The Roads not Taken: Greater Emphasis Needed on “Sounds”,“Actual Listening”,and “Spoken Input”

The Comprehension Approach

When teaching this neglected skill, the close adherence to the comprehension approach (i.e., focusing primarily on comprehension as reflected in accompanying exercises while listening) in EFL listening instruction has been reiterated by different scholars (e.g., Field, 2019; Tsang, 2020; Wallace, 2012). This is indeed supported by most of the survey respondents. In spite of some differences, the comprehension-oriented approach to teaching primary-level and secondary-level listening seems highly common, as shown in Table 1. Whether or not there is schemata activation before listening (e.g., students expressing their thoughts on a certain topic, C1), pre-teaching vocabulary (e.g., C2), post-listening discussion (e.g., C2), listening strategies (e.g., prediction, H3), comprehension checks in the form of questions, exercises, and tests seem to be a common core feature of EFL listening instruction.

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Table 1.

Survey respondents' descriptions of how listening is taught in the primary and secondary EFL classroom in the five contexts.

Context	Examples of description by survey respondents* (respondent code, level of education which the comment was about)
China	“Completing listening tests or exercises in textbooks” (C3, primary and secondary) “Listen to the audio file, and find the answers” (C6, primary) “The teacher gives students a certain topic, asks them to express their thoughts and then shows them a list of words. After that, have them listen to the tape and finish some exercises related to the topic.” (C1, secondary) “Usually T asks some questions about the topic, and then show some topic-related pictures; some new words are taught with the pictures. Then T plays listening materials on the computer, Ss will answer the questions or fill in blanks. Finally one or two open or critical questions are for students to discuss.” (C2, secondary)
Hong Kong	“Teachers play the listening tapes from the textbook publisher. Students blacken the circles/tick or circle the correct answers in a set of multiple-choice questions. Then teachers check the answers. Not much explanation is provided.” (H1, primary) “Teaching of listening is mainly about finishing exercises in the textbooks.” (H2, primary) “Skills on highlighting keywords, guessing answers are the focus in junior forms. Retrieval of important information from conversations is the core part in senior forms.” (H2, secondary) “For listening lessons, teachers usually teach various listening skills. For instance, prediction and anticipation skills in the pre-listening stage. Sometimes, vocabulary input is also provided. Teachers highlight how to tackle different kinds of questions using the listening book/mock tests like listening for specific information, ranking etc. In the post-listening stage, the usual tasks include reviewing common mistakes (e.g., spelling/grammar) and discussion on a topic related to the recording.” (H3, secondary)
Japan	“Dictation with audio or NS teacher” (J1, primary, secondary) “Almost exclusively through textbook CDs” (J3, primary, secondary) “Students listen to some conversation and answer the questions” (J2, secondary)
Korea	“Listening was taught by playing CD-ROMs provided by the textbook publishers. Common activities were from the textbooks including look & listen, listen & do (i.e., activities), and listen & practice, etc.” (K2, primary) “Students listen to several conversations between a native speaker and a non-native speaker restricted to one or two target expressions. After the listening, comprehension check-up questions are provided in various forms.” (K1, secondary)
Taiwan	“A piece of audio script (usually 3–5 min) will be broadcast in the classroom, and usually followed by some related questions and task for the students to work on.” (T1, primary) “1. Questions and answers sessions in class; 2. Audio files that go with textbooks (e.g., vocabulary items, sentence structures, texts); 3. Listening tests” (T2, primary) “Listening is taught through paper & pencil assessments. Students are required to fill in blanks or answer multiple-choice questions after they hear a short dialogue.” (T3, secondary) “In every lesson of the textbook or the English magazine, listening practices related to the topics are assigned to students to finish. Sometimes, extra videos clips are provided for training students' listening skills, such as listening for general ideas and details.” (T4, secondary)

Note: *the quotes are copied verbatim or translated directly; no corrections or changes are made.

A major problem with this comprehension-oriented approach is that the focus tends to be narrowly on what correct and incorrect answers are; little to no attention is given to examining and addressing the difficulties that learners have (Field, 2019). In fact, from my experience, even when a student obtains the correct answer, it does not necessarily represent genuine comprehension; it could well be a result of, for instance, mere guesswork or sound test-taking strategies (e.g., eliminating the most likely incorrect choices in a multiple-choice question). Many EFL teachers would assume that getting correct answers is evidence enough for comprehension, and will do little to follow up on listening per se. Important listening skills such as being able to convert sounds to meaning are almost always left unaddressed whether students obtain the right or wrong answers in comprehension exercises.

Strategies are All Learners Need?

