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Teaching and learning listening in ESOL classes: ‘The rock we build the house on’

James Simpson & Goodith White

[Published as Simpson, J. and G. White (2008) ‘Teaching and learning listening in ESOL classes: “The rock we

build the house on”.’ Language Issues 19/2, 4-19.]

James Simpson

School of Education

University of Leeds LS2 9JT

00-44-113-343-4687 (phone)

j.e.b.simpson@education.leeds.ac.uk

JAMES SIMPSON is a research fellow in the School of Education, University of Leeds. His

current research interests lie in the teaching and learning of ESOL, English for Speakers of

Other Languages. He has also published work on discourse and computer-mediated

communication, Computer-Assisted Language Learning, and language testing.

Goodith White

School of Education

University of Leeds LS2 9JT

00-44-113-343-4569 (phone)

a.g.white@education.leeds.ac.uk

GOODITH WHITE is a senior lecturer in the School of Education, University of Leeds. One of

her main research interests is the teaching and learning of L2 listening skills, and she has

published a number of books and articles in this area.

Abstract

This paper investigates the way in which English language listening skills are currently taught

and learnt in adult ESOL classes in the United Kingdom, using data drawn from classrooms

involved in the NRDC ESOL Effective Practice Project. It finds that current practice often fails

to give students the listening instruction which would be most useful for them, and discovers a

history of missed opportunities, occasions when the teacher might have enabled a focus on the

listening skill which was driven by a student’s immediate and explicit learning concerns.

The context and the problem

While a substantial body of research exists for the learning of second language listening skills

in contexts such as universities (e.g. Flowerdew 1994), and schools in the state system (e.g.

Goh and Taib 2006), it is true to say that there is a dearth of both research and reflection on

effective methodology for L2 listening in government funded adult ESOL classes, particularly

in the UK.

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The adult ESOL classroom presents particular challenges of its own for the teaching and

learning of listening. Adult students in ESOL classes in English-dominant countries are from a

hugely diverse range of geographical, social and educational backgrounds. Some come from

mainly oral cultures, or may have missed out on formal education, and thus have little

experience with using writing systems. These factors have implications for the ways in which

listening can be integrated with reading and writing in classroom instruction. Economic and

institutional constraints often dictate a small number of classes within a centre and a wide

variety of levels within a single class (Baynham, Roberts et al 2007). This means that teachers

have to deal with the problem of how to provide differentiated opportunities for learning the

listening skill for individuals within the same class, all of whom may have different levels of

ability in listening and different needs. Teachers will tend to have come from a wide variety of

backgrounds as far as training for the job is concerned, and consequently may have very

different views on what constitutes effective learning and teaching in general, and the learning

of the listening skill in particular.

The importance of teaching listening, however, is not lost on ESOL teachers, one of whom

provided the quote in the title of this paper, characterising the role of listening in his class as

‘the rock we build the house on’. Despite such perceptions, there may be a lack of suitable

materials for teaching listening, with teachers ‘mixing and matching’ between government

produced materials, commercial ones produced for EFL contexts and their own home-grown

materials. Then there is the growing push to enter students for external tests in order to prove to

funding bodies that progress is being made, which means that the teaching of listening may be

rather narrowly focussed on exam requirements.

Moreover, the students themselves often live in a world characterised by power imbalances,

either within the communities in which they live, or in society as a whole. They may be

refugees or asylum seekers still awaiting a decision on an application to stay in the country, or

low-paid migrant workers taking ESOL classes as a means of increasing their employability, or

women from so-called settled communities who have lived in the country for many years

without being able to attend formal English classes because of work or childcare commitments.

Their childhood learning background may be one in which they were not expected to question

the teacher. In other cases, because of a lack of formal educational experiences, they simply do

not possess the structures of expectation for particular pedagogical events (Simpson 2006),

particularly in classes where the dominant pedagogic philosophy advocates some variety of

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learner-centredness. These factors have an influence on the way learning is viewed by ESOL

students, and may explain what to an observer looks like passivity, where many students

appear to accept whatever the teacher does and are reluctant to ask questions or take

responsibility for their own learning.

We would argue that the power imbalances of ESOL learners’ everyday lives, combined with a

lack of understanding of the conventional ways of behaving in classes which are supposed to

be learner-centred, have implications for learning the listening skill. Carrier (1999) discusses a

number of factors which may affect the ability of listeners with ‘low status’ to understand

messages. She points out that in asymmetrical encounters, low status listeners are less likely to

engage in negotiation of meaning with their interlocutors (e.g. asking for repetition or

clarification) and thus less likely to understand what is being said or to acquire language. We

would suggest that ESOL students are at a disadvantage both in listening encounters outside

the classroom, which are habitually asymmetrical, and within it. However learner-centred the

instruction may be, students are still interacting for much of the time with higher status native-

speaker teachers, whose teacher talk constitutes a large part of their auditory input in class.

