Listening Comprehension - sure, why not ? - WHERE LANGUAGE AND FUN MEET

Listening Comprehension - sure, why not ?

4/27/2018

Probably the single biggest 'innovation' in the new Language Ab Initio and Language B courses is the discrete Listening Comprehension assessment. We all started whispering about it as soon as listening skills started to be mentioned in curriculum review meetings and reports to teachers. It is now a reality and it brings a lot of excitement to the ongoing subject-specific seminars around the world.

Yes, it is a new assessment, but how new is listening really to these courses ?

I assume that, for as long as you have been teaching either or both of these courses, you have been
- using the target languages as much as possible in your lessons
- doing lots of classroom presentations with your students
- using the audio resources that come with many language acquisition course books
- playing plenty of online video clips (YouTube, anyone ?) and/or sound files (podcasts, anyone ?)
- bringing native speakers or fluent speakers of the target language into your classroom
- setting up virtual classrooms and Skype connections with target language speakers around the world
- encouraging your students to watch movies in the target language and to turn off or ignore the subtitles
- doing plenty of other things that expose your students to the sounds of the target language

So what is the fuss all about ?

Workshops, online discussions, workshop leader upskilling sessions and random conversations reveal that teachers' concerns center mostly around 'variation' (yes, one of the five conceptual understandings !), accessibility, findability and the level of difficulty of most online resources.

As far as VARIATION is concerned, there is what sounds like a guarantee that all the recordings that the students will listen to in their Listening Comprehension assessment will be of broadcasting standard. This means that there will be no room for dialects, poorly pronounced statements, background interference or the use of slang. What the students will hear is of the same standard as what we might expect to hear on official media broadcasts such as news bulletins, weather forecasts, documentaries, tourism promos and the like.

FINDABILITY thereby becomes a matter of selectability. There is no such word but you know what I mean. We will find many thousands of videos and audio files in the target language - that's for sure. But we will have to be very careful with what we choose to expose our students to. The courses move fast and the resources that we use must reflect the level that the students have reached at that particular moment in time.

I believe that the fuss is not about the intrinsic difficulty of a listening comprehension assessments, but rather about the time it will take all of us to find and/or develop appropriate listening comprehension resources for our courses. Exposing the students to the recordings that accompany our course books isn't enough, as these will not present much variation. We will all have to go and search beyond that.

Hence, we will set up a database of such resources, grouped per language, so that everyone can benefit from everyone's treasure hunts - and make the Language Ab Initio / Language B world a better place for all of us !

Add your comments please ...

2 Comments

Authors

We are practising Language Ab Initio, B and A teachers, examiners and workshop leaders for the International Baccalaureate. We author and publish the “Language Ab Initio Student Workbook”, the various Language Portfolios (for Ab Initio, B and MYP) and the How to Ace Language Ab Initio and Language B series. We are also a language acquisition and mother tongue consultants and tireless advocates for mother tongue entitlement in international education. Beyond our lives as linguists, we travel the world, we publish novels, we practice photography, we play and coach football coach, we write and we read.

rayesh

4/30/2018 07:51:08 am

With respect, I disagree with your take on the main problems. You highlight FINDABILITY and VARIATION as the primary concerns. However, I disagree. Below are some of my thoughts:

1. If the aim of the IBO is to align MYP - DP then moving away from the audio/visual assessment makes little sense. On the one hand the IB claims it would like to be up to date with current technology and market trends. On the other hand it seems like the DP listening assessment is now going back to the days of radio.

2. Expecting a child to do a formal listening assessment with 2 years (1.5 really for ab initio) of language learning is a huge undertaking for several reasons.

a) Too much information - too little time: The student has to rapidly process input (in LOTE), decipher the content, make sense out of it, and then write it down. They are only given 2 opportunities to hear the audio. Arnold (2000) comments on how “ listening induces anxiety in learners, because of the pressure it places on them to process input rapidly”. This pressure and anxiety does not allow students to show their true ability, instead it creates a ‘best guess’ scenario.

b) There’s more to listening than hearing: “The listeners’ knowledge of the topic, their general knowledge of the world and of how ‘texts’ generally ‘work’, will interact with the linguistic knowledge to create an interpretation of the text” (Buck, 2001: 29). As pointed out by Buck, many ‘texts’ have nuance that students must be familiar with in order to read between the lines so that they can answer the question. Listening involves a set of skills that go beyond just comprehending words, namely specific topical and cultural knowledge of the language. Preparing an ab initio student for all the possibilities within the limited time frame of the course seems to be setting them up for failure.

c) Limited time to teach listening strategies: Graham's work (2006) analysing listening comprehension states that students struggle due to " ...the speed of delivery of texts, making out individual words in a stream of spoken L2, and making sense of any words that have not been identified or understood". This causes them to lose confidence in their listening abilities. Students’ perception that listening is difficult is reinforced due to lack of classroom time to practice effective listening strategies. While you offer many ways in which listening is presently used in the classroom, all are used to build familiarity with limited set expressions. This is not the same skill students will need to adequately respond in the listening component. Mastering listening strategies requires time and repetition. These are luxuries we don’t have as we also need to address the oral, reading, and writing components of the course.

To conclude, the DP program is already pretty demanding without the listening, where a student has to practice oral skills, reading and answering questions, and writing using a wide range of formats. To now introduce listening puts added pressure on both the teacher delivering the program and the student. The point of an assessment is to allow the student to prove that s/he is able to use the language in order to communicate. Listening is an important skill and often times is underrated. However, if the IBO includes it as part of an assessment, it most certainly undermines the main goal of the ab initio program which is to communicate without taking into account a broad knowledge of the language.

Personally, I feel the IB fails to address authenticity in ab initio. On the one hand it advocates for a holistic, well rounded approach to learning but then totally contradicts this by putting in place unrealistic assessments. Discarding assessments such as the WA and implementing a difficult listening component are both approaches that do not do justice to the teachers that teach nor the students that study.

Diana

5/8/2018 08:57:46 am

Rayesh, you have made some valid points in your lengthy response. In my humble experience as a language acquisition teacher I have always had to teach listening comprehension. Yes, as a formal exam this poses a number of challenges for the learners but is also a true reflection of the challenges language learners have in real life interacting with speakers of the target langauge. Imagine the real life case of having to speak to someone on the phone and having only one chance to hear what they say before you need to respond. You can no doubt think of many other such situations of needing to establish an immediate rapport with a speaker and respond to their meaning and message. On the other hand, testing listening comprehension as a separate assessment component is nothing new in the langauge education industry. The Cambridge langauge exam board have been doing it for many years and I suspect the IB might have looked that way too. In the current Lang B DP assessment listening has been tested through the orals but in the interactive oral there is plenty of room for scripted performance if the teacher is not vigilant meaning that students don’t have to spontaneously respond to meaning making with their interlocutors. This is a weak area of the IB assessment in my view as it is open to much interpretation and finding short cuts to true comprehension. Anyway, this is my short rant to your much more detailed and referenced response.

Listening Comprehension - sure, why not ?

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