Goh Chuen Meng Christine

This chapter presents a brief overview of the process of listening comprehension and some of the learner factors affecting the outcome of this process, highlighting many of the mental processes that occur in language listeners. It will help teachers understand the complexities involved in listening and be more sensitive to the diverse learning needs of their learners, offering a theoretical framework for teaching the processes of listening. It further highlights some of the learner factors that appear to be related to L2 listening ability and the need to further explore potential causal relationships between learner variables and L2 listening comprehension.

The spread of English as a language for communication is a key feature of our globalized world. Countries such as China, which experienced unprecedented socioeconomic development in the last three decades partly due to globalization, are increasingly concerned about its people’s ability to speak English well enough to compete internationally in all arenas where the use of English is still a dominant part of transnational communication. With increased mobility among its people in areas of work and studies within and beyond the country, English is now widely perceived to be “a bridge to the future” for both the country and the people (Jin & Cortazzi, 2002). This has led to many centralized initiatives aimed at improving the teaching of English, particularly the teaching of spoken English. Although these changes have been recognized to be significant in invigorating English language education in China, there is still relatively little understanding from research on one of the most important agents of this change, namely the English language teachers who are entrusted with enacting these initiatives through their daily work in schools and colleges. In this chapter, we report a study that examined the beliefs that university EFL teachers have about teaching spoken English and consider how their beliefs may or may not be related to some main teacher characteristics. It is hoped that results of the study will offer insights for local initiatives that can support English language teachers in the important task of teaching spoken English in the new globalized landscape.

This chapter introduces classification and regression trees (CART) to investigate the factors that determine listening test item difficulty. CART has been used extensively in education fields and machine learning but has received relatively less attention in language assessment. We discuss the major components of a reliable CART study such as articulation of theoretical frameworks, using cross-validation, estimation of fit statistics, and accuracy of classification. The chapter employs the construction-integration (CI) model of comprehension to measure item difficulty in a large pool of listening test items. The data comprised seven Michigan English Test (MET) listening tests comprising 321 items answered by 5039 international language learners. CART modeling generated 41 IF-THEN rules, which revealed nonlinear relationships between item difficulty and 12 independent variables (IVs) measured by Coh-Metrix. CART enabled us to show that the relationship between item difficulty and the 12 IVs is not linear, and different sets of rules would apply to predict the difficulty of different groups of listening test items.

The Metacognitive Awareness Listening Questionnaire (MALQ) was developed to assess second language (L2) learners’ metacognitive awareness about listening strategy use and themselves as L2 listeners (Vandergrift, Goh, Mareschal,& Tafaghodtari, 2006). The questionnaire consists of 21 items that represent five areas of metacognitive awareness about L2 listening: problemsolving, planning and evaluation, mental translation, directed attention, and person knowledge. The questionnaire is administered after a listening task, and respondents are asked to self-report the strategies that they used to complete the task as well as their general feelings concerning listening in the L2. Research has found that metacognitive awareness is positively related to respondents’ listening comprehension performance. The MALQ also is used to assess L2 learners’ metacognitive development by researchers and instructors and as a guide for learners to reflect on their own strategy use and person knowledge.

Listening, unlike writing, speaking, and even reading, is typically done in real time where the input is transient and there is little record of what happens during listening. Teachers therefore find it difficult to teach listening in the way they teach the other language skills. Chapter 6 described a pedagogical sequence that encourages students to activate the processes of real-life listening through planning, monitoring, problem-solving, and evaluation. This is an important way for teachers to make the processes of listening explicit and show learners how they can develop greater facility in the execution of these processes. The different stages of discussion and repeated listening offer learners the opportunity to revisit the input, giving some degree of permanence to what would have been ephemeral and transient. Re-listening helps learners comprehend more of the content, which can motivate them to continue their practice. The pedagogical sequence is a direct metacognitive approach to teaching that deconstructs the listening process and the listening text. It is one of two ways to plan listening lessons discussed in this book.

This chapter offers practical ideas on how to plan and adapt listening tasks that build on the theoretical perspectives and pedagogical guidelines in the last two chapters. The chapter provides guidelines and examples of techniques that teachers, material writers, and curriculum designers can adopt and adapt for enhancing listening instruction. It covers: (a) Instructional activities that promote listening skills for communication, metacognitive knowledge and skills, and decoding/lexical segmentation skills; (b) planning lessons and units of learning for listening; and (c) techniques for assessing of listening proficiency and assessing listening for learner development.