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TitleFive Principles for Teaching L2 Listening
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Larry Vandergrift is a Professor Emeritus at the Official Languages and Bilingualism Institute at the University of Ottawa, Canada. He has published widely on listening, particularly the role of metacognition in successful L2 listening.

1.     Teach students how to listen.

Periodically, lead your students through the process of listening in order to develop their metacognition about listening. That will help them tackle listening practice (and real-life listening activities) with a clear sense of purpose. Help them set a goal for their listening; encourage them to generate predictions about what they will hear. Teach them to mentally review what they already know about the subject (see Principle 5), and to selectively attend to what is relevant. Make sure they maintain focus and refocus attention when their mind wanders. Remind them not to be thrown off by confusing or unfamiliar details but to make inferences on what they don’t understand, based on all the information available to them. Teach them to constantly evaluate their understanding of what they hear so that they can better resolve remaining questions. Metacognition can promote greater success, greater motivation and a greater sense of control over listening events (Vandergrift, 2003; Vandergrift & Tafaghodtari, 2010; Vandergrift & Goh, 2012). Two activities for developing student metacognition for L2 listening are featured here and here as the Activity of the Week in this week's InterCom.

2.     Provide listening practice without the threat of evaluation.

Much of classroom listening practice is really disguised testing, focusing on the product (the correct answer). Focusing on what they have not understood makes learners anxious about listening activities. However, when listening practice is divorced from any form of evaluation, the affective filter is lowered, allowing students to allocate more of the limited capacity of working memory to the listening text (Krashen, 1985; Vandergrift & Goh, 2012).

3.     Offer written support only after students have had an opportunity to activate real-life listening strategies.

Captions, subtitles and transcripts can help learners develop word segmentation skills and gain insight into their comprehension errors; however these aids do not help learning how to listen. Any written support should only be used after learners have first attempted to understand the text using prediction, inferencing and monitoring strategies that help to compensate for gaps in understanding (Diao, et al. 2007; Vandergrift & Goh, 2102; Winke, et al. 2010).

4.     Develop target language vocabulary.

L2 vocabulary knowledge plays a huge role in L2 listening success (Mecartty, 2000; Staehr, 2009; Vandergrift & Baker, 2015). In fact, Staehr noted that over 51% of listening variance could be explained by L2 vocabulary. Researchers also noted that many participants with low vocabulary scores were able to use compensatory strategies (their metacognition) to make up for what they did not understand.

5.     Build on students’ prior knowledge.

The research on prior knowledge provides ample evidence for its crucial role in listening comprehension (Long, 1990; Macaro, Vanderplank & Graham, 2005; Tsui & Fullilove, 1998). Activating this vital resource before a listening activity helps learners to draw on a wide range of prior knowledge to facilitate comprehension. This is why it is so important to choose listening texts appropriate to the age and life experience of the learners.

References:

Diao, Y., Chandler, P., & Sweller, J. (2007). The effect of written text on comprehension of spoken English as a foreign language. The American journal of psychology, 237-261.

Krashen, S. (1985), The Input Hypothesis: Issues and Implications, Longman.

Long, D. R. (1990). What you don’t know can’t help you. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 12, 65–80.

Macaro, E., Vanderplank, R., & Graham, S. (2005). A Systematic Review of the Role of Prior Knowledge in Unidirectional Listening Comprehension. London: EPPI-Centre, Social Science Research Unit, Institute of Education, University of London.

Mecartty, F. (2000). Lexical and grammatical knowledge in reading and listening comprehension by foreign language learners of Spanish. Applied Language Learning, 11, 323–348.

Staehr, L. S. (2009). Vocabulary knowledge and advanced listening comprehension in English as a foreign language. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 31, 577–607.

Tsui, A. & Fullilove, J. (1998). Bottom-up or top-down processing as a discriminator of L2 listening performance. Applied Linguistics, 19, 432–451.

Vandergrift, L. (2003). From prediction through reflection: Guiding students through the process of L2 listening. The Canadian Modern Language Review, 59, 425–440.

Vandergrift, L., & Tafaghodtari, M.H. (2010). Teaching learners how to listen does make a difference: An empirical study. Language Learning, 65, 470–497.

Vandergrift, L. & Baker, S. (In press). Learner variables in second language listening comprehension: An exploratory path analysis. Language Learning.

Vandergrift, L. & Goh, C. (2012). Teaching and learning second language listening: Metacognition in action. New York: Routledge

Winke, P., Gass, S., & Sydorenko, T. (2010). The effects of captioning videos used for foreign language listening activities. Language Learning &Technology, 14, 65–86.

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