In order to find out how the listening skill is currently taught and learnt in adult ESOL classes

in the UK, in this paper, we draw on observations and audio recordings of two ESOL lessons

which took place in the North of England in 2005. The classes were with students at beginner

to low-intermediate level. The data were drawn from a larger study of ESOL pedagogy, the

NRDC ESOL Effective Practice Project (Baynham, Roberts et al., 2007). In order to describe

and evaluate the teaching and learning of listening which took place in the ESOL classes we

observed, the first part of the paper reflects briefly on the current thinking about what the

listening skill consists of and how it can be learnt and taught most effectively. The second half

of this paper comprises an in-depth analysis of the two lessons, which provide a snapshot of

how listening is currently done in ESOL classes. We then relate this data to our theories about

best practice for teaching and learning the listening skill.

Effective teaching of the listening skill – some theories

The roles of bottom-up and top-down processing in L2 listening

One of the main controversies of the last thirty years concerning the teaching and learning of

listening in an L2 has centred on the relative roles and importance of top-down and bottom-up

processing in understanding spoken messages. Anderson and Lynch (1988: 13) suggested an

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influential model of how listeners make sense of a spoken message. In this model, the listener

draws on three kinds of knowledge, systemic, contextual and schematic. Listeners combine

these three kinds of knowledge when trying to understand, and check one kind of knowledge

against another to see if predictions about the meaning of the message are correct. Contextual

and schematic knowledge are involved in top-down processing, in which knowledge outside

the spoken message, deriving from listeners own experience and ideas, influences how they

comprehend the message. Contextual knowledge is a knowledge of the social and physical

world within which interaction occurs. Schematic knowledge is a mental representation of a

typical instance of an event or a situation. Systemic knowledge is used in bottom-up processing

which involves the perception, storing, sampling and parsing of the language of the message.

Gaps in any of these three kinds of knowledge can cause comprehension problems for non-

native listeners: for example, they may lack knowledge of the language system, or of the

context, or of how a particular type of discourse is organised in another culture.

During the 1970s, the teaching of L2 listening in western-dominant EFL contexts tended to

focus on bottom up processing, concentrating on the development of learners’ abilities to

identify individual sounds, combinations of sounds, contractions, word and sentence

boundaries and so on. In the 1980s, there was a move towards helping students to activate top-

down processing and use schematic and contextual knowledge such as topic knowledge or

familiarity with ‘scripts’ to predict the content of a spoken message. Recent research indicates

that learners with low levels of listening proficiency may benefit from more focus on bottom-

up linguistic decoding, with a subsequent swing back to a teaching focus on bottom-up

listening. But even low-level listeners need to maximise the top-down knowledge they may

have rather than waste clues which may help them understand, and learners need training in

both kinds of process. As Lynch (2006: 92) argues:

‘… listening skills teachers should not regard the approaches as mutually exclusive but

as essentially complementary, and should create listening tasks in which language

learners make conscious use of both top and bottom as they try to understand what a

speaker is saying.’

It would be interesting to see whether the ESOL classes we observed focussed more on

bottom-up or top-down processing, or reflected current thinking by teaching both processes

equally.

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Listening as a means of acquiring language versus listening as a skill

Another area which interested us in examining our own data was to see whether listening was

just used as a means of presenting or practising language, or if it was taught as a skill in its own

right. L2 listening instruction has had a long history of being viewed primarily as a means of

teaching students features of language, be they grammatical structures, lexical items, pragmatic

features or aspects of pronunciation. One of the implications of Krashen’s input hypothesis

(1982) was to suggest that the relationship between linguistic knowledge and listening ability

could, however, be viewed in reverse, i.e. that rather than listening ability being a result of

successfully applying knowledge of linguistic features, language learning could result from

exposure to comprehensible input. Even though Krashen posited a different cause and effect

relationship between language learning and listening, the emphasis was still on listening as a

means to an end (that is, language acquisition/learning) rather than an end in itself. The idea

that listening is a skill in its own right, rather than being merely a means of providing linguistic

input only really emerged with the communicative approach of the 1980s. Linguistic

knowledge in this approach becomes the means, the end being oral or written communication.

The emphasis is on using knowledge of the language to perform an act of communication, and

therefore language skills such as listening, which involve doing something with language

knowledge, finally received attention. However, there was (and still is) quite a lot of

uncertainty about how best to teach the listening skill.

