Learning to Listen and Listening to Learn

[jeff_lindqvist]

In this moment I'm listening to the mightly Faust Symphony of Liszt Ferenc, and I'm writing this comment in English, and once in a while I look at the television where the two new Mythbusters try to blow up something. And just a few minutes ago I was solving a sudoku in my kitchen while eating a pear and listening to Faust.

And I just finished more than half a dozen Ilya Frank stories in Russian while listening to the great album "The given note" by Irish uilleann pipe player Liam O'Flynn (who passed away just a few days ago). I also reviewed Anki cards, did Duolingo reviews, played Wordfeud and lost a chess game.

[olim21]

Hi,

I have been a member of this forum from the beginning and HTLAL before that, but this is my first post.

I was very hesitant to participate in this thread, worried to be sucked in an endless discussion. But the amount of false knowledge and half-broken conclusions spread by that kind of thread is kind of worrisome. I hope it will not come out as too harsh, it's not my intention. I don't care who is right as long my knowledge increase.

Also, I have not read the blog post linked by the OP, so here are my thoughts on the few extracts quoted:

Listening is by far the most important skill-set,

That's not true at all. Listening is not even a skill. Listening is just a shorter way of saying "oral understanding" and the skill here is "understanding" while "oral" is just the medium.

The most important skill is "understanding". Without it there is nothing, no reading, no listening, no speaking, no writing. Nothing!

Listening is basically the same thing as reading. The most obvious difference being, that while you read you can pause and go back to think without loosing anything. An important point to note here is that if you need to pause when reading, you should not be too surprised when your oral understanding is low. It just means that you do not understand the language yet, not really, not natively.

So, to improve listening, you need to improve your understanding. And to improve your understanding the easiest way is to read more. It seems to me that the most important activity is reading.

Small caveat:

Before you start reading large volume of text, you should make sure that you have a good idea of how words are pronounced. Otherwise you risk to develop your own, alien pronunciation which will make it difficult to recognize words when listening.

Working with audio and transcript at the beginning should help a lot in that regard. You can also use Forvo to practice and check your pronunciation.

especially if we are preparing our students for the real world, where 45 % of communication occurs through the aural medium and only 25 % through reading and writing.

Choosing between the two when you can have both for the same price does not seem like a very good idea to me. Especially this days with Internet and texting everywhere.

Moreover, the human brain is naturally wired to acquire languages through listening,...

What does this even mean? Our brain is no more "naturally wired" to listen than to read. We have to learn both.

Once the audio signal has been transformed by your ears into a "brain signal", do you really think there is that much of a difference between the way your brain will process it, compared to a signal transformed by your eyes?

The main reason why many students fail at listening is that MFL teachers do not actually teach aural skills.

Yes, that is one of the reason for sure. The other being low understanding. Students don't read enough nor often enough. Their reading is too often too slow and too choppy. In other words: their understanding is too low.

I had been teaching listening by playing an audio-track and quizzing students on its content...

Yes, this is a bad way of teaching. Not only for language teaching but for teaching in general. It happens because people confuse testing with learning.

Testing is to prove to someone that you are at the level you claim to be.

Learning comes from practice. Practice means understanding + repetition. There is no need to be tested to learn. Testing is just a schooling artifact.

In my opinion, the best and most teacher-friendly skill-based account of listening comprehension to-date was provided by Field (2014), who identifies the following skill-set as crucial to the effective processing of aural input:

Except it's all fantasy. That's not how our brain works. Nothing is decoded, nothing is stored, nothing is retrieved, nothing is parsed.

A brain is more like a mold. An input is shaped into an output. When you hear a word there is no parsing and retrieving of information. Instead the hearing of the word (input) "triggers" various thoughts related to that word (output). The next word triggers new thoughts that combined with the previous ones giving new thoughts that in turn will be altered by the next inputs, etc. Those thoughts dissipate over time if they're not altered by more recent ones. The whole process giving the feeling of a meaning progressively developing.

What we call learning is actually the shaping of the mold. It happens because each time your brain produce an output the shape of the mold changes slightly. That is why we need repetition in the first place. To slowly shape the mold so that a particular input triggers an output that approaches more and more the perfect output.

A meaning-building phase - in which, having ‘broken’ the speech flow, identified the words he heard and how they fit grammatically in the sentence he finally makes sense of it

It seems almost magical: "... he finally makes sense of it".

How?

First of all, they need to drastically increase the students’ exposure to aural input

Well, yes but only because in a classroom settings, exposure to aural input is almost nonexistent to begin with. Aural input should not be the main input. It can be but this is slower.

Secondly, they need to teach decoding skills extensively from the very early stages of instruction.

I'm not sure what that means.

Thirdly, they must teach vocabulary aurally, as much as possible,

Well, not exactly. Teacher ideally should provide accompanying audio for everything. But it should not be audio only. Any audio should also be transcribed. So basically you want both: the text with the audio. And In a perfect world you would also have aligned translation for every sentence, and a gloss for every word.

in high-frequency chunks, rather than in isolated words as they often appear in word lists.

High-frequency chunks are certainly an improvement over simple word lists, but they should also come from larger text that the student has already studied or read.

