In my experience with learners, there are 6 “intervention points” in which listening skills can be practiced: pre-listening, while-listening (first listening), second listening, immediate post-listening, follow up post-listening, and later appropration. Most teachers and most students tend to focus on the “first listening” phase as the primary – or even only – phase to practice listening, but it has been shown that practice with the other stages improves listening proficiency as well.
- Pre-listening stage
Before listening to an extract, usually a video or audio clip, provide some type of short pre-listening activity to pique interest and activate expectations. The goal of pre-listening is to build curiosity and a desire to participate, it is not top assess accuracy or depth of knowledge
Examples include: Opinion/Experience questions, answering pre-listening/viewing opinion questions (Day et al., 2019); Prediction guesses, predicting content based on a list of statements in the upcoming text (Sert, 2017); Vocabulary activation, identifying familiar vs. unfamiliar vocabulary expressions from the upcoming text (Solorzano & Frazier, 2017)
2. First listening stage
In an experiential listening approach, it is important to delay comprehension checking in order to build up subjective listening skills. After the first listening to an extract, which can be paused periodically, ask pre-comprehensionquestions about students’ impressions and interests: What is interesting to you? What is new to you? What is unclear to you? If the students are simultaneously reading the extract, the instructor can have them indicate (underline or star) which parts were of most interest, and then share their ideas with a classmate.
The evaluation here is not about what the students have understood, but rather about what they find of interest or relevance to them, even if they do not fully understand the content. Instructors should aim to assess the quality of response: clarity, thoughtfulness, consistency. Any response that shows an increase in personal engagement should be encouraged. Students can take notes during this first pass listening, but they are only for their own reference, not for evaluation. Instructors should aim to build a collaborative discussion, acknowledging each person’s contribution as valuable.
3. Second listening stage
In this experiential listening approach, it is useful to help learners slow down the listening process so that they have an opportunity to consider the ideas they are listening to, not merely trying to catch up with the language flow. Slowing down the process entails providing some type of scaffolding task: a graph or chart to be filled in, an outline or partial set of notes to be completed, an illustration to be labelled.
The evaluation for this stage is to detect active participation in the comprehension process, not to test complete comprehension. After students have attempted the task individually, they can compare their task completion with a classmate and discuss the differences.
4. Immediate post-listening stage
After the second listening to an extract, a more formal comprehension check can be given. A global comprehension check will include these types of questions: What was the main idea? What is (Speaker A)’s reasoning? Why does (Speaker A) believe (that)? What is your opinion of what (Speaker A) said? Why do you think so?
A more detailed comprehension check can include a set of multiple choice or True-False questions that exhaustively cover the entire extract. Students can compare answers before checking as a whole class, as this type of peer exchange tends to build relationship and establish a collaborative classroom culture.
The evaluation here can go beyond checking the accuracy of answers. Instructors can also assess students willingness to communicate with each other, support for each other, use active listening strategies (give full attention to partner, paraphrase partners’s meaning) have positive regard for each other (show patience and appreciation), show increased openness to new ideas, ask probing questions, refer back to the input text for support.
5. Follow up post-listening stage
In the following class meeting, or in a journal response, the instructor provides an opportunity for students to reconstruct the previous text and recall the previous group discussion. Reflective questions can be posed to facilitate this review: What were the main points of (the text)? What were the main ideas in your discussion? The evaluation here is how well students begin adopting the principles of interactive listening. Assess students’ ability to increase their openness, their tolerance for diverse ideas, and their willingness to change their viewpoints based on new evidence or considerations offered by others.
6. Appropriation stage
At some point in the future, the instructor asks the students to work on integrating the content they learned in some meaningful way. Students may present some personal experience or some personal research finding based on the conflictive text that has been presented. For example, if this input text from the class involved a cultural conflict (such as, a person was asked to change their hair style in the workplace, even though the hair style is traditional to them), a student may present some background to the story, based on researching news items. Students are also asked to field questions and in turn to pose discussion questions to their classmates.
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As you can see, many of the activities involve output and interaction, in which the learner articulates (in speech or writing) some response, and negotiates meaning “intersubjectively” with other participants.
