Ten tips to accelerate academic listening
Michael Rost
Series Editor
Contemporary Topics4thEdition (Pearson)
Academic listening is a special kind of listening. It is listening in order encounter, understand, learn, discuss, and remember new ideas. No matter what your teaching situation, helping students become better academic listeners is an important part of language teaching.
Over the years, through teaching, observation, and research, I have come up with ten teaching tips that can accelerate academic listening.
Tip 1: Use great content
Academic listening is really about content learning. You want the content to do the teaching! Your goal as a teacher is to get the students excited about the new content and about sharing their perspectives. It’s easiest to do this when the content itself is compelling, when there is substance that is really worth trying to understand. Whether you’re teaching history or math, biology or art, literature or physiology, try packaging and presenting the content in ways that makes it more interesting and provocative. Try supplementing the content with different forms of multimedia (audio tracks, video clips, web pages) and activities (tasks, games, experiments, surveys) in order to make it more engaging and more motivating for your students. (See Philp and Duchesne, 2016 for a clear summary on the interaction of engagement and motivation.)
But what about the language teaching aspect? Don’t we need to teach the language? Of course, yes. But it is well established that the most effective way to teach the language is throughthe learning of content in the target language — provided thatthere is sufficient language support (See Cenoz, 2015 for discussion of the role of language support in L2 content instruction.)
Tip 2: Teach “academic conversations” as a social learning tool
Academic listening is also about exploring, negotiating, and sharingideas and learning new perspectives. Classroom learning of academic listening depends cruciallyon the learners having frequent collaborative “academic conversations” with each other — and with you, the teacher. The learners need to feel safe brainstorming, sharing personal thoughts, questioning ideas, reacting emotionally at times, and working out problems understanding each other and the course content.
But trying to have meaningful academic conversations often runs into a wall. Left to their own devices, most learners, regardless of age, will settle on minimal verbal and non-verbal interaction in the classroom, often attempting to finish learning tasks as quickly – and with as few words – as possible. The challenge for learners is that academic learning involves making our thinking explicit, so it is necessary to teach and reward the use of explicit gambits in order to develop this elaborated style of thinking (Crawford and Zwiers, 2011; Zwiers and Soto, 2017).
Implementing this tip involves two practical steps: (1) presenting conversation prompts, interaction models, and academic phrases and (2) promoting “positive regard” for others. Presenting interaction models is best done by identifying specific critical thinking skills as “focus points” for learning. The most commonly recognized critical thinking skills are: identify main ideas, comparing similarities, contrasting differences, attributing facts to sources, evaluation of validity, inferring missing information, explaining results, and applying information to solve problems.
Here’s an example of displaying the relationship between focus, conversation gambit (for posing questions), and language frame (for responding and formulating ideas).
| Focus | Conversation Gambit | Language Frame |
| Describe the main idea | What is the gist of the lecture?What do you think is the central idea?What was this part of the lecture about? | The presentation was mainly about…The speaker is basically saying….The main idea of the talk was… |
The second aspect is promoting “positive regard”, which means seeking and acknowledging each speaker’s contribution. Positive regard can be achieved through active listening to each other’s ideas, supporting each other’s efforts to learn, and respecting alternate points of view. Teachers assist through modeling and monitoring of conversational interaction to be sure that “positive regard” is systematically practiced (or at least aimed for!) in all classroom interactions (Singer, 2018).
Tip 3: Shift responsibility to the learner
The essential insight behind this tip is: It is the learners themselves who decidewhether or not they want to understand. Set up optimal learning conditions – and let the learners do the work. This suggestion may seem obvious, but I have often seen learning get short-circuited when teachers try to guide or help their students too much. Think in terms of letting the students take the lead, in whatever ways you can. Have the students run the technology, let them select content supplements and decide on activities when possible, have them lead group discussions, have them give presentations, even have them design the tests.
But are we being too “harsh” on the students if we really think learners decidewhether or not they want to understand? Shouldn’t we be making the content easier for the students to understand if they’re having difficulties with the language? Well, yes and no. The paradox is that by setting high expectations, and allowing the students to struggle to succeed, we are actually empowering them with the skills and strategies they need outside of our classroom (See Ferlazzo, 2016 and Asgedom, 2014 for insightful discussions about challenging students with high standards.)
Tip 4: Teach “active listening” as a reliable learning strategy
Active listeningis more than the notion of “being animated when you listen”. It is actually a broader range of cognitive and emotional activity that could be described as “engaged processing”. Active listening starts with a mindset: an open-mindedness and curiosity and a “positive regard” for the speaker and his or her ideas – a supportive intention to try to understand without judging. Beyond these intentional aspects, active listening involves the specific teachable behaviors of paying full attention, asking clarification questions, paraphrasing, reflecting, summarizing, asking creative follow up questions to probe further into the speaker’s meaning (Rost and Wilson, 2013).
