Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1998. Vol. 2. Eger Journal of English Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 26)

Studies - Richard Cauldwell: Listening comprehension: three problems and three suggestions

course, there are very good reasons why we should be careful about this particular issue: we don't want learners to strain so much to hear every word that they cannot understand anything. In my view though, it is a mistake to abandon, as we have, bottom-up activities which introduce learners to the essential characteristics of speech. The acceptance of this article of faith has resulted in the standard explanation of the communicative language teacher: 'You won't be able to understand every word, and you don't need to'. Now I find this explanation worryingly insufficient. Here's why. Let us start with two indisputable facts: first, native listeners don't attend to every word; and second, learners don't understand every word. We make the mistake of proposing the first fact (native listeners don't do it) as a solution to the problems posed by the second fact (learners don't understand). In doing so, we ignore the fact that native speaker listeners have great advantages over non-natives both in terms of perceptual ability (in particular) and in terms of the abilities to guess, and predict on the basis of contextual knowledge. We expect learners to simulate native listener behaviour without helping them acquire one of the major prerequisites for such behaviour - adequate perceptual abilities. Any activity which encourages of bottom-up processing, which requires learners to attend to the substance of speech, has become taboo. For example, some authors discourage teachers from giving learners the opportunity of looking at the tapescripts for fear that it 'reinforces the myth that learners can't understand meaning without catching everything they hear' (Helgesen et al, 1997, p. xii). Thus, because of the misplaced faith in first language research, we have listening comprehension exercises which require learners to simulate native listener behaviour (don't try to understand every word) but which do not sufficiently address the need to teach learners how to acquire progressively native-like abilities in perception - there are insufficient bottom-up activities. If true, this is a serious indictment of an approach (Communicative Language Teaching) which claims to be 'learner centred' and claims to place great emphasis on learners' needs Misplaced hope Listening exercises are also characterised by misplaced hope which often appears in the shape of the following words of encouragement to the 10