Lang. Teach. (2017), 50.

1, 107–119 c Cambridge University

Thinking Allowed

Research into practice: Listening strategies in an

Suzanne Graham University of

1. Introduction

This paper considers research and practice relating to listening in instructed classroom
settings, limiting itself to what might be called unidirectional listening (Macaro, Graham
& Vanderplank 2007) – in other words, where learners listen to a recording, a TV or radio
clip or lecture, but where there is no communication back to the speaker(s). A review of
the literature relating to such listening reveals a tendency for papers to highlight two
features in their introductory lines: first, the acknowledged importance of listening as a
skill underpinning second language (L2) acquisition more broadly, and second, the relative
paucity of research into listening compared with the skills of speaking, reading or writing.
In the last ten years or so, however, there has been a growth in the number of studies
conducted in the field, as evidenced in Vandergrift’s review in 2007 and Vanderplank’s
more recent overview (2013). Consequently, my view is that it is possible to identify from
that research certain key principles in relation to listening within instructed settings,
particularly regarding listening strategies. These are outlined in Graham, Santos &
Francis-Brophy (2014) and can be summarised as follows:
1. Without instruction in how to improve listening, learners are very slow to develop effective
listening strategy use, if at all; by contrast, it is possible to develop that effective use through
instruction, with potential benefits for learners’ listening proficiency.
2. The development of metacognitive strategies and metacognitive awareness in relation to
listening can be particularly helpful and can be achieved through learner discussion of
strategy use.
3. Attention to the development of bottom-up and top-down strategies is important for
helping learners to develop their listening.
4. Prediction/pre-listening strategies need to be combined with strategies for verifying and
monitoring predictions.
Two other arguments also feature in recent discussions. On the one hand, while listening
arguably needs to be TAUGHT, in many contexts TEACHING takes the form of TESTING. That is,
learners’ comprehension is assessed, rather than there being a focus on the processes they used
to achieve that comprehension (Field 2008; Goh 2010; Graham, Santos & Vanderplank 2011).
Or, listening occurs as an activity to be completed, a form of practice, but with little or
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108 THINKING ALLOWED

no attention to its improvement as a skill. On the other hand, it seems clear that the picture we
have of what teachers actually do in the classroom with respect to listening is very limited as
few studies have gathered evidence systematically of teachers’ classroom practice. The same
applies to what we know about their pedagogical beliefs about listening. My own recent work,
however, with Denise Santos, has focused on those two areas, particular with regard to the
extent to which teachers’ beliefs and practices reflect current thinking from the listening
strategy research literature. We have also been interested in exploring the extent to which it is
possible to modify teachers’ beliefs and practices regarding listening.
This article will draw on that empirical research conducted in England alongside
findings from other contexts where relevant, discussing the extent to which the findings
from listening strategy research, particularly those summarised in the principles listed
above, are reflected in classroom practice and teachers’ expressed beliefs about what form
such practice should take. I will also draw on my own experience as a teacher educator in
England, working with pre-service and in-service teachers, making it clear when I am
expressing my own views and reporting on my own experiences rather than on research
evidence. The focus will be on language classrooms in secondary/high schools, and where
the languages being taught are chiefly French, Spanish and German (known as Modern
Foreign Languages or MFL). In addition, it is worth noting that in the context of England,
foreign language learning is compulsory only up until the age of 14 (and compulsory
between 7 and 11 only since 2014). I therefore comment mainly on language learning for
11–14 year olds, i.e. those who are at the beginner to lower-intermediate stage. It is also
important to note that in England the teaching of language skills, including listening, is
considered to be in need of improvement (Ofsted 2011). There has also been criticism of
the way in which teaching is influenced by an assessment system which seems unrelated to
what research suggests about how language proficiency develops (Macaro, Graham &
Woore 2015). For listening, it seems to me, this has led to a focus on assessing learners’
ability to extract specific details and information from texts, to recognise opinions (often at
a fairly trivial level), and to understand passages that include different tenses and certain
topic-based items of vocabulary, at the expense of assessing whether they can gain global
understanding, infer meaning, and generally employ listening strategies effectively.
Finally, for the purpose of this review I am employing the following definitions of strategies
broadly, as ‘conscious mental activity’, applied in pursuit of a learning goal which is
‘transferable to other situations or tasks’ (Macaro 2006: 328). For listening strategies in
particular, Rost’s (2002: 236) definition of ‘conscious plans to manage incoming speech’ is
employed. Importantly, these definitions encompass top-down strategies (e.g. using contextual
clues to work out meaning) but also bottom-up strategies (e.g. attending to intonation patterns,
to word prefixes, or to other linguistic features to make meaning more accessible); likewise,
they cover both cognitive strategies (operating at the level of the input itself) and metacognitive
strategies, ‘higher order executive skills that may entail planning for, monitoring, or evaluating
the success of a learning activity’ (O’Malley & Chamot 1990: 44–45). It is beyond the scope of
this piece to explore fully the difference between ‘skills’ and ‘strategies’, but in brief one might
refer to Field’s (1998) description of listening skills as native speaker-type competencies, such
as the perception of words and phrases, while strategies have the much more conscious, goal-
directed element outlined above.
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 SUZANNE GRAHAM:RESEARCH IN
TO PRACTICE 109

