies utilized multiple data collection techniques including listening tests, recall tests, verbal reports (to check comprehension and strategy use; the initial report was used to determine the learners’ predominate approaches to listening), interviews, and questionnaires.

Findings

Since the research was based on five case studies, each case (i.e. student) will be listed below along with their characteristics and findings. All names are pseudonyms.

  • Diana (top-down listener) improved her listening proficiency “substantially”. She said (via verbal report while listening) she used a lot more bottom-up skills (such as grammar, discourse markers, intonation) although her word segmentation skills did not improve. She also improved her top-down skills, especially guessing correctly. Overall, it seemed that the addition of bottom-up skills helped to “to constrain her top-down processing,” on which over reliance may have caused misunderstandings in the past.
    • According to previous research by Tsui and Fullilove (1998) and Wu (1998), “L2 listeners who lack perceptual skills [bottom-up skills] can be led astray by these knowledge-based [top-down] processes” (p. 35)
  • Peta (bottom-up listener) began with a number of comprehension difficulties, many of which persisted to some small degree at the end of the course. In particular, she had trouble comprehending and keeping the information in her memory. She also had trouble making mental models of the listening.  She was also somewhat bored. Overall, it was found that she could decode sentence but could not really process or retain (i.e. understand) them. She did begin to employ some top-down strategies and had higher but still poor listening comprehension test scores.
  • Nerida (bottom-up listener) began to use top-down strategies more (background knowledge and guessing), though not necessarily accurately. Her decoding skills improved slightly.
  • Tony (bottom-up listener) made major gains, which may have been due to the course or his extracurricular listening prep for a major test. Through bottom-up instruction, he began to focus more on stressed words and chunks of stressed word, as well as grammar and discourse markers.  In addition, he was able to understand fast speech more effectively. He used more top-down strategies, too, such as predicting and guessing. These were practiced in the language lab using a CD called Language Connect Institute English.
  • Edna (interactive listener) claimed she could understand texts faster (“increased processing). Although her total listening score improved, there was no improvement in her segmentation skills. Interestingly, her use of top-down skills decreased as she became “more aware of how top-down processing could mislead her” (p. 48). She also felt like her perceived in bottom-up skills meant she did not need to use top-down ones so much.

Implications

The main conclusion and implication of this research suggests that bottom-up strategy instruction is not enough. It was found to be “inadequate” for the learners in this study (p. 48). According to the authors, there is a “need to develop an interaction between bottom-up and top-down processes in order to progress…” (p. 49). In addition to the bottom-up skills instruction, they recommend:

  • “leading learners through the metacognitive processes of ‘prediction/planning, monitoring, evaluating, and problem solving’ (Vandergrift & Tafaghodtari, 2010, p. 470)…[including] how to coordinate their use of these multiple strategies” (p. 49)
  • “explicit teaching of cognitive strategies…activities…, such as inferencing and guessing, could include having learners: (1) infer unstated information in a text to assist comprehension, using cues such as the topic, setting, and mood and relationships of the speakers; (2) guess difficult words and information in a text; and (3) guess missing segments of information in a text purposely obscured (by the teacher) by white noise (Mendelsohn, 1994, 2006). Exercises requiring learners to complete the endings of sentences or short utterances would provide practice at anticipating text content (Field, 2008; [also see Vandergrift 2003])” (p. 50).

The authors’ research indicates a possible need for an interactive approach to listening instruction, but they also recommend that this approach needs to be further tested, especially owing to the current lack of research in such area.

References

Field, J. (1998). Skills and strategies: Towards a new methodology for listening. ELT Journal, 52, 110–118. https://academic.oup.com/eltj/article-pdf/52/2/110/13061542/110.pdf

Field, J. (2008). Listening in the language classroom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Gilbert, J. (2005). Clear speech: Pronunciation and listening comprehension in American English (3rd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Tsui, A.B.M., & Fullilove, J. (1998). Bottom-up or top-down processing as a discriminator of L2 listening performance. Applied Linguistics, 19, 432–451.

Vandergrift, L. (2003). Orchestrating strategy use: Toward a model of the skilled second language listener. Language Learning, 53, 463–496. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1467-9922.00232.

Vandergrift, L., & Tafaghodtari, M.H. (2010). Teaching L2 learners how to listen does make a difference: An empirical study. Language Learning, 60, 470–497. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-9922.2009.00559.x.

Wu, Y. (1998). What do tests of listening comprehension test?: A retrospection study of EFL test takers performing a multiple-choice task. Language Testing, 15, 21–44.

Yeldham, M., & Gruba, P. (2014). Toward an instructional approach to developing interactive second language listening. Language Teaching Research18(1), 33-53.

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Anthony Schmidt
English language Instructor at University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Anthony Schmidt is editor of ELT Research Bites. He also has his own blog at anthonyteacher.com. Offline, he is a full-time English language instructor in a university IEP program. He is interested in all aspects of applied linguistics, in particular English for Academic Purposes.