Transformative Teachers
Webinar 8 - Listening and vocabulary learning
Summary notes
Firstly, thank you for participating in the Trinity College London teacher support webinar series. We are delighted to have over 1000 teachers from 70 countries participate in the series.
In this webinar, Test Production Manager, Gemma Bellhouse, is interviewed by TESOL Qualifications Manager, Ben Beaumont. Gemma and Ben discuss the relationship between listening and vocabulary learning. During the discussion, they explore how a learner's vocabulary is the key factor for success in their listening.
If you were unable to attend the webinar, you can watch the webinar via the following link:
Webinar 8 video – Listening and vocabulary learning
Summary of questions and responses
Interview: Gemma Bellhouse and Ben Beaumont
Q: Before we watch the video, let’s just place this in context. Gemma, why is it important to look at listening and vocabulary together?
A: As Robin will explain, vocabulary levels will predict success in comprehension. It is important for teachers and academics to discuss how to best teach vocabulary to students, as you yourself said in a previous teacher webinar, you need about 85% of the vocabulary in a text to be able to infer, or guess, a word from context. We cannot expect language learners to pick up vocabulary by simply guessing – we must give them as much support as we can.
Q: Robin makes some very interesting points about listening and vocabulary. Can you just briefly review these key points again?
A: Yes, gladly. Robin first made the point that listening is a very difficult skill and needs a lot of practice. But it’s interesting to discuss reasons why listening is more difficult than reading. A main explanation is because there is so much variation – people have different tones, accents, volumes, and people pause, hesitate, and use ungrammatical structures – of course this is quite a challenge! Robin made the point that a key factor in becoming a successful listener is being able to pronounce a word. While it is true that is possible to learn words while reading, in order to listen and recognise the words, one must know how they are pronounced.
Secondly, Robin made an important point that students should be engaging with vocabulary beyond simply being given a list of words and a dictionary. The research says that the more students can actively practise the vocabulary (between 6-16 times is suggested to learn a word), the more likely the word will be transferred into long-term memory.
Thirdly, Robin makes a good point that confidence of students should be generated and encouraged by teachers, and I personally agree very strongly with this.
Q: Robin says that pronunciation is really important for understanding listening texts. What’s your experience of this?
A: Yes, actually this became very apparent to me a couple of weeks ago, as I’m currently attempting to learn Hebrew. This language is very different from English phonetically speaking, and I quickly realised that when I tried to read aloud for the first time, I was not understood at all, even by a native speaker. I had to hear the Hebrew words first, then repeat to be understood. The speaker using correct pronunciation, and the listener knowing correct pronunciation, is absolutely key for any listener to be able to recognise and process speech, which leads to successful listening comprehension.
Beyond a beginner language learning level, even for more advanced language learners, we are limited by what is called the ‘phonological loop’, that is, that we can hold 1-2 seconds of audio in our memory, until we can process it by activating the vocabulary within our mental lexical bank. If someone mispronounces a word, or pronounces a word differently from what we might expect, we might actually get stuck by trying to process that word, and not listen to the following words.
Automaticity, that is, understanding something without having to pay much conscious attention to it, is key in processing real-time speech. Just think, we speak as quickly as 3-4 words per second, so when breakdowns occur, which can be common in unpredictable speech, and we spend too much time trying to understand, then the overall processing of meaning can end.
Q: And this is important for native speakers as well - [Ben’s ‘turbofan story’].
A: Yes – this is a great story, because I assume you learned this word by reading, and therefore had never heard the word and did not know how to pronounce it. And when this happens, there is a strategy that can be taught to students – rather than spending a lot of mental energy on trying to understand that one word they didn’t recognise, it is better to focus on the general meaning of a lecture or presentation, as, unless it’s a key word, it may be very possible to understand the general gist while ignoring several of the other words. Of course in a conversation, a student should feel relaxed enough to be able to ask for a repetition or a meaning of a word they don’t recognise.
Q: What is a classroom exercise that teachers could use to help students learn vocabulary and practise listening?
A: I appreciate Robin’s breakdown of the stages:
1) introducing a list of vocabulary words into the classroom by theme, and
2) allowing the students to add to it to make it more personal and relevant to them. I also appreciate that he recommended that
3) the students partner up and have a discussion using the new words.
I would suggest that this exercise is taken one step further:
4) the students must write a short (or long) script using as many of the words as possible, then perform this conversation for the class.