For all of these behaviors, there are specific gambits we can teach students to help them adopt an active listening mindset:
asking clarification questions: When you said (….), did you mean…? I’d like to ask if you can explain more about…
paraphrasing: What I hear you saying is… Let me see if I understand you correctly. I believe you said…
reflecting: That is very interesting to me. It reminds me of … I see a parallel between (….) and (…)
asking follow up questions: Is there another way to think about this? For example, is it possible that…
I often talk with teachers who believe that active listening is way beyond their learners’ abilities. After all, their students may be struggling with basic vocabulary and grammar issues. Don’t they need to master the language more fully before they can use these “advanced” academic formulas and interaction gambits? Research has shown that teaching this type of “metacognitive thinking” actually helps students, even lower-level students, handle new and complex language more readily, without simplification of content. It empowers learners to engage gradually with more complex ideas (Goh, 2018; Vlach and Ellis, 2010).
Learning to use structured academic language can also create more meaningful interactions — “learning conversations” — between the students. This language provides students with “islands of reliability” for interacting in pairs and groups in ways that promote more “comprehensible output” – that is, speaking or writing output that challenges the learner to use his or her maximumlanguage capacity (Keene, 2011; Graf and Birkstein, 2007). And in my own experience, teaching active listening strategies makes listening more enjoyable for the students!
Tip 5: Use short segments to focus on skill building
Academic listening can be overwhelming for students because it involves sustained listening, sometimes up to 30 minutes or longer. Once a student becomes overwhelmed and fatigued, learning efficiency — engagement and enjoyment, as well as memory function – obviously diminishes. What I like to do to counteract this is to punctuate a class with intensive work on shorter listening extracts: cuing an audio or video track to just 30 or 60 or 90 seconds of input. I may play the track three or four times, each time with a new task:
• Listen and write down just the verbs. (Drawing attention to the need to identify key words.)
• Listen and write the full forms for these reduced forms. (Drawing attention to reductions and assimilations).
• Listen and tell me which of these words or expressions you hear (To develop selective listening. I write several words on the board, only some of which are actually in the passage to be played).
• Listen and summarize the main ideas. (Orally to a partner, or in writing)
• Listen without taking notes. Then at the end, try to reconstruct exactly what the speaker said. (I may provide a partial transcript to facilitate this process.)
You might object that this type of activity doesn’t resemble trueacademic listening – as in a university lecture or a business presentation. That is correct, but in order to effect transfer of skills to academic listening contexts, students also need the training opportunities to build up the sub-skills of word recognition, phonological discrimination, extracting key information, and building short-term memory (Field, 1998; Goh and Aryadoust, 2013; Wilson, 2003). Working with short extracts also helps the teacher and students diagnose specific decoding problems and take concrete steps to remediate, rather than relying entirely on inferencing in order to guess “the missing pieces” (Cross, 2009).
Tip 6: Teach listening strategies through specific tasks
Listening strategies are cognitive and social techniques for “how to understand”, deliberate plans to construct meaning more deeply. Some have argued that effective strategies are a by-product of motivation and emerge in learners naturally without being taught (this is the “soft skills” theory) and others argue that listening strategies d o not emerge unlessthey are demonstrated explicitly, and that direct teaching of listening strategies improvesmotivation (Graham, 2017). The realized benefits may be a matter of individual differences and cultural learning styles. I have found that most learners will benefit from some explicit instruction in “how to listen”, particularly if it is done in the immediate context of a listening task.
What are listening strategies? In my own research tracking and interviewing learners (Rost, 2016), as well as through the research of colleagues (e.g. Vandergrift, 2007), we have identified eight recognizable categories of listening strategies.