The comprehension approach usually involves the teaching of strategies (as suggested by a reviewer). Making reference to Milliner and Dimoski’s (2021) framework of three listening instruction approaches , listening strategies can be understood and described as cognitive top-down (i.e., “macro-features to make meaning… [such as] making predictions and inferences based on one's existing knowledge and prior experiences”) or metacognitive (i.e., the coordination of strategy use and facilitation of self-management such as monitoring one's comprehension). Many teachers seem to believe that these strategies are the most important in teaching listening and that they are a panacea when listening breaks down. Indeed, these strategies are useful and necessary at times, whether we are listening to our first language (L1), a second language (L2) or a foreign language (FL). Although research findings of the effectiveness of these strategies on listening are somewhat mixed (e.g., see the studies and reviews by Milliner and Dimoski, 2021 and Tanewong, 2019), the crux of the matter is that they alone should not be a plausible ultimate solution to listening breakdown. Strategies are often taught in the L2/FL context as compensatory techniques, that is “expedients used periodically when an individual's listening competence cannot match the demands of a listening task” (Field, 2019: 296). However, as Lee (2020) aptly states, “the primacy of the signal (i.e., the ability to accurately hear what is being said) stands as the first stages that must be cleared [in listening]”. Rather than solely focusing on employing different strategies to guess what is spoken, it makes more sense and is more effective to target at learning to actually decode sound signals. This is no mean feat, but given that (a) many incorrect answers in comprehension questions can be attributed to failures of word-level or clause-level rather than general understanding (Field, 2019) and (b) researchers who have focused on sounds and English phonology in teaching listening have shown promising results (e.g., Hamada, 2016; Tsang, 2020), greater emphasis on the process of listening is warranted. In other words, greater attention to the cognitive bottom-up approach (in Milliner and Dimoski's (2021) framework) is called for.

Process Over Products

Scholars (e.g., Field, 2019; Wallace, 2012) have drawn the distinction between the products of listening (e.g., focusing on correct or wrong answers in comprehension exercises; i.e., associated with the comprehension approach) and the processes of listening (i.e., how we actually listen and how sounds are converted into meanings). When zeroing in overwhelmingly on the product aspect and neglecting the processes of listening, learners are deprived of opportunities to develop their full repertoire of listening skills and the problems they encounter in listening may remain unaddressed. For example, due to the nature of connected speech in English, determining word boundaries often poses immense difficulties for learners and this problem is hardly ever tackled head-on in the classroom (Field, 2003; Lee, 2020). This leads to learners finding phrases that they actually know (if written) indecipherable in listening (e.g., not at all spoken as if these were a word; Tsang, 2020) and making errors in decoding (e.g., my name is as mayonnaise; Lee, 2020).

It is therefore worthwhile to introduce features of English phonology in EFL listening classes. After all, “the first step in making sense of what people say is recognizing patterns in recurring sequences of sounds and attaching meaning to them. This begins the process of segmenting the stream of speech into meaningful units…” (Saville-Troike, 2012: 170). Teachers can start at the phoneme level, drawing learners' attention to the fine auditory differences between similar phonemes (e.g., with the help of minimal pairs such as bed and bad and pool and pull). This can be easily done using the many free online dictionaries (e.g., playing “lend” and “land” without showing learners these words, and asking them which is which). After this, teachers can focus on higher-level phonological features such as linking, weak and strong forms, and rhythm. These topics are common components in a pronunciation syllabus, so it is possible to combine pronunciation instruction with listening instruction.

Actual Listening

Although learners' awareness and knowledge about the sound system of English are important, to become a fluent listener who can decode speech with ease, a large amount of practice is indispensable. In the process-oriented approach of teaching listening, there should be a substantial amount of actual listening to familiarize learners with how English is actually spoken (or Englishes are spoken). This is also a pressing concern because the amount of time that EFL learners listen to English is minimal in listening classes (e.g., Renandya, 2013) and outside class (see the next section). According to Renandya:

In a typical 50-minute listening lesson, students listen to a two- or three-minute passage twice or three times – a total of about nine minutes of listening, which is less than 1/5 of classroom time. Students spend a bigger chunk of classroom time on tasks and activities that do not involve meaningful listening to the text. (Renandya, 2013: 16)

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Table 2.

Amount of actual listening in listening lessons.

Context	The mean length of actual listening in a ONE-hour listening lesson
China	Primary: 21.67 min (Range: 10–35 min) Secondary: 25 min (Range: 20–40 min)
Hong Kong	Primary: 15 min (Range: 5–30 min) Secondary: 25 min (Range: 15–40 min)
Japan	Primary: 11.25 min (Range: 10–12.5 min) Secondary: 10.83 (Range: 5–17.5 min)
Korea*	Primary: 20 min Secondary: 40 min
Taiwan	Primary: 9.5 min (Range: 4–15 min) Secondary: 12 min (Range: 6.5–25 min)
All five areas	Primary: 15.48 min (i.e., one-quarter of the lesson) Secondary: 22.57 min (i.e., one-third of the lesson)

Note: *no ranges; one participant provided both estimates.

