Listening StrategiesThe following section will review studies related to listening strategies, firstly, by presenting a definition and classification of listening strategies, secondly, by presenting studies conducted to investigate the use of listening strategies by FL/L2 learners, and thirdly, by reviewing a number of studies on listening strategy training.
Definition and Classification of Listening Strategies
Strategies are special techniques or activities that learners apply to facilitate the acquisition, storage, retrieval, and use of information (Oxford, 1990). Applied to listening, cognitive strategies are used to infer, predict, interpret, store and recall information acquired from listening input; rategies are used to plan, monitor and evaluate mental processes and to manage difficulties during listening; social strategies serve to enlist the help or cooperation of interlocutors to facilitate listening prehension; and affective strategies enable the listener to ions, motivation and attitudes that influence prehension.
With respect to the classification of listening strategies, O'Malley and Chaitive and social-affective strategies and Vandergrift's (1996; 1997b) refined version of that have received the widest aeptance among listening strategy researchers. Grounded in inforg theory (Anderson, 1980), these taxonomies have facilitated the clarification and categorization of different listening strategies.
O'Malley and Chamot (1990) differentiated listening strategies in terening prehension process. For exaed using attentional strategies that ion on the task during perceptual processing, such as being aware of when to stop attending and when to to redirect attention to the task. Students also reported segmenting portions of the oral text based on cues to meaning or on structural characteristics during the parsing phase, such as by listening to larger chunks of the text, inferring for unfamiliar words and using both top-down and bottom-up approaches to process the text for coilization phase, learners reported using different types of elaboration (i. e., using prior knowledge froversational context and relating it to knowledge gained froion in order to fill in missing inforprehension and recall and they also used elaboration to support inferencing the meaning of unfamiliar words. O'Malley and Chamot thus related different listening strategies to the different listening processes. They associated perceptual processing with selective attention and self-monitoring, parsing with grouping and inferencing fro, and utilization with elaboration from world knowledge, personal experiences, or self-questioning (1990, ).
Table 2 provides a co of listening prehension strategies, as defined in a figure by Vandergrift (1997b).
Table 2 Listening prehension Strategies and Their Definitions
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(Source: Vandergrift, 1997b, -395)
Research on Language Learners' Use of Listening Strategies
In general, researchers investigating listening strategies (e. g., Bacon, 1992; Flowerdew & Miller, 1992; Murphy, 1985; O'Malley, Chamot & Kupper, 1989; O'Malley, Chamot, Stewner-Manzanares, Kupper & Russo, 1985; Vandergrift, 1997a, 1997b) have found that listeners who were able to flexibly use various listening strategies were essful in cos, whereas listeners without the ability to apply adequate listening strategies concentrated on the text by word-for-word decoding. Therefore, the use of listening strategies seems to be an important indicator of whether a learner is a skillful listener or not.
Studies have exat and less-proficient listeners, and findings indicate that t listeners use a wider variety of strategies with greater flexibility, frequency, sophistication, and appropriateness to meet task demands (e. g. Goh, 2002; Smidt & Hegelheimer, 2004), and efigurations of strategies cot listeners (e. g. Vandergrift, 1997b; 2003a).
Using a think-aloud method, he strategies used by adult ESL listeners in acadetures. hat more skilled listeners were open and flexible, using more strategies and a greater variety of different strategies. Less skilled listeners, on the other hand, either concentrated too or on their own world knowledge. hat the more skilled listeners engaged in ion with the text and used a wider variety of strategies that interconnect like “links in a fence. ”Listening strategies, aording to Murphy, should be seen as “interweaving coo a single animated language process” ().
Vandergrift (1997b) looked at differences in strategy use by learners of different proficiency levels. Using students of French in their first, second, and fifth years of language study (labeled as novice) and students in their eighth year of study (labeled as intermediate), Vandergrift found that the novice listeners relied heavily on elaboration, inferencing, and transfer to build up meaning and that they overcame their limited knowledge of words by using what they knew (cognates). This finding led hiitive constraints of processing at the novice level are so great that there is little roog strategies such as monitoring.
Goh (2002) reported on the broad strategies and specific techniques (referred to as “tactics”by Goh) eese adult learners of English as a second language in Singapore. Both cognitive and rategies were identified. The cognitive strategies included inferencing, elaboration, prediction, translation, contextualization and visualization, and the rategies consisted of self-monitoring (referred to by Goh as “directed attention”), coive attention and self-evaluation (referred to as “prehension evaluation”). As for strategy use differences between learners of different listening ability, both the high-ability and the low-ability students reported a bination of the use of prior knowledge, text and context. One important difference was that the high-ability students ed a greater number and higher quality of inferencing, prehension prehension evaluation strategies.
Vandergrift (2003a) exahe types of listening strategies used by more skilled and less skilled 7th graders while they listened to authentic texts in French. In the two-year longitudinal study, the progress of an experitrol group of 36 learners was pared to address the following two research questions: (1) What are the strategies that junior high school learners of French use while listening to authentic text in French? (2) What are the differences in the use of listening strategies reported by more skilled and less skilled listeners? In the listening co, authentic dialogues in French were first presented followed by e questions that required the learners to verify their cohree-category listening strategy taxonoitive, cognitive, and social/affective) as well as the sub-strategies within each category, as previously shown in Table 2, Vandergrift used think-aloud to gather data. The tage use of each strategy by the more skilled and less skilled listeners were also calculated, and the quantitative analysis resulted in the following findings:
(a) with the exception of the “evaluation”strategy, all the rategies were used by the listeners;
(b) by mainly using such rategies as “prehension monitoring, ”the more skilled listeners had better control over the listening process;
(c) the more skilled listeners demonstrated openness and flexibility in their approach to listening by using rategies, such as “question elaboration”;
(d) and the less skilled listeners, on the other hand, appeared to engage in more direct translation strategies, involving bottog, which impeded the developual frat construction of meaning.
By analyzing the think-aloud protocols of the listeners, Vandergrift's study showed how a given strategy or a particular bination of strategies was used to build meaning in the process of listening. In his study, a less skilled listener appeared to rely on translation and bottog, which resulted in superficial engagement with the text and li of its trast, a more skilled listener seemed to employ a more dynabining bottom-up andtop-down processesto allocate more resources to organize rategies.
The studies reviewed above have shed light on listening strategy research in a number of ways.