I did this once myself in a French class, and wore a wig – I had a great time! The students could also:
5) create a few quiz questions for the class at the end, to test their listening on the conversation. This would help the students first to practise the vocabulary, and then allow the students to be inventive and have a bit of fun with it. And if the rest of the students are quizzed at the end, then everyone stays engaged the whole time. (Of course I love to add a little test whenever I can!)
Q: What are some other good classroom activities that teachers can use to help activate new vocabulary?
A: Another fun activity that a teacher might bring into the classroom – and the teacher can break the students into smaller groups, or just bring the entire class to one circle – is to go around the circle telling a story. This can be a fun game that needs no materials. It would be ideal if the teacher first chooses a context, like a grocery shop, or a garden, and explains some vocabulary around that theme first, so then the story will hopefully elicit some of this vocabulary. Having a context will also assist the students by focusing the unpredictable speech. Each student adds a sentence and follows on from the next, developing the story. As this is a nice listening exercise of unpredictable speech, students are compelled to listen to each other to build on each sentence. And they can be individually creative with their responses. You could also create a point system, to ensure they are using the target vocabulary words. I like to make it competitive whenever possible – I've always found students are more interested that way!
Q: Robin says that it’s really important to activate language and gives the example of a short dialogue. How important is it to activate new language across all four skills?
A: If we need 6-16 repetitions to remember a word, we should try to develop our personal vocabularies by using both productive and receptive skills, that is, speaking and writing, and listening and reading.
Language learners should use as much active engagement and processing of each new vocabulary word as possible. In fact, research recommends from 6-10 minutes per word. And the more they practise, the more likely the word will be processed into long-term memory, and the candidate will be able to recognise the word the next time he or she hears it.
Q: And part of this is helping raise awareness of collocations. As well as helping the automaticity of processing you’ve talked about, could you say a bit more about pronunciation?
A: Sure, one of the issues with listening is that speech is not as uniform and ‘polished’ as the written word. There are variations, for example, on sound shapes, as Richard Caldwell calls them. John Field has also referred to this idea of sound shapes. Students generally learn how to say a word in a particular way from a teacher, or from the dictionary, which will phonetically spell out how to pronounce the word. However, with a slightly different dialect or accent of the speaker, or if the word is simply followed by another word that becomes a connection, then the sound shape might change, or shift, and a student might not recognise the word as he/she had learned it.
Q: The kinds of activities you talked about are also helpful when it comes to semantic clues to understanding language as well, aren’t they?
A: Sure – you need a context in order to pick up on semantic clues, which are a driver of listening comprehension. For example, the pronunciation of ‘guessed’ and ‘guest’. Without any context, they sound exactly alike, but semantically, one is the verb ‘guess’ in past tense, and one ‘guest’ is a noun. eg
'I guessed the correct response in my Trinity exam'
'I invited my guest to a nice dinner at the Shard'
With the context, without even thinking about it, we know that one is a past tense verb, and the other is a direct object noun.
However, sometimes a sentence is not enough to activate the vocabulary, especially for lower-level learners. By knowing the context - for example that they are in a grocery shop (and having already learned some of the vocabulary before trying the story-telling activity) it will lower the amount of processing and guesswork a student has to do while listening to unpredictable speech.
Q: And about the importance of pre-teaching of vocabulary, are there some key points you’d like to share with us?
A: Yes, I’d love to. There’s been a lot of research on this, and I think there are a few myths out there that have yet to be proved. Like, we can just spend time in a country to be ‘immersed’ in a language, and we’ll absorb it, without even trying to learn.
Actually, a systematic review of vocabulary intervention research by Wright and Cervetti, published in Reading Research Quarterly in 2016, talks about three important variables for vocabulary instruction to transfer to comprehension – these are: firstly, the amount of practice, secondly, the range of training in the use of the words, and thirdly the active processing of the words. They found in the 36 studies they analysed that the more active processing of vocabulary words students would do (from 6 to 26 minutes per word!), the more impactful the vocabulary learning. So in fact, simply put – the more time, effort and attention the students can give to a word, the more likely they are to remember it. The review of these studies also showed that the more direct and explicit the pre-teaching of vocabulary, the more likely the students would recognise and understand the target words in a text afterwards.
There are lots and lots of ways to practise vocabulary, such as:
- semantic mapping tasks
- comparing/contrasting discussion
- sentence generation tasks
- morphological analysis
- learning the history of the words
- practising multiple meanings… the list goes on!