Some writers have seen the overall listening skill as composed of a set of sub-skills which all

need to be learnt by the student. Quite elaborate taxonomies of all the component sub-skills

contained within the overall skill of listening have been produced (e.g. Buck 2001). Some of

these sub-skills appear to relate more to top-down processing, others to bottom-up, and some

are a mixture of the two. One approach to teaching and learning the listening skill has relied on

providing targeted practice of the sub-skills needed for particular listening situations. This

approach has problems in that it assumes that practice of individual sub-skills will lead to

improvement of the listening skill as a whole. In fact current good practice for teaching the

listening skill takes place in what Kumaravadivelu (1994) has termed a postmethod condition

in which teachers, rather than adhering to one particular type of methodology, select activities

for their learners in an eclectic fashion, based on close observation, analysis and evaluation of

what their learners need at a particular time.

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In reporting the results of our observations of ESOL classrooms, we will have some comments

to make on the ways in which listening still seems to be perceived by many teachers as

principally a means of introducing or reinforcing language items rather than as a skill, and how,

rather than eclecticism, a particular methodology for teaching listening seems to predominate.

Real life and the question of authenticity

Adult ESOL learners in England have a very real need to understand what is being said to them

outside the classroom. In order to maintain the most basic necessities of life – housing, income,

a job, the medical services, sources of help in settling into a new country or in establishing

social ties with other sections of the population – they need to be able to understand what

others are saying to them.

These quotations from students on the ESOL Effective Practice Project illustrate some of the

listening problems they face in their daily lives and how these impact on their ability to interact

and integrate with others:

But it’s just greetings, there’s nothing else to say, no further talk with each other, very

little. Especially before, now it might be better … if they say ten sentences, you only

understand one or two sentences, it’s boring and meaningless, for example, you don’t

understand what they say and they don’t understand what you say, that means you

don’t say anything. So we just greet each other, for example, when I’m weeding in my

garden, they see me and say, “you’re weeding”, and I say, “yes, I’m weeding, you’re

weeding too”. Just like that, no further talk.

(Chinese man, Leeds)

I don’t get anything. They talk and they talk, I just say yes to not create an

uncomfortable situation.

(Spanish man, London)

One might suppose therefore, that the most valuable listening instruction would be that which

seeks to give students as genuine an experience as possible of the listening they are likely to

meet outside the classroom, including the local accents they might encounter. It could include

students recording what they hear outside class, or doing listening homework or projects (see

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White [1998] for some activities of this nature). However, there are some factors which

militate against this happening.

First of all, teachers may have different attitudes towards ‘bringing the outside in’ to the

classroom. The notion of bringing the outside in, as it relates to ESOL classes, was first

illustrated in a study by Cooke and Wallace (2004). Students who bring the outside in: ‘draw

on the linguistic, cultural and intellectual resources they bring both from their immediate

context in urban Britain and their worlds as immigrants to Britain’ (2004: 94). ESOL teachers

vary widely in the extent to which they allow the ‘outside to be brought in’ in their lessons

(Baynham, Roberts et al 2007). For example, while one teacher may utilise students’ outside

experiences as a major – perhaps even the major – classroom resource, others insist that, given

the difficulties experienced by many ESOL students in their lives, the classroom should be a

safe haven, a space insulated from the outside other than on a superficial level.

Secondly it could be argued that directly importing real life language (so-called text

authenticity) into the classroom might be too difficult for students in unadapted form (although

we would argue that much of the difficulty is caused by playing tape recordings in class of

disembodied voices removed from the original context in which they were produced). Breen

(1985) and Taylor (1994) amongst others have pointed out that there are other aspects of the

teaching and learning context which can be authentic to a greater or lesser degree. These

include task authenticity (in which the tasks should be as near as possible to the ones students

would do in real life with a particular piece of listening, there should be genuine

communication between students and the text, between students, and the task should lead to

learning). Learner authenticity involves the notion that the student should be motivated and

interested to listen; teacher authenticity involves the teacher being culturally aware and

sensitive to students’ learning needs. Finally classroom authenticity refers to the fact that

classrooms are part of real life too, and are social contexts in their own right: ‘We cannot just

dismiss the classroom setting and all that takes place in it as being by definition artificial’

(Taylor 1994: 6). Thus, in our remarks about the classrooms which we observed, we must bear

in mind that more than one type of authenticity may be operating, and that teachers who

deliberately decide to make the class a sanctuary from the outside world may be good at

creating learner, teacher and classroom authenticity when they teach listening. We could argue

that students listening to others within the class, or to the teacher engaging in teacher talk

which goes beyond merely giving instructions or correcting language are being provided with

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motivating listening practice in an unstressful environment, face to face with familiar

interlocutors.

