Some basic features of listening comprehension

Learners need to be able to listen to and understand spoken English, as a preliminary to speaking it and, in most situations, to reading and writing it as well. This is not only because in the natural order of things we hear a new language before we speak it and because reading and writing are secondary to speech. It is also because listening is normally the main channel through which learners are exposed to new items, lexical or grammatical, in English, and increase their knowledge.

Listening is not just the mirror image of speaking. Learners can understand spoken English that is at a higher level, and a lot more in quantity, than that which they are capable of producing themselves. Texts used for listening comprehension activities should therefore be longer and more advanced than the kinds of spoken output we would expect from the learners who are expected to cope with them: what Stephen Krashen (1981) calls ‘i+1’. If students talk to one another in spoken fl uency activities, it is true that they are also listening; but the amount of useful listening comprehension practice that they are getting is limited. The speech they are hearing is only at the level they can produce themselves: it is not ‘i+1’.

An additional point to be noted is that comprehension of both spoken and written discourse involves knowledge which derives from at least two different sources. On the one hand, there are the bottom-up processes which are based on the decoding of the text itself: perception of sounds and combinations of sounds, the identification and comprehension of individual words, phrases and patterns. On the other, there are top-down processes deriving from listeners’ real-world knowledge of the subject matter, genre or context, which enable easier perception of meanings or underlying implications. In some cases, top-down processes may precede the bottom-up, as when we come to a text with strong preliminary assumptions as to its content or style.

There is some debate in the literature about which is more important (top-down or bottom-up), and this would clearly depend in any specific case on what the text is and which learner population is using it