Developing materials for teaching listening-in-interaction: An action research approach

Abstract

Language learners frequently report a marked disparity between their confident listening performance in the classroom and the confusion they encounter in real-world contexts. Such breakdowns, far from being confined to complex extended texts, occur repeatedly even in very brief conversations and simple service encounters. One explanation for this disparity are shortcomings in current approaches to listening, with both syllabus content and task design often heavily weighted towards a testing approach to comprehension and to the one-way receipt of information. As such, learners often receive inadequate instruction and practise in many of the subskills required for real-life listening in person-to-person interaction, such as recognizing speaker actions and intentions, acknowledging information and speaker emotionality, and actively shaping the speaker’s language choices and delivery. In response, an action research project was initiated to enhance the curriculum of an academic English skills programme for university entry. The project sought to develop an approach to listening-in-interaction, in which routine practices identified within the field of Conversation Analysis would be conceptualised as listening subskills, and that these would be explicitly highlighted, taught and practiced. The project was conducted over a period of 18 months in cycles of designing, using and evaluating tasks and identifying suitable curriculum content, with reference to classroom observations and learner feedback. This revealed that a range of fundamental skills underlying listening in interaction pose substantial challenges for many learners, even at advanced levels. In conclusions and reflections from the study, the most promising directions in this work are identified, while pointing also to remaining gaps and pedagogical challenges