Listening strategies

Current L2 listening pedagogy often includes strategy training. There are many ways of

defining what strategies are and how they operate, and we here take one possible view, which

we could describe as the deficit approach. In this view, if listening skills are abilities to use

linguistic and non-linguistic knowledge which the L2 listener already possesses, listening

strategies, whether they be learning strategies or language-in-use strategies, are used by

students to compensate for deficiencies in particular listening skills and they help students to

acquire those skills. Elsewhere we have described listening strategies as:

efforts to compensate for uncertainties in understanding, and could include making

inferences, realising where misunderstandings have occurred, and asking for

clarification. Students should need these strategies less and less as they get more

familiar with the language and more competent at listening skills, although even very

proficient native speakers will need to rely on them occasionally. (White 1998: 9)

In this, we are following Field’s (1998) argument that the skills of listening are competencies

which native speakers have already acquired and L2 learners still need to acquire; strategies

give learners a way of compensating for their lack of skill. In table 1, we attempt to synthesise

some of the listening strategies which have been mentioned in the literature (e.g. Vandergrift,

1999). The table employs the three-way distinction between metacognitive, cognitive and

socio-affective strategies originally formulated by O'Malley, Chamot and colleagues (e.g. 1990)

and widely used in studies of language learning strategy training and use. There are many other

ways of categorising and labelling strategies; the socio-affective category is, for example,

somewhat of a catch all and has been referred to in other ways (e.g. Macaro [2001] refers to

them as interactive strategies).

TABLE 1: Listening strategies

(1) Cognitive strategies: these are the processes which learners use to acquire language and to facilitate

comprehension, i.e. mental activities related to comprehending and remembering input.

Predicting what a piece of listening will be about, or what language/information will come next

Drawing inferences when information is not stated or has been missed

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Guessing meaning of unknown words

Using intonation and pausing to segment words and phrases

Other micro-strategies to do with processing language – identifying stressed words, listening

for markers, listening for structures etc

Using schematic and contextual information (top-down) together with linguistic information

(bottom-up) to arrive at meaning

Visualising the situation they are hearing about

Piecing together meaning from words that have been heard

(2) Metacognitive strategies: these are the ways in which learners organise, monitor and evaluate how

well they are understanding:

Focussing attention, concentrating and clearing the mind before starting to listen

Applying an advance organiser before listening (‘I think the topic is going to be.., so…’)

Going in with a plan (‘I’m going to listen for…words I know/key words/cognates…’)

Getting used to speed and finding ways of coping with it

Being aware when they are losing attention and refocusing concentration

Deciding what the main purpose of listening is

Checking how well they have understood

Taking notes

Paying attention to the main points

Identifying listening problems and planning how to improve them

(3) Socio-affective strategies: these are the ways in which learners use others to help their

comprehension and encourage themselves to continue listening.

Asking for clarification

Checking that they have got the right idea

Providing themselves with opportunities for listening

Motivating themselves to listen

Lowering anxiety about listening

Providing a personal response to the information or ideas presented in the piece of listening

Empathising with the speaker and trying to understand why s/he wants to convey a particular

message

Encouraging students to use these strategies will involve the teacher in helping students, among

other things, to guess, to take risks, to learn from communication with others, to attend to form

and meaning by synthesising top-down and bottom up, linguistic and non-linguistic knowledge,

to create their own opportunities for listening and to evaluate their own performance. There is a

considerable body of research which shows that strategy instruction helps students to improve

their listening performance (e.g. O’Malley and Chamot [1990], Thomson and Rubin [1996]

and Vandergrift [2004]), but we still have much to learn about how strategy use varies

according to individual learning style, task and type of listening. We would hope to find some

strategy instruction in the ESOL classes we observed.

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Transactional and interactional listening

The penultimate feature of listening we intend to relate to our own observational data concerns

the distinction between transactional listening, where the primary purpose is for the speaker to

communicate information to the hearer, and interactional listening, where the primary purpose

for the speaker is to facilitate social interaction. Often a conversation can contain both kinds of

communication, as when for instance one goes into a local shop to buy something and also

exchanges greetings and remarks about the weather with the person serving. L2 listening

pedagogy often over-concentrates on the transactional aspects of listening (listening for train

times, prices, what somebody bought, etc.) at the expense of drawing students’ attention to

speaker’s opinions, intonation and politeness features. Students are asked to listen for

information rather than attitude, for what was said rather than why it was said. There is no

doubt that ESOL students need to be able to understand factual information, but they also need

to establish and maintain social relationships through the medium of English and therefore it is

important that they also learn some of the interactional features of spoken messages. We will

be examining the balance between transactional and interactional listening in our observational

data.