My review will be in three main sections: areas of classroom practice where findings
from listening strategy research have not been well applied to the language classroom, i.e.
where teachers’ views and practices bear little trace of the principles outlined above; areas
where findings from research seem to have been over-applied, in the sense that certain
practices highlighted by research seem to be dominating what teachers do and say to the
exclusion of others, or used extensively but not necessarily effectively; and areas where
there is evidence of at least potential for good application. In the last section in particular I
hope to stimulate discussion of ways in which it might be possible to bridge the gap
between research and practice, in a discussion about teacher cognition and professional
development in relation to listening instruction.

2. Research findings that have not been well applied in the language classroom

2.1 Learners can and should be taught HOW to listen not just tested on their listening

Research provides evidence that learners of MFL in England perceive listening as one of
the most difficult skills in which to improve, particularly beyond the immediate beginner
stage (Graham 2006). Problems noted among learners, even those in their sixth year of
language learning, include poor monitoring of understanding, poor application of
background knowledge to help overcome problems of comprehension; problems in speech
segmentation and recognising familiar vocabulary in the speech stream. In Graham et al.
(2011) we found that over a six-month period, during a time when they were exposed to
much more challenging listening material than they had experienced beforehand, learners
displayed stability in how they used strategies and that differences between proficient and
less proficient listeners, regarding strategy use, persisted over time. In a more recent study
with younger learners (aged 13–14), Macaro (2014) found they relied almost totally on
just one strategy, listening out for cognate words, when trying to understand what their
teacher was saying to them in French classes.
Several authors (such as Field 2008; Goh 2010) have called for more teaching of
listening as a skill in its own right, rather than something which teachers assume will
develop of its own accord. Listening strategy instruction is one approach to the teaching of
listening. There is some variability in outcomes from studies exploring such instruction
(see Macaro et al. 2007) but I would argue that more recent investigations provide firmer
evidence of its benefits. These studies include those that investigate (a) approaches
combining explicit strategy instruction and a metacognitive element (e.g. Harris 2007, who
studied 13–14 year olds in England; Graham & Macaro 2008, working with 16–17 year
olds in the same context); and (b) more implicit approaches where the development of
metacognitive awareness and/or metacognitive strategies is the main objective (e.g. Goh &
Taib 2006; Vandergrift & Tafaghodtari 2010). Both explicit and implicit approaches are
underpinned by the notion that practice and contact with spoken language alone are
insufficient to improve how well learners listen. They also reflect a growing emphasis on
the development of metacognition in relation to listening (see also below).
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110 THINKING ALLOWED