| 1. Planning Developing an awareness of the steps needed to accomplish a listening task, anticipating content that may be introduced, coming up with an “action plan” Advance organizing:Clarifying the goals of a task before listening Self-management:Rehearsing the steps to take to deal with a listening task | 2. Focusing attention Concentrating on the input and task at hand, avoiding distractions and disruptive thoughts, reminding oneself of the plan Directed attention:Attending to the listening task, consciously ignoring distractions or any tendency to give up Selective attention:Attending to specific aspects of the listening input, such as key words or ideas that have been anticipated Persistent attention:Attending to broad meaning, keeping flow of attention even if temporarily distracted by unknown language Noticing attention:Attending to new language, specific language, rhetorical forms in the input |
| 3. Monitoring Verifying or adjusting one’s understanding or way of understanding during a task Comprehension monitoring:Checking how well one is understanding, identifying problematic aspects in the input Double-check monitoring:Verifying one’s initial understanding and making revisions in understanding as needed, during the second listening to the same input Emotional monitoring:Keeping track of one’s feelings, encouraging oneself to keep listening, finding ways to counter negative emotions and anxiety | 4. Evaluating Checking the outcome of one’s listening process against a standard of accuracy or completeness Performance evaluation:Checking one’s overall attainment of the task goals Problem evaluation:Identifying what specific issue needs to be solved or understood or what part of the listening task still needs to be completed Revision evaluation:Choosing a second listening to assist understanding or selecting an alternative way of accomplishing a listening task |
| 5. InferencingUsing information in the input to guess themeaning of unfamiliar language, to predictcontent, or to fill in missing information Linguistic inferencing: Using words youknow to guess meanings of unknown wordsor blurs of soundsContextual inferencing: Consciously usingknowledge of the setting and extralinguisticfeatures (items in the environment) tocreate or amplify meaningSpeaker inferencing: Using the speaker’stone of voice, paralinguistic cues (stress,pause, intonation) or to guess intendedmeanings, facial expressions, body languageand baton signals (hand and armmovements) to guess intended meaningsMultimodal inferencing: Using backgroundsounds, visual cues, supplementary text andintuitive sense of the input to infer meaningPredictive inferencing: Anticipating detailsin a specific part of the input (localprediction), or anticipating the gist of whatis coming in the input (global prediction)Retrospective inferencing: Thinking backover a large chunk of input to fill in gaps andconsolidate one’s understanding | 6. ElaboratingUsing prior knowledge from outside theinput and relating it to content in the inputin order to enrich one’s interpretation of theinput Personal elaboration: Connecting with priorpersonal experiencesWorld elaboration: Connecting withknowledge gained about the worldCreative elaboration: Making up backgroundinformation to contextualise the inputs,generating questions that relate to theinput, or introducing new possibilities toextend the inputVisual elaboration: Using mentalvisualizations to represent aspects ofthe input |
| 7. CollaboratingCooperating with the speaker, other listeners,and outside sources for assistance with improving comprehension or enrichin interpretations Seeking clarification: Asking for repetition,explanations, rephrasings or elaborations about the language just heard Seeking confirmation: Asking for verification that what you have said has been understoodBackchannelling:Showing the speaker thatyou are engaged, following the input and ready to continue listeningJoint task construction: Working together,with the speaker or with another listener to solve a problem or complete a task Resourcing: Using available referencing resources to deepen language and idea comprehension | 8. ReviewingCondensing, reordering or transferring fromone modality to another, of what one hasprocessed to help understanding, memorystorage and retrieval Summarization: Making a mental or verbal(oral or written) summary of informationpresentationRepetition: Repeating or paraphrasing partof what was heard as part of a listening taskNoting: Writing down key words or ideas inanother form (abbreviated verbal or graphicform) to assist in recall or performance of ataskMediating: Rendering ideas from the input tothe listener’s L1, orally or in writing |
(From Rost and Wilson, 2013)
But how do we teach listening strategies? And is it important for students to learn all of these various categories? Much of the language used to describe the strategies (“metalanguage”) is very abstract and unfamiliar to our students. Will this really help them? The key to helping students learn and adopt these strategies is in designing tasks, or steps in an activity, that focus on onespecific listening strategy. For example, to promote “advance organizing”, we might give a series of images related to an upcoming lecture to the students, and ask them to come up with a list of ideas that might be included in the lecture. For “joint task construction”, we might play a segment of a lecture or presentation, and have students work in pairs to complete a cloze summary of the section. And because listening strategies are consciousplans to improve understanding, it is important for students to reflecton their utility. At the end of an activity, we may simply ask, “What did you think of that activity? Did it help you listen better? Why or why not?”
Tip 7: Teach note-taking as a review tool
Note-taking is widely viewed as one of the most important macro-skills in academic listening, but there is little agreement on what constitutes effective practice. Different techniques have been taught, including the Cornell Method (columns and indenting to show relationships), Mind Maps (graphic connections to show associations), and Key Words (noting only key words and phrases to show sequencing and prominence). However, no one method has been shown to be superior to others, although there is evidence that certain modalities of note-taking represent deeper levels of information processing than others (Bohay et al., 2011; Mueller and Oppenheimer, 2014).