The shape of the lesson

The final feature of listening which we wish to investigate is the way in which the teachers we

observe plan the stages of their listening instruction. In the methodological tradition of ELT

originating in the English-dominant West there is a well-established pattern of teaching

listening based on a presentation-practice-production model which is really more suited to

language items than skills (White 2006). This model frequently follows the pattern shown in

Table 2 below:

TABLE 2: Lesson plan for teaching the listening skill (traditional version)

1. Selection of listening material

Either the teacher chooses the material which the students will listen to (a video or audio recording), or

it is the next piece of listening in the course book. The students are not involved in choosing.

2. Pre-listening

The teacher perhaps does a warm-up to the topic of the listening text along the lines of ‘What do you

know about…?’ ‘What do you think they’re going to say…?’

The teacher may pre-teach some difficult or key vocabulary items.

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3. Gist questions

The teacher sets some gist questions for the students to answer after they have listened for the first time.

4. First listening

5. Checking answers to the gist questions

The teacher often does this stage by getting the students to check their answers in pairs, then has a

whole-class feedback.

6. Detailed questions

The teacher sets some tasks which require the students to listen for main information/details in the piece

of listening.

7. Second listening

The teacher plays the audio or video tape again so that students can complete the tasks.

(Steps 6 and 7 can be repeated. The teacher will probably play the tape at least once for each task.

Teacher and students check the answers after each task.)

8. Extension activity (optional)

The teacher uses the topic or some of the language from the listening text as input for an ‘extension’ or

‘transfer’ activity in which the students use other language skills. Perhaps the listening prompts a

discussion, or a writing task, or leads on to some reading on the same topic.

The plan allows for the activation of top-down listening processes particularly at stages 2 and 3

(pre-listening and answering gist questions). There is also activation of bottom-up processes

and the opportunity to combine the two types of processes. Different listening skills can be

focussed on in different kinds of task (stages 3-7). But the model is dominated by teacher

decisions and places students in the situation of passive overhearers of decontextualised taped

material. There is little place for strategy instruction or for allowing students to develop their

own listening strategies. It scores quite low for learner or classroom authenticity. Stage 8 can

often develop into a focus on the language items learnt during the listening instruction. As used

by teachers, there tends to be little attention paid to students errors (what they misheard, which

is extremely interesting and would give teachers valuable insights which could be used to help

students); the focus is all on getting the right answers. Task-based approaches, regarded by

some as the natural descendent of early communicative approaches, do appear to give more

freedom to students to choose/create listening material, to develop their own strategies and to

reflect on listening difficulties. And certainly enabling ESOL students to gain control or agency

in their learning is welcome given the lack of control they have over aspects of their everyday

lives (Baynham 2006). It will be interesting to see how far the teachers we observed adhere to

the P-P-P model in Table 2 rather than to task-based approaches, and if so, what kind of

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obstacles it appears to present for their students as far as effective learning of the listening skill

is concerned.

Our research questions

We therefore intend to investigate the following six questions in relation to our data:

1) Are students helped to develop both top-down and bottom-up processing ability?

2) How far is listening being used as a means of presenting/practising linguistic items?

To what extent is it being taught as a skill in its own right?

3) What do teachers do about using authentic materials? What other kinds of

authenticity seem to be present in their classrooms?

4) How far do teachers provide opportunity for students to develop listening strategies?

5) Is there an over-concentration on transactional listening?

6) Does the ‘shape’ of the lesson appear to help or hinder the development of listening

skills?

Two ESOL teachers and their classes

This analytical part of the paper begins with an examination of the ways in which listening is

taught by two ESOL teachers, Yelena and Carl. We first give details of the two teachers, their

classes, their attitudes towards the Skills for Life ESOL materials used in many ESOL

classrooms (DfES, 2003), which include listening materials, and their stance on teaching

methodology and perceived role as teachers. We then turn our attention to an analysis of first

Yelena’s lesson, and then Carl’s.

Yelena

Yelena teaches an Entry Level 2 (i.e. low intermediate) ESOL class at one of a number of local

‘off-site’ centres of a large college of Further Education. She has only recently become an

ESOL tutor, and has taught at this centre for two years. Yelena is a Russian speaker, and

English is her second language. She herself learnt English using a traditional grammar-

translation method, but upon becoming an EFL teacher was trained in communicative

methodology. She sees great differences between the EFL she was trained to teach and the

ESOL she is teaching, in terms of the students and their particular needs, as well as the social

and political contexts within which ESOL is situated. Yelena’s class meets three times a week

for a two-hour lesson. Most of the 15 learners are refugees or asylum seekers, mainly Russian

speakers from the former Soviet Union and Angolans, with one Kashmiri-born British citizen.

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Carl

Carl also teaches at a community centre, one of 20 where his city-centre college holds classes.