Summary

In summary, the two following points are in dire need of attention in EFL listening instruction:

Sounds: listening strategies are undoubtedly very useful tools but these cannot replace the primacy of sound-decoding in listening. There is also a need to shift from testing to teaching listening. Teachers should pay greater attention to the process of listening. To do this, English phonology can be capitalized on.

These two points are directly germane to learning to listen, but can also be relevant to listening to learn (e.g., a heightened phonological awareness through careful listening may also benefit learners' spoken English). I will end this section with some food for thought. The following is contrived but it is very much the gist of many conversations I have had with EFL students in Hong Kong in the past decade. When asked what their overall experiences in their years of primary and secondary EFL education were like and what they learnt in reading, writing, listening and speaking lessons, learners were often able to recall genres they had read and wrote, and specific skills learnt in reading, writing, and speaking. However, when it came to listening, they could not remember much except that it was all about listening to audios, completing exercises, and checking the answers. There was little enjoyment to speak of and little was learnt aside from some common-sense strategies (e.g., guessing from the context, using background knowledge, and highlighting keywords on question papers). In the decade-long EFL education for many learners, EFL listening lessons seem to boil down to nothingness apart from mundane audio exercises with little value. This is indeed noteworthy.

Input and Language Learning

Clichéd as it sounds, it is impossible for language learning to take place without any language input, which can be received through reading and listening. Although input alone does not necessarily guarantee successful mastery of a language, and aspects such as output (e.g., Swain, 1993), interaction (e.g., Long, 1996), and input becoming intake (e.g., Saville-Troike, 2012) are equally important for language learning, input is nonetheless the very first step in learning any language. From a general language acquisition perspective, learners' interlanguage undergoes restructuring as they process target language input, resulting in language development (Gass, 2003; Saito and Hanzawa, 2018). From a more layman's perspective, the input exposed to (e.g., a previously unknown word) can be taken in and kept in the mental storage (the vocabulary bank), leading to acquisition. The new word learnt may then be applied in the receptive (i.e., comprehending this newly learnt word in reading and listening) and productive modalities (i.e., using this new word in writing and speaking). Despite input being such a central element in language learning, SI (i.e., listening), as one of the only two kinds of language input, is very often neglected in EFL learning.

English Input and EFL Environments

As implied in the acronym EFL, English is typically foreign to many EFL learners. Apart from EFL lessons (and places such as train stations where some announcements may be in English), learners have very few opportunities to be exposed to spoken English on a daily basis, unless there is a need (e.g., conversing with foreigners using English) or it is a personal choice (e.g., watching videos in English on YouTube and/or listening to podcasts). However, these scenarios and hobbies are rare and exclusive to the minority who, for instance, have high motivation. The general lack of spoken English input is illustrated in the survey shown in Table 3. Although it is unclear how long each “time” (as in, e.g., “around three to four times”) is, no respondent indicated that primary and secondary EFL learners are likely to be exposed to English for more than 2 hours per week, which is very little in amount.

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Table 3.

EFL learners' exposure to spoken English outside EFL lessons.

Context	The amount of time that learners listen to English outside EFL lessons per week*
	Primary+	Secondary+
China	less than 30 min 1 h three times	5–10 min 20 min less than 30 min 2 h three times
Hong Kong	<10 min less than once	1 h around three to four times
Japan	varies heavily from person to person, however if I had to say, most students almost never listen to English outside of the classroom less than 1 h	varies heavily from person to person, however if I had to say, most students almost never listen to English outside of the classroom 0 h less than 1 h
Korea	0–1 h	1–2 h
Taiwan	two to three times twice	there are differences between individuals, but most students rarely listen to English outside EFL lessons. 10–20 min. 20–30 min one to two times four times

Notes: *the quotes are copied verbatim or translated directly; no corrections or changes are made; ⁺each participant's response is shown here.

Interestingly, however, in the same English-deprived EFL environment, learners (e.g., those in Hong Kong) tend to receive more written English input naturally (although the overall amount is still unlikely to be high since it is an EFL environment after all, unless, as mentioned, it is an individual's choice). In this globalized multilingual world, it comes as no surprise that English can be found alongside L1s in food menus, signage, and labels on products, among others. Learners who study and revise English outside class tend to rely on notes, textbooks, exercises, electronic or in print, which require them to read rather than to listen. Most emphasis, effort, and time in EFL learning beyond the classroom are often given to and expended on written input (i.e., reading), whether this be initiated by learners themselves, parents, or educators (e.g., frequenting libraries and book stores for leisure reading; extensive reading schemes). Those who study other subjects in English also potentially receive a large amount of written English input when completing assignments and reading textbooks.