So does it matter if we have students take notes? Yes! Even though there is no consistent correlation between specific types of notes or quantity of notes and comprehension scores, as a teacher I have consistentlyseen a positive effect of note-taking instruction on student participation and an increase in student responsibility in trying to understand. I have seen advantages of providing interventions whilestudents are actively engaged in listening to academic lectures— not just before or after. Interventions— short instructional episodes during a language processing experience— provide a way for students to focus their attention and learn specific note-taking strategies that promote comprehension. And as other researchers have found, I also believe that the note-taking interventions improve long-term memory during and after listening, particularly if notes are used for collaborative tasks and review for tests — or even if notes are allowed to be used during tests (Flowerdew and Miller, 2005).
Tip 8: Provide stimulating out of class listening homework
Because accelerating academic listening involves nurturing a full-time active mindset, it is important to have productive outside homework assignments between classes.
For each course I teach, I try to curate a set of at least 10 topically related YouTube or Vimeo or TEDTalk or other videos or FreshAir or other short interviews that are in the public domain. (I ask students to provided suggestions to add to the list as the course progresses.) This is a technique for keeping learning alive for students between classes, and for “flipping” the roles of classwork and homework as needed (Jensen et al., 2015).
As a safety procedure, I recommend watching the videos all the way through or listening to interviews from start to finish first, to be sure the content is appropriate for your students. In a typical 8-week course for me, the homework for the students is to listen to at least five and complete a short task – usually some variation of “Summarize in your own words”, “What is one thing that you learned in this presentation?” “What is one follow up question that you would like to ask the speaker?” “What are 5 words or expressions you learned in this talk?” If the class has a discussion board in its Learning Management System, I may require that each student comment on each video they watch, and respond to one other student’s comments for each video. If the class has time for presentations, I may have students prepare a presentation in pairs, related to the ideas in one video they have watched together.
Tip 9: Integrate student presentations into the class
We often think of listening as primarily a receptive activity — in which the listener’s goal is to gather information, organize it, and retain it for later retrieval. And while receptivity to incoming ideas and the ability to perceive and evaluate new information are essential parts of listening, reception is not the only goal. Indeed, we might say that “owning” the information is the main goal of listening, especially academic listening. “Owning” in this sense means integrating, evaluating, and formulating a positionon the ideas and opinions being forwarded by the speaker.
When we include student presentations into the academic curriculum, we show the learners that we expect them to take responsibility for “owning” what they are learning. We want our students to learn how to do additional research, to prepare and rehearse, and finally to deliver their own ideas in front of their classmates. (For time management reasons, we may need to have the students work in small groups when delivering presentations.)
Tip 10: Demonstrate to learners how to “get an A” in your course
The concept of academic listening — and academic study generally – may be unfamiliar to your learners at first, so it is helpful to “gamify” the concept by demonstrating to students the specific active behaviors they can use to “win the game”. For example, in one of my CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) classes, I give the students guidelines that include a number of “active listening” ideas:
HOW TO STUDY AND EARN AN “A” IN THIS COURSE
These guidelines are the best way to master the material in this course and earn an “A:”
• Come to class on time, listen actively, and participate. Take good notes and participate in the
discussions and in-class exercises. Be certain that your comments improve on the silence.
• Participate in the on-line discussions and make use of web resources, especially the videos.
• Take notes as though you will be explaining the content to a friend who missed the class.
• Communicate with the instructor – about possible absences, late assignments, or anything else that will
affect your performance in class.
• Ask questions if you don’t understand something! Just because others aren’t asking questions doesn’tmean they understand. If something isn’t clear to you it may not be clear to your
classmates. Do them a favor and raise your hand.
• Summarize, rewrite, and review your notes between classes. Don’t wait for the night before an
exam to re-familiarize yourself with the material covered.
• Take some action to personalize the material. Develop your own set of study notes, summarize eachlecture or reading to a classmate (learning partner), or write out what you think would be a likely essay question on the test.
But aren’t these guidelines too strict? Don’t we need to be sensitive to learner differences? Don’t we need to modify course expectations to fit a range of cultural learning styles? To an extent, yes, but we also need to allow students to understand and modify their own study habits and to clarify cultural differences (between their home culture and the target culture) for themselves. By showing the “rules” of the system, we are helping them succeed, both in content learning and cultural learning (Hattie, 2012; Hofstede et al, 2010).
So those are the ten tips that can accelerate academic listening. Using them is no guarantee that all students will immediately increase their listening ability, but trying them out in your classes may well trigger some fresh energy for students to improve. I hope you’ll try them.
REFERENCES
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