Carl, teacher of an Entry Level 1 (beginners) class, has a number of years’ experience as an

EFL teacher in the UK and abroad, and now as an ESOL tutor. He makes a distinction between

the EFL and the ESOL worlds: ESOL is about teaching survival skills for ‘out there’, while

EFL is about ‘turning out perfect language learners’. He enjoys teaching ESOL but is thinking

of returning to the private sector or moving to secondary school teaching because of low pay

and job insecurity. Carl’s class is part-time with a mix of students from very different

backgrounds from the local area. Students come from Sri Lanka, Somalia, Kosovo,

Afghanistan and China, among other places. The students are all asylum seekers and refugees,

with most awaiting a decision on whether they will have leave to remain in the UK. This brings

with it obstacles to attendance; students are frequently absent because of appointments at the

Home Office or with their solicitors. The students show great solidarity towards one another.

Both Yelena and Carl make substantial use of the Skills for Life ESOL materials published by

UK government agencies to be used side by side with the Adult ESOL Core Curriculum

(AECC, DfES 2001), commonly known amongst teachers, and referred to here, as the ‘Skills

for Life materials.’ ESOL teachers talk about a range of stances in relation to the AECC, which

is used to greater or lesser degrees and with differing levels of approval (Baynham, Roberts et

al 2007). There is an appreciation that the curriculum materials associated with the AECC are

peopled by characters more like ESOL students than those found in EFL textbooks. Some

institutions seem to insist on their use in planning, believing erroneously that their use is a

policy requirement. This can leave teachers being obliged to use materials they are not happy

with. There is also much variation in the extent to which teachers use EFL textbooks in their

ESOL teaching, and an eclectic approach to materials is common, whereby teachers adapt, cut

and paste and create their own materials to suit the context. We will examine how our two

teachers handle the Skills for Life listening materials in the context of particular lessons, given

that ESOL teachers interviewed for the Effective Practice Project expressed the following

dissatisfactions with the materials designed specifically for listening instruction:

There’s not much out there.

It’s a struggle to find authentic materials.

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It would be good to get out and record people and produce our own materials.

It’s difficult to find good extensive locally appropriate materials.

Published materials are often very plummy.

Students need to hear different voices, different models.

When interviewed, Yelena revealed that her teaching is based on the premise of no

preconceived ideas. The students are her central concern and she adapts methods and materials,

including the curriculum materials, to fit in with them. Consequently, the lesson content is

relevant, ‘nice and personal’, and the students are free to bring to it whatever they want. She

sees the needs of the students in competition with those of government policy as represented in

the AECC and curriculum materials, positioning herself as being caught in the middle, trying to

balance one set of needs, the students’, with those of another, the government’s. Carl is

likewise ambivalent about the curriculum materials and their use in his lessons. Although he is

unhappy with the idea of any sort of imposition, he uses the materials extensively in his

teaching. He feels the topic-based approach which they promote is arbitrary, a way for ‘the

organisation to be able to present a document as opposed to a valid method of teaching.’ Yet he

likes the fact that they are ‘clearly linked with the curriculum’, which helps him plan the lesson

content to the satisfaction of ‘any kind of external assessment’.

Lesson 1 – Yelena

Stage 1: Yelena writes the following sentences on the board: What did you do in your country?

What do you want to do in England? and asks ‘Which one is past? How do you know?’ There

is some discussion of the function of do and did. The students ask the teacher the questions,

then they ask each other. Yelena focuses on the correct language and pronunciation of the

answers. She then writes some jobs on the board engineer, accountant, housewife, student etc.

and elicits adjectives which students associate with them. Students describe their feelings

towards the jobs they had in their own countries. Yelena then gives information and vocabulary

about two other jobs, mining and bar-tending, and elicits some adjectives to describe them.

Stage 2: She explains that the students are going to listen to a tape about a man and his

life. She shows them a map (which she has found herself) showing where Yorkshire and Dorset

are. They will hear about these two areas on the tape. The students look at the two pictures in

the Skills for Life materials (Unit 7-E2, ‘Bill’s Story) and do the first task, discussing the

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differences between the two work places shown, a mine and a pub. Yelena adds a question of

her own – which job looks easier?

Stage 3: Students listen to the tape and answer two fairly detailed questions which appear in the

Skills for Life materials: ‘What does he say about his work in the past and now’? ‘What does he

say about home life in the past and now?’ Answers are discussed as a whole class. Yelena adds

two questions of her own: ‘Is he happy now?’ ‘Was he happier in the past?’

Stage 4: She adds another opportunity for listening which is not in the materials, and asks

students to listen and say how Bill’s work life and home life have changed.

Stage 5: Answers are discussed as a whole class. There is some discussion of new lexis, e.g. ‘4

by 4’. Yelena explains the next task in the material – to complete a table about the changes in

Bill’s life.