These give rise to two problems. First, EFL learners tend to be more comfortable with reading than with listening (though this does not apply to every learner). This is partly supported in studies showing that FL learners have higher reading self-efficacy and lower anxiety compared with listening (Mills et al., 2006). Although this has partly to do with the nature of reading and listening (e.g., listening is spontaneous, rapid, and non-permanent), learners generally receive very little amount of English listening practice, hence feeling less confident and more anxious about it. Second, by depriving themselves of the opportunities to listen to English, they have one fewer channel (out of a possibility of only two) to receive linguistic input for proficiency development. The strong tendency for them to rely on the reading channel likely leads to a decrease in the quantity (the overall amount of input) and quality (only the written modality) in their EFL learning journeys.

SI and Extensive Listening

Exposure to a large amount of SI partly chimes with the notion of extensive listening, which is defined as “all types of listening activities that allow learners to receive a lot of comprehensible and enjoyable listening input” (Renandya and Farrell, 2011: 56), or similarly, “doing a lot of easy, comprehensible, and enjoyable listening practice” (Chang and Millett, 2014: 31). Extensive listening is associated with many benefits. It enables learners to construct a cognitive map (i.e., “a network of linguistics information”) which is fundamental for the development of different language skills (Nation and Newton, 2009; Renandya, 2013: 19), echoing the construct of listening to learn. In relation to learning to listen, extensive listening provides opportunities for multiple (and at times repeated) exposure through which learners practise listening. This in turn facilitates their development of listening automaticity and fluency. Saville-Troike (2012) explains this: “[R]epetition can enhance noticing and contribute to automatization, by facilitating faster processing of input, and the ability to process longer segments in working memory”. Also, as scholars (e.g., Ellis, 2002; Field, 2019; Renandya, 2013) have stated, declarative knowledge is important but when it comes to actual performance or “expertise” (Field, 2019: 289), “hundreds of hours” (Renandya, 2013: 26) or even “tens of thousands of hours” (Ellis, 2002: 175) of practice is essential. There are no shortcuts to internalizing and automatizing language knowledge other than familiarizing oneself through practice. The need for such prolonged practice shows the irreplaceable value of a substantial amount of spoken (and written) input for language learners. In fact, “practice-induced developmental pattern of cognitive and motor skills [have] show[n] a remarkable regularity across tasks and situations” (Dörnyei, 2009: 152), so the common-sensical “practice makes perfect” mantra applies to multifarious situations including language learning. It is common to hear learners complain that English speech is too fast when in fact “the listener [is] listening too slowly” (Buck, 2018: xiv). Therefore, practice helps learners get used to what authentic English speech is genuinely like in terms of speed.

The notion of extensive listening also facilitates vocabulary learning such as fillers or stock phrases (Renandya, 2013). With more practice, learners' confidence in listening may well increase while their listening anxiety may decrease. By choosing an English input that they favour (e.g., watching a soccer match on television, a movie on Netflix, or catching up on news about one's idol on YouTube), it is likely that learners experience greater enjoyment in listening and perhaps even general EFL learning. Decoding problems (e.g., mishearing words or phrases, as mentioned above) due to poor mastery of the English phonological system may also decrease as learners become more used to features of connected speech through extensive exposure to spoken English (e.g., Tsang, 2020).

Summary

The importance of input in language learning is beyond dispute. As one of the only two channels to receive language input, spoken English deserves much more attention from learners, teachers and other stakeholders. Thanks to the advancement of technology and the high accessibility of the Internet in many places, spoken English is no longer a rarity in EFL settings. Radio and television programmes, downloadable podcasts, videos on platforms such as YouTube and Netflix, and numerous other resources have become more accessible than ever to EFL learners. They also come in relatively low cost or are mostly free. The promotion of extensive reading globally in L1/L2/FL education is a worthwhile educational enterprise and should certainly continue. If this can be coupled with extensive listening, it is in all likelihood that learners will be benefited in their EFL learning journeys to an even greater extent. Individual differences, learner autonomy, and learner agency are of high currency in education nowadays. The promotion of more SI sits very well with these paradigms. In EFL classes, two problems many teachers tend to face are how different learners have different interests and different problems in learning EFL. These can be more readily addressed with extensive listening outside class since learners can relish the flexibility of material selection. With proper guidance from teachers or parents, learners can be engrossed in materials that they enjoy and work on specific problems they have (e.g., for a learner who desires to work on their pronunciation, they may select specific YouTubers as role models to help them; see Tsang, 2019).