The extent to which the methods underlying the generally positive outcomes of such
studies have reached classroom practice seems, from my perspective, to be limited, a view
that is also expressed by other authors across a range of contexts who comment on
teachers DOING listening activities or tests with their learners rather than teaching them how to
listen. This ‘doing’ or ‘testing’ approach dates back a long while in England; thus Chambers
(1996) outlines what he sees as the typical approach to listening in foreign language classrooms
in that context: learners listen to a text and complete an accompanying exercise, which is then
corrected. Listening becomes principally a test of comprehension, typically based on an
exercise from a textbook, which, as an examination of such materials indicates, usually
requires the understanding of specific details rather than the global meaning of the text (thus
probably depriving learners of a sense of achievement if they rarely feel they understand more
than a few snippets of class listening materials). This constitutes what Field (2008) calls the
‘Comprehension Approach’ and which, he argues, does little to develop effective listening
skills. Working as a teacher educator, a couple of years ago I asked my 26 student teachers
about the practice they had observed during their ten-week practicum. Twenty-two (or 85%) of
the students had rarely or never observed teachers showing learners how to improve their
listening skills.
Seeking further evidence of what teachers believe and do with regard to the explicit
teaching of listening, we carried out a study of language teachers in England involving
questionnaires given to 115 teachers with a range of years of teaching experience (the
findings from those questionnaires are reported in Graham et al. 2014). We then conducted
observations followed by interviews with 13 of these teachers. In addition, we analysed a
number of commonly used textbooks for the type of listening activities presented and what
support they gave teachers for listening instruction (a full analysis of these data sources is
given in Graham & Santos 2015). While there was a strong level of agreement from the
closed questionnaire responses of teachers with the idea that it is possible to teach learners
how to ‘listen more effectively’, such agreement was then contradicted by other aspects of
teachers’ replies. When we asked them through an open-ended item to outline the four
most important things that they did when conducting listening activities, and to give
reasons, there was very little sign of any actual teaching of listening or teaching of
listening strategies. Most respondents outlined steps taken to make sure learners were clear
about task completion procedures (e.g. where and how they should record their answers)
rather than any practices adopted to focus on improving listening as a skill. Justification
for practices adopted was mainly concerned with helping learners get the right answers to
questions set, behaving in the expected manner, and meeting assessment requirements.
The subsequent observations and interviews largely confirmed the questionnaire
responses: that teachers DID listening activities with their classes but rarely TAUGHT
listening. The purpose of such activities was rarely seen as helping learners to improve
their listening; instead, other purposes such as preparing learners for assessments, for
developing some other skill or body of knowledge (e.g. of verb endings; preparing learners
for speaking tasks) were identified. Siegel (2014) argues that teachers do not to teach
listening because they lack the pedagogical knowledge to do so, a view which I tend to
share and which seems to be borne out by a comment from one of the teachers we
interviewed about the best way to teach listening:
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 SUZANNE GRAHAM:RESEARCH IN
TO PRACTICE 111

I think, to a certain extent, yeah possibly, you know, by practising, by doing it different ways, by approaching
listening tasks differently you probably do teach them a little bit more to listen effectively, but there’s only so much
you can do. So I suppose yes, by doing different types of activities on the same kind of text like gap fill or listening
for the whole meaning before just picking up a few words or just answering questions [ . . . ] trying to do different
activities on the task . . . probably does help, but there’s not really any . . .
method for them to follow.

The hesitancy from this teacher suggests a certain resignation (‘there is only so much you
can do’) as well as uncertainty about what might be useful ways to teach listening.
Teachers’ lack of pedagogical knowledge may arise from lack of input on listening in their
training; it may also be exacerbated by a lack of guidance in the materials they use. In addition,
more than may be the case for other skill areas, teachers may turn to commercially produced
materials for listening, because of the difficulties involved in creating their own. Our textbook
analysis found little support for teachers, with scant focus on the teaching of listening
strategies, and indeed the tasks set offered little scope for doing so. Activities mainly consisted
of locating very specific, local information from generally quite short texts with little or no
redundancy, and with very little or no potentially more challenging vocabulary. Any advice
given for using materials with learners was mainly of a practical, procedural nature.
Furthermore, teachers responding to our questionnaire confirmed that they relied heavily on
textbooks as sources of listening material and activities, something to which the school
inspectorate in England (Ofsted 2011) attributes learners’ weaknesses in listening.

2.2 The development of metacognitive strategies/metacognitive awareness

The previous section highlighted that studies have reported improvement in listening
attainment through approaches that seek to develop learners’ metacognitive awareness and use
of metacognitive strategies. For example, working with quite young learners, i.e. 11 years old,
Goh & Taib (2006) found that combining traditional listening activities with post-listening
reflections and discussions of metacognitive strategies for listening led to improved confidence
among learners, especially for the less proficient ones. Similarly, Vandergrift & Tafaghodtari
(2010) record improved listening scores for lower proficiency learners (although not for those
of higher listening proficiency) as a result of a metacognitive instruction programme for
listening, in which there was no explicit teaching of named strategies but ‘guided practice on
the listening process as a whole’, developing ‘implicit knowledge about L2 listening through
task performance’ (487–488). The programme took the form of a ‘pedagogical cycle’
(Vandergrift & Tafaghodtari 2010: 472) involving prediction of what might be heard,
verification or checking of these predictions and peer discussion of what was heard, reflection
on strategies employed and future goal-setting. Learners of all proficiency levels showed
greater metacognitive awareness and sense of control over their listening after the intervention.
The authors comment that the peer discussion element was particularly helpful, aiding the
development of strategies for planning, evaluation and problem-solving.
Giving learners opportunities to reflect on, and talk about how they listen and how they
arrive at understanding might seem to be a relatively uncomplicated thing to do in the
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