Discovery listening—Improving perceptual processing

Wilson, M. (2003). Discovery listening—improving perceptual processing. ELT journal, 57(4), 335-343.

Background

Current EFL (English as a Foreign Language) literature focuses primarily on top-down processing, listening for gist and teaching listening strategies to improve students’ listening and comprehension abilities. On the other hand, bottom-up teaching approaches such as ‘noticing’ and ‘word recognition’, have been comparatively undervalued.

Aims

The author deployed the ‘discovery listening’ technique to help a group of Japanese students identify their listening problems.

Sample

The study was based on the quotes from the discussion of three intermediate level students in a second-year, compulsory general English university class in Japan.

Method

The ‘discovery listening’ tasks comprised three main stages – listening, reconstructing and discovering. During the listening phase, the students listened without note taking, self-assessed their understanding, and listened to the text twice again while taking notes.  During the reconstructing phase, they used their notes and reconstructed the text with their peers. During the discovering phase, the students compared their reconstructed text with the original and tried to categorize the causes of errors made, determine the relative importance of these mistakes, listen again without referring to the text and then assess their understanding.

Findings

The results showed that, in the second stage, the students shared their perceptions of the text with their peers and confirmed what they were unsure of using a bottom-up approach. They then continued to discuss the problematic areas with each other using their top-down grammatical knowledge. It appeared that students experienced difficulties prioritising the problems.  The author postulated that this could have been due to the complexity of the problems they faced as the difficulties could not be resolved in isolation. He also noted that participants did not often use contextual information and lacked top-down processing ability. However, in the third stage, the students acquired specific knowledge of their individual learning difficulties when they compared the reconstructed text with the original. The process of prioritising their difficulties also gave students another ‘noticing’ opportunity. The students appeared to be more motivated during the ‘discovery listening’ tasks than in ‘getting the gist’ listening exercises.

Implications

The author highlighted the importance of giving students a manageable number of specific areas to focus on so that the subsequent listening activities would help to enhance their awareness and perceptual processing. It is also important to give students texts that match their ability levels and classroom activities that enable them to focus on ‘bottom-up’ accuracy.

Original article retrieved from Google Scholar.