Issues in development of listening skills

2.2. Techniques and Strategies of Listening Comprehension

One of the methods learners can become actively involved in controlling their own learning is by using strategies. Vandergrift (1999) showed ―Strategy development is important for listening training because strategies are conscious means by which learners can guide and evaluate their own comprehension and responses.²⁵ In O'Malley, Chamot, Stewner-Manzanares, Kupper, and Russo‘s (1985) study, high school ESL students were randomly assigned to receive learning strategy training on vocabulary, listening, and speaking tasks and the result indicated strategy training can be effective for integrative language tasks.²⁶ Nakata (1999) studied the influence of listening strategy training on Japanese EFL learners‘ listening competence, and it showed that the effect of listening strategy training was more discernible on perception than on comprehension, especially for those students who received low scores on the G-TELP.
Research into speech perception has shown that listening comprehension involves far more than mere decoding of the sounds. Rivers (1983) in her discussion of speech perception identifies three stages. First, the listener must recognize that the sounds are an actual message and not just noise. This recognition means to the listener that the sounds are elements of the language system. In the second stage the listener identifies sounds along with lexical and syntactic forms by segmenting and grouping them. The third stage involves recoding in order to retain the auditory message in long-term storage. These stages are necessarily rapid and overlapping. Whether the process of listening comprehension is as described above or in some other form, it is certainly an active process involving cognitive processing (pp. 80-83). ²⁷
Native speakers and highly proficient second language learners complete the complex process of speech comprehension smoothly. Second language learners at lower levels of language proficiency whether it be due to a lack of auditory experience with varying accents, limited vocabulary, imperfect control of the syntactic and semantic structure of the language, or other limitations with regard to the elements necessary for communicative competency need to rely on listening strategies to assist them in comprehending the aural communication. Brown (1995) quite appropriately compares strategies to ―battle plans‖: Strategies are specific methods of approaching a problem or task, modes of operation for achieving a particular end, planned designs for controlling and manipulating certain information. They are contextualized ―battle plans‖ that might vary from moment to moment, or day to day, or year to year (p. 104).
Among all the strategies for listening, O‘Malley and Chamot (1990) claimed three main types of strategies: metacognitive, cognitive and social strategies. The meta-cognitive strategy was a kind of self-regulated learning. It included the attempt to plan, check, monitor, select, revise, and evaluate, etc. For example, for meta-cognitive planning strategies, learners would clarify the objectives of an anticipated listening task, and attend to specific aspects of language input or situational details that assisted in understanding the task (Vandergrift, 1999). Generally, it can be discussed through pre-listening planning strategies, while-listening monitoring strategies, and post-listening evaluation strategies.
The cognitive strategies are related to comprehending and storing input in working memory or long-term memory for later retrieval. They are investigated from the aspects of bottom-up strategies, top-down strategies. For bottom-up processing, it refers to using the incoming input as the basis for understanding the message. Comprehension begins with the received data that is analyzed as successive levels of organization-sounds, words, as a process of decoding. For bottom up strategies, Henner-Stanchina (1987) engaged in a similar study and pointed out that effective listeners were good at using their previous knowledge and experience to raise hypotheses about a text, integrating new information into their ongoing interpretations, making influences to bridge gaps, assessing their interpretations, and modifying their hypotheses, if necessary. On the other hand, top-down processing went from meaning to language (Richards, 2008).
Learners can try to predict what will utter by the signal. However, Chiu (2006) claimed that listening comprehension was neither only top-down nor bottom-up processing. Simultaneously, Lu (2008) summed up that the scholars believed the listeners not only utilized bottom-up but also top-down processing models. In sum, Thompson & Rubin (1996) indicated the effects of meta-cognitive and cognitive strategy instruction on the listening comprehension performance of American university students learning Russian. They found that the subjects who received strategy instruction in listening to video-recorded texts improved significantly over those who had received no instruction.
For social/ affective strategies, Vandergrift (2003) defined the strategies as the techniques listeners used to collaborate with others, to verify understanding or to lower anxiety. Habte-Gabr (2006) stated that socio-affective strategies were those which were non academic in nature and involve stimulating learning through establishing a level of empathy between the instructor and student. They included considering factors such as emotions and attitudes (Oxford, 1990). It was essential for listeners to know how to reduce the anxiety, feel confident in doing listening tasks, and promote personal motivation in improving listening competence (Vandergrift, 1997). According to O‘Malley & Chaumont (2001), among the four strategies of management strategies, social strategies, cognitive strategies, affective strategies in listening comprehension, both social and affective strategies influenced the learning situation immediately.
A great deal has been written about language strategies. These strategies have been categorized as learning strategies and communication strategies. Ellis (1985:181) has stated that, ―Communication strategies are problem-oriented. That is they are employed by the learner because he lacks or cannot gain access to the linguistic resources required to express an intended meaning.‖ They are ―short-term answers‖ while learning strategies Ellis points are ―long-term solutions.
In general, discussion of and research on these communication strategies have focused on the learner‘s behavior when his production in the second language shuts down. Little research has focused specifically on strategies employed when the learner finds he cannot comprehend the auditory message. This research specifically intended to address the question of what strategies the listener employed to solve the problem when he/she failed to comprehend the message he/she was listening to. The listener‘s level of language competency was considered an important variable in the listener‘s choice of strategy. Paterson (2001:90) states that ―Strategy use varies with proficiency and so the relationship between strategy use and proficiency level is an important one.‖
Listening is the language modality that is used most frequently. It has been estimated that adults spend almost half their communication time listening, and students may receive as much as 90% of their in-school information through listening to instructors and to one another. Often, however, language learners do not recognize the level of effort that goes into developing listening ability.
Far from passively receiving and recording aural input, listeners actively involve themselves in the interpretation of what they hear, bringing their own background knowledge and linguistic knowledge to bear on the information contained in the aural text. Not all listening is the same; casual greetings, for example, require a different sort of listening capability than do academic lectures. Language learning requires intentional listening that employs strategies for identifying sounds and making meaning from them.²⁸
Listening involves a sender (a person, radio, television), a message, and a receiver (the listener). Listeners often must process messages as they come, even if they are still processing what they have just heard, without backtracking or looking ahead. In addition, listeners must cope with the sender's choice of vocabulary, structure, and rate of delivery. The complexity of the listening process is magnified in second language contexts, where the receiver also has incomplete control of the language.
Given the importance of listening in language learning and teaching, it is essential for language teachers to help their students become effective listeners. In the communicative approach to language teaching, this means modeling listening strategies and providing listening practice in authentic situations: those that learners are likely to encounter when they use the language outside the classroom.

Instructors want to produce students who, even if they do not have complete control of the grammar or an extensive lexicon, can fend for themselves in communication situations. In the case of listening, this means producing students who can use listening strategies to maximize their comprehension of aural input, identify relevant and non-relevant information, and tolerate less than word-by-word comprehension.