Stage 6: The students listen for a third time and complete the table. Then they discuss their

answers in groups of three. Finally the whole class check their answers.

Stage 7: Students complete sentences about changes in Bill’s life, on the pattern:

Bill worked in a coal mine but now he works in a pub in Dorset. They then write sentences

about themselves using the same structure. They then fill in learner diaries, noting down what

they have learnt in the lesson: ‘today we spoke about difficult jobs’. Students are asked to write

a poem about themselves for homework.

Commentary

As far as our research questions are concerned, the following seems to be the case. (1) The

materials mainly practise bottom-up listening skills (listening for particular words and phrases).

There is an attempt at the beginning of the materials to activate content schemata for mining

and bar-tending when the students discuss the two pictures. On the first listening, students are

required to listen for detail rather than gist. (2) It is fair to say that Yelena herself appears to see

the lesson as an opportunity to teach both language (work on past simple tense versus present

simple tense) and listening skills, as we can see from the additional questions/information she

asks the students to listen for, which ask for gist information and also touch on the feelings of

the speaker. However, the tasks in the materials before Yelena’s additions seem to be directed

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towards the learning of particular language items. The students also appear to have viewed this

lesson mainly as a means of learning language; when they fill in their learner diaries at the end

of the class, they do not see this as a lesson which practised the listening skill but as one which

gave them the language to discuss jobs. (3) The materials are inauthentic in that they are

disembodied voices played on a tape recorder, speaking rather more slowly than normal,

although the speakers have a Yorkshire accent which will be familiar to the students. However,

the teacher is very careful to create learner and teacher authenticity. She relates the materials to

her students’ own experience, and is not afraid to evoke potentially painful memories of past

life in their home country. This is very much a teacher who ‘brings the outside in’ and she

mainly does this by adding to the Skills for Life materials at Stage 1 of the lesson and bringing

in a map for Stage 2. We could also argue that classroom authenticity is created when students

work co-operatively together with each other and the teacher, listen to each other and the

teacher and initiate questions, as they do in this lesson. Perhaps the teacher could have created

more opportunities for students to listen to each other (their peers), although admittedly there

are two examples of this happening at stages 1 and 6. (4) If we refer to the strategies mentioned

in Table 1, there does not seem to be much strategy training going on in the lesson; we could

perhaps argue that by setting a pre-listening task, the teacher is giving the students a

metacognitive strategy : Going in with a plan (‘I’m going to listen for’) but this is about all. (5)

The information which students are asked to listen for in the materials – facts about jobs, such

as hours, wife’s job, place etc. are all transactional. It is interesting that the teacher gets some

discussion going about Bill’s possible feelings and thus builds in some interactional features to

the monologue, but there is no work on intonation or accent. (6) The shape of the lesson is

much as described in Table 2, with its emphasis on a rather ‘presentation-practice-production’

progression, which, as we have pointed out earlier, may be inappropriate for teaching language

skills and places students in the position of passive overhearers. The materials follow this P-P-

P design, and thus they are responsible for the ‘shape’ of the lesson; we could argue that the

teacher has done much to make up for the inadequacies of the materials by personalising them,

by building in some peer listening, by adding in extra ‘gist’ questions, by providing a lot of

extra support in the prelistening stage to help students to activate content schemata, and by

adding in some interactional features to the listening experience. However, we could certainly

say that the lesson does not encourage students to develop their own listening strategies (it

would possibly need to involve students in choosing/making their own listening texts and tasks,

and/or engaging in more task-based learning to do that). The teacher sets some interesting

homework, asking students to write a poem about themselves in which they will reuse some of

17

the language learnt in the lesson, but does not encourage the students to do listening outside

class. There is no examination of problems students might have experienced in listening; the

emphasis is very much on getting the right answers. Students do not take any responsibility for

improving their listening skills.

Lesson 2 – Carl

Stage 1: Carl divides the class into two, and they stand on opposite sides of the room. They

have to shout information to their partner, who will write it down and report back to the class

(examples of activities using the present simple). There is a lot of noise and fun; the activity

involves students listening to each other. The teacher sees this as a warm-up to the listening

lesson proper.

Stage 2: Carl provides lexis and structures for ‘problems in the home’ (present continuous,

engineer, electrician, plumber, leaking, etc.). In doing so he is following the rubric of the Skills

for Life materials (Unit 7 –E1 ‘Problems in the home’) quite closely, although he adds in some

comprehension check questions of his own. Students match problems to pictures as per

Activity B in the materials.

Stage 3: Carl adds in an extra stage before the students listen to the tape. He discusses where

you can find numbers to call for emergencies such as gas leaks, use of the Yellow Pages in the

phone book and so on.

