So far listening has been taken as a process of decoding speech – working out the ‘message’ from the sentence you hear, just as a spy decodes a secret message by using a code he or she already knows. However, recent discussions of teaching methodology have focused on listening as a way of learning rather than as a way of processing language. Logically, L2 learners cannot learn a language if they never hear it; the sounds, the words, the structures, have to come from some- where. This process can be called codebreaking – listening means working out the language code from the ‘message’, just as a cryptographer works out an unknown code from an intercepted message. Decoding speech has the aim of discovering the message using processes that are already known. Codebreaking speech has the aim of discovering the processes themselves from a message.
One of the first to interpret listening as codebreaking was James Asher’s total physical response method (TPR) (Asher, 1986), which claimed that listening to commands and carrying them out was an effective way of learning a second lan- guage. A specimen TPR exercise consists of the teacher getting the students to respond to the following (Seely and Romijn, 1995):
1 You get a present from a friend. 2 Look it over.
3 Feel it.
4 Shake it and listen to it …
… and so on. The students follow the directions given by the teacher. This can now be done through an interactive CD-ROM called Live Action English (Romijn and Seely, 2000).
TPR came out of psychological theories of language learning and was based on extensive research. Its unique twist on listening is the emphasis on learning
through physical actions. As Asher puts it, ‘In a sense, language is orchestrated to a choreography of the human body.’ TPR gradually leads in to student production of language. According to Seely and Romijn (1995), TPR relies on four main exercises:
1 single unrelated commands such as ‘Grapple with your opponent’; 2 action series like the one above;
3 natural action dialogues based on a short script;
4 action role-playing without a script, that is, a freer version of (3).
These lead in to a technique called TPR storytelling, in which students retell famil- iar stories through the second language. TPR is discussed further in Chapter 13.
During the 1980s there was much talk of listening-based methods, summed up under the slogan of ‘Listening First’ (Cook, 1986). Postovsky (1974) had described how students who were taught Russian by methods that emphasize listening were better than students taught in a conventional way. According to Gary and Gary (1981a; 1981b), the benefits of concentrating on listening are that students do not feel so embarrassed if they do not have to speak; the memory load is less if they listen without speaking; and classroom equipment such as tape recorders can be used more effectively for listening than for speaking. Classroom research has con- firmed that there are distinct advantages to listening-based methods, as shown in the collection by Winitz (1981). A major schism in communicative teaching is between those who require students to practise communication by both listening and speaking, and those who prefer students to listen for information without speaking.
Krashen brought several disparate listening-based methods together through the notion of ‘comprehensible input’. He claims that ‘acquisition can take place only when people understand messages in the target language’ (Krashen and Terrell, 1983). Listening is motivated by the need to get messages out of what is heard. L2 learners acquire a new language by hearing it in contexts where the meaning is made plain to them. Ideally, the speech they hear has enough ‘old’ language that the student already knows and makes enough sense in the context for the ‘new’ language to be understood and absorbed. How the teacher gets the message across is not particularly important. Pointing to one’s nose and saying ‘This is my nose’, working out ‘nose’ from the context in ‘There’s a spot on your nose’, looking at a photo of a face and labelling it with ‘nose’, ‘eyes’, and so on, are all satisfactory provided that the student discovers the mes- sage in the sentence. Steve McDonough (1995) neatly summarizes the process as ‘the accretion of knowledge from instances of incomprehension embedded in the comprehensible’.
Stephen Krashen claims that all teaching methods that work utilize the same ‘fundamental pedagogical principle’ of providing comprehensible input: ‘if x is shown to be “good” for acquiring a second language, x helps to provide CI [com- prehensible input], either directly or indirectly’ (Krashen, 1981b).
Krashen’s codebreaking approach to listening became a strong influence on lan- guage teachers. It is saying, essentially, that L2 acquisition depends on listening: decoding is codebreaking. It did not, however, oddly enough, lead to a generation of published listening-based main coursebooks in the teaching of English, though some examples exist for teaching other languages in the Two Worlds series by
Tracey Terrell and others (Terrell et al., 1993), and in ‘More English Now!’, an appendix to the Gary and Gary (1981b) materials discussed in Chapter 13.
But Krashen’s theory does not say what the processes of decoding are and how they relate to codebreaking. The statement that teaching should be meaningful does not in itself get us very far. Most teachers have always tried to make their les- sons convey messages, whatever method they may be using, even the conversa- tional interaction drills mentioned in Chapter 2. Comprehensible input is too simplistic and too all-embracing a notion to produce anything but general guide- lines on what a teacher should do. It pays little heed to the actual processes of lis- tening or learning, but promises that everything will be all right if the teacher maximizes comprehensible input. As advice, this is too vague; the teacher can do anything, provided the students have to make sense of the language that is addressed to them – at least anything but make the students produce language, thus eliminating most of the ‘British’ communicative methods.
Discussion topics 133