Also, another myth that has yet to be proven is that certain people have a natural ‘aptitude’ for learning vocabulary. There is no evidence for this.
Q: I know that some teachers can spend rather too long pre-teaching vocabulary that learners might already know. What are some ways to help ensure that the teaching of vocabulary is focused and meets learners’ needs?
A: Sure – you don’t want to spend that 6-10 minutes learning animal names when you’re in a B2, or upper intermediate, classroom. But then – remember that we all have different personal vocabularies. Why not first just check the list with the students – ask them for a synonym or direct translation. Spend a few seconds on each word before choosing the words you want to spend longer on. Then, be conscious of their facial expressions and check in with them later, maybe you didn’t pick up on one of the words that they should have been pre-taught, just like Robin’s example of ‘Asia’. This is what an engaged, aware teacher will do – focus on the individual needs of the learners.
My own French vocabulary may have some low-frequency, or C2 words, but I may be lacking some high-frequency, or A2 words – it’s just because I picked up the words that were most relevant to express myself. I learned the words I needed for my job, for ordering the type of food I like, and for talking about my own experiences. My own vocabulary is sure to look very different to another language learner of French – an effective teacher needs to be aware of the range of individual vocabularies in the classroom.
Q: How can listening skills be practised in the classroom while preparing for our exams, in particular Trinity's ISE?
A: The ISE exam has several listening tasks, and the cognitive demands vary per level, from A2 – ISE Foundation, to C1 in ISE III.
There’s an independent listening task, which is followed by questions, and an interactive task which begins with a prompt. My team, along with our item writers, produce the listening tasks and the prompts for the exam. The interactive task is unpredictable speech, so the conversational activity we talked about earlier is a good one, but there are some sample prompts on the Trinity website that you can bring into the classroom to try to emulate the testing environment, while keeping the pressure low of course.
For the listening tasks, you could have the students use the online samples and test each other, by that I mean, ask the questions of each other, as an examiner would. The ISE exam is meant to be encourage authentic academic interaction within the classroom, so I believe bringing in sample or past tasks as classroom activities is actually a really nice idea.
Q: Robin also talks about the need to build learners’ confidence with language. What’s your experience with that?
A: Yes I feel quite strongly about this – as students get older, their affective filter, that is, their self-consciousness that prohibits them from embarrassing themselves, gets stronger, and unfortunately, they are too afraid to make mistakes, and are quiet, or they are stressed because of something they did not understand, and so they turn off, and do not want to talk or even listen anymore. I think it is possible to teach students to be better listeners, which will help them relax and be better conversationalists, and better speakers.
A recent piece of research I did last year was on active listening strategies used in another of our exams by higher level candidates. One of these strategies of active listening is back-channelling – just short, verbal or nonverbal signs we show each other that we’re listening. For example 'Mm, mmhmmm, yeah, uh huh, okay', etc. If we teach the language learners early on to use these, and other strategies like asking open-ended questions and not just for the sake of keeping the conversation, but actually asking them to learn more, then students may not be as stressed and pressured to speak so much in a conversation, and they can act more naturally, and speak when they’re ready.
Q: Why is learning motivation important while teaching students how to be better listeners?
A: Well, I’ve mentioned unpredictable speech a few times now. There’s something called the ‘collaborative continuum’ in listening literature (check out ‘Assessing Listening’ by Buck). On the left end of the continuum, there is no collaboration, so a listening text would be something like the radio, or the television, and the listener is passive – requiring no collaboration. On the right side, you have full interactive collaboration – probably the best example is a 1-1 conversation. The more a language learner goes towards the interactive end, the more engaged they must be, and the more switched-on, so to speak.
So this is why adding interactive activities with unpredictable speech in the classroom is so important – as outside of the classroom, students will be faced with a range of listening challenges on the collaborative continuum.
And of course, we’re not here merely just for classroom practice or exam preparation – we all want the students to succeed out there in the real world.
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We very much look forward to welcoming you to the ninth webinar, on Wednesday 20 June at 13:00 UK time, when Jonathan Frank, University Recognition Manager, will be interviewing Tom Garside, Academic Consultant. They will be discussing listening and confidence and how we can help learners improve their listening skills.
Click on the 'Join Webinar' link below at the appointed time for the next webinar.