Stage 4: He introduces the next activity from the Skills for Life materials in which students

listen to people talking about different problems in the home. Students listen once to identify

each problem, then once again to write numbers of problems next to the relevant picture on

their listening materials. There is whole class discussion of the correct answers.

Stage 5: Students listen twice to a phone call to a plumber (the next activity in the Skills for

Life materials) after Carl has discussed key vocabulary in the recording. He then uses the

recording to illustrate a discussion about how to conduct a telephone call in terms of clarity,

politeness – this is his own idea and is not in the materials. There is also discussion of different

accents.

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Stage 6: Carl alters the direction of the lesson to tell students about the listening exam next

week.

Stage 7: Students do the next activities in the Skills for Life materials, practising speaking (they

role play a telephone call) and reading and writing about services.

Stage 8: The lesson ends with a teacher-led recap of what has been done in terms of activities.

Commentary

If we refer to our six research questions, we see the following: (1) The listening practice

focuses on bottom-up processing, since it mainly requires students to identify previously taught

lexical items to do with emergencies in the home. (2) The main aim seems to be teaching the

vocabulary associated with dealing with household problems, i.e. teaching language rather than

the listening skill. (3) Authentic materials (the Yellow Pages) are used, though not to a great

extent. However, the students value the lessons and their teacher greatly, and attendance is high,

and thus it may be assumed that both learner and classroom authenticity are evident in the

lesson. (4) There is little strategy training built into the materials unless it is a microstrategy to

do with identifying key words, but this is a result of teaching vocabulary rather than a pre-

planned piece of strategy training. The students are not given any listening task to do outside

class. (5) The materials largely provide practice in transactional listening and in listening for

detail to a recording of disembodied voices (6) within a P-P-P framework.

The interesting parts of the lesson are those which Carl has added himself, and which,

deliberately or instinctively, make up for some of the deficiencies in the ways in which

listening is presented in the materials. So there is peer listening in Stage 1, although it is

unrelated to the rest of the listening lesson and seen as a ‘fun’ warm-up activity. Carl uses

authentic materials (the Yellow Pages) at Stage 3, a stage at which the students listen to a lot of

teacher talk describing what to do in case of various types of emergency. At stage 5, he uses

the audio recording to discuss some interactional aspects of listening.

Pedagogic implications

We have looked in some detail at two classes, and seen that they resemble each other in a

number of ways, mainly because of the blueprint for listening instruction provided by the Skills

for Life materials which both teachers use. We have seen that these two skilful teachers have

19

supplemented the listening instruction their students receive, but that the model of the listening

process their students are presented with still does not contain many of the essential features

we have discussed earlier in this paper. In our analysis of the two ESOL lessons there are

occasions when the teacher might have enabled – but did not enable – a focus on the listening

skill which was driven by a student’s immediate and explicit learning concerns. This suggests

an inability or unwillingness to act contingently, to plan in response to the moment, in relation

to teaching listening. It also shows that the teachers we observed did not on these occasions

allow the listening lesson content to be driven by the learners’ needs. Reacting contingently to

issues as they arise, and integrating them ad hoc into lessons through on-the-spot planning, is,

it must be said, easier when approaching the teaching of the speaking skill than the listening

skill. For example, it is more feasible to allow opportunities to develop long turns of talk than it

is to plan a listening activity ‘online’. But teachers are certainly able to notice occasions when

students raise an issue which relates, or can be related, to listening. At that point they have at

least two options. They can pick up on the issue and develop it in the ongoing lesson. Thus the

focus on the listening skill becomes part of the way the teacher and students together address a

real problem as it arises. In this way, the outside is brought in. Or they might develop the issue

at a future stage, perhaps expanding it into a task which involves explicit attention to the

listening skill. In either case, the content of the lesson is turned over to the students. This is a

valuable reaction by teachers to attempts by students to take control of their classroom

discourse, and hence their learning; a way of relating classroom content to learners’ lives.

There is a further benefit of reorienting the balance of control in lesson planning towards the

students. There is a paradox inherent in materials such as the Skills for Life materials used

widely by ESOL teachers. That is, efforts have clearly been made by the materials writers to

relate content quite explicitly to learners’ lives, as acknowledged by the teachers themselves.

Yet the material often does not generate the level of interest in class that the writers might have

expected or hoped for. This is perhaps because widely distributed published material can never

quite resonate with learners’ lives in the same immediate and relevant way as lesson content

developed directly from an experience that a learner has had, and which they bring to class. An

approach to planning and the development of listening activities which involves the students at

a fundamental level goes some way to resolving the paradox. That is, if teachers and learners

work together to use the learners’ lives as a resource, they can avoid the inbuilt

inappropriateness of much material which makes a claim of direct relevance.

20

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