Toward an instructional approach to developing interactive second language listening

Abstract

This study details the development of six second language learners in an English listening course that focused on developing their bottom-up listening skills. The research employed longitudinal multi-case studies to chart the development of these lower proficiency-level Taiwanese university learners, and their progress in the course was analysed in light of the main theoretical claims of this instructional approach. The study found that many of the learners did not develop in the manner theorized, at least over the 22-hour period of the course, spread over a semester and a half. The study also found that there was no particular ‘type’ of learner, in terms of their predominant approach to listening (i.e. top-down or bottom-up), most likely to benefit from such a course. It was concluded that bottom-up skills ought to be taught in conjunction with more knowledge-based listening strategies to develop learners’ interactive listening abilities. The study also underscored how listeners need to develop an interaction between bottom-up and top-down processes in order to progress.

Getting to the bottom of L2 listening instruction: Making a case for bottom-up activities

“…However, based on the increasing test results, the positive learner feedback, and our own pedagogic experiences, we believe the exercises presented in this paper should be added to other approaches (i.e., TD-or strategically-oriented) in order to provide more holistic, balanced, and integrated listening instruction (e.g., Yeldham & Gruba, 2014). Still, even authors who promote a BU view of listening instruction (e.g., Goh, 2008;Vandergrift & Goh, 2012) are aware of potential caveats, which teachers and researchers should consider.…”

“…It is generally agreed that listeners do not exclusively employ either of these approaches; rather, an interactive combination of the two is ideal (e.g., Lynch & Mendelsohn, 2002;Yeldham & Gruba, 2014). Contextual guesswork (i.e., TD) needs to be combined with acoustic and linguistic perception and interpretation (i.e., BU; Lynch, 2009).…”

“…These points of emphasis overshadow, in particular, phoneme recognition and parsing capabilities, the elements represented near the BU position in Figure 1. Furthermore, as pointed out by several recent publications (e.g., Siegel & Siegel, 2013;Vandergrift & Goh, 2012;Yeldham & Gruba, 2014), research into listening pedagogy has typically overlooked studies on BU pedagogy.…”

“…Pedagogic techniques for the classroom include focusing on phoneme perception by accounting for aspects such as segmental and suprasegmental features, intonation patterns and phonetic clustering (e.g., Al-Jasser, 2008;Yeldham & Gruba, 2014). Also recommended are activities that target segmenting the speech stream into chunks, recognizing where words begin and end, and building up lexical predictions based on the previous words in an utterance (e.g., Field, 2008a).…”

“…Using a case study approach, Yeldham and Gruba (2014) followed six Taiwanese learners in order to monitor their development during a course that emphasized BU skills. After first establishing learner preference as either predominantly TD or BU, students received a coordinated sequence of BU instruction (see Appendix A).…”