A chunk out of context is not much better than a word out of context.

Finally, and more importantly, we must train our students in grammatical-pattern recognition and analysis through the aural medium

If you "explain" the pattern while reading a text and you also provide the audio for the same text, there is no need to train aurally. The pattern are the same whether they are heard or read.

--
OM

[reineke]

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[Dragon27]

That's not true at all. Listening is not even a skill. Listening is just a shorter way of saying "oral understanding" and the skill here is "understanding" while "oral" is just the medium.

What do you mean "listening" is not a skill? If you think it's useful not to think of listening as skill you should at least provide your definition of the term "skill". Otherwise, we can just go with our basic "4 language skills" and discuss them, being sure that most languge studying people will immediately understand, what is meant by it.
Also, one may notice that listening in that quote was referred to as "skill-set". It's always good to remember that "listening" is a rather complex activity, which involves parsing speech, recognizing phonemes, phonetic words, intonational patterns, parsing it all into a coherent string of language units, then recognizing grammar, collocations, familiar phrases, connecting it all, taking into the account the order of language units (syntax) and context, into a meaningful message. So I think, that this phrase:

Listening is basically the same thing as reading.

is too big of a stretch (gross oversimplification). Listening is way too different from reading. And processing the written word is definitely not the same as processing the spoken word. And

So, to improve listening, you need to improve your understanding. And to improve your understanding the easiest way is to read more. It seems to me that the most important activity is reading.

that would help to some extent, of course. The "listening" and "reading" skill-sets do have a lot in common, and it's a good idea to use one of them to improve the other (and not just "reading" to improve "listening", but "listening" to improve "reading" too), but they're still different. You must listen to improve your "listening" skill-set. It's not just "understanding". You can't "have both for the same price" as you put it.

Before you start reading large volume of text, you should make sure that you have a good idea of how words are pronounced. Otherwise you risk to develop your own, alien pronunciation which will make it difficult to recognize words when listening.

Working with audio and transcript at the beginning should help a lot in that regard. You can also use Forvo to practice and check your pronunciation.

Not only that. A beginning language learner should be at least aware that spoken language is primary. That it's not just "sloppy written language". That the way the words are pronounced, the way they sound is their primary representation in a native's mind, and the way they're written is secondary. That written text misses out on a lot of spoken language aspects (intonation, emphasis, etc), which a native usually reconstructs from written text using his extensive native language experience. That people speak differently from how they write (texting can account for some of that difference, though).
Of course, if good "aural understaning" is not a goal for a language learner (for whatever reason), he could cut down on listening significantly. But I hope this person has gotten enough aural input and pronunciation training in the first place (correcting ingrained habits is a pretty nasty experience).

[olim21]

What do you mean "listening" is not a skill?

I thought I was clear, sorry about that. Let me try again.

What I mean by listening is not a skill is that it does not require to be learned. Your ability to understand the spoken language is directly dependent on your ability to understand. If your comprehension increase, your listing ability will increase too.

So what I'm trying to say is that in order to improve your listening you should not waste too much time by listening more. What you should do is improve your comprehension by reading more instead (once you know how the language sound, of course), and you listening comprehension should follow.

What you should aim for is developing reflexes. When you hear or read a word it should immediately trigger the corresponding thoughts. Like in your first language. No retrieval at all. If you need to think to recover the meaning of a word, that's already too late, you have probably missed 10 words.

Now, you could improve your understanding by listening to something you mostly understand over and over, but that's way easier to simply read large amount of text that you understand, instead. The other advantage of reading is that you will meet a lot more words. The spoken form in comparison is limited.

As for the so called 4 skills, I don't think this is an interesting way to describe language learning. Because to learn a language fully you only need to work on 3. The first and most important one and also the one taking the most time is comprehension. And then on top of it you can learn to speak and to write. Each of this 3 skills require you to do specific task to improve, that's why I call them skills.

It's always good to remember that "listening" is a rather complex activity, which involves parsing speech...

No, that's exactly what I was trying to explain in my first post: there is no parsing at all. Please re-read the part where I describe how the brain can possibly process speech.

Contrary to what you think our brain is a very very slow device. We are talking a few 100Hz at best here. Compare with modern CPU at 4GHz to get an idea how slow the brain is.

So given that lack of speed there is no possibility to do the parsing, recognizing, pattern matching, etc. There is simply no time for it. The brain is way too slow.

Listening is way too different from reading. And processing the written word is definitely not the same as processing the spoken word.

How? What are those differences you are talking about?

A beginning language learner should be at least aware, that spoken language is primary.

I strongly disagree with that. The spoken language is no more important that the written one. Both are often a variation on the same theme. They are on the same level. They are just too media for the real language in our head: the actual primary language.

Of course, if good "aural understanding" is not a goal for a language learner (for whatever reason), he could cut down on listening significantly. But I hope this person has gotten enough aural input and pronunciation training in the first place (correcting ingrained habits is a pretty nasty experience).

Definitively agree with that, but that's not the case I'm talking about here.

What I'm saying is that, if when you read a word you immediately understand it, and you know how to pronounce it, you will understand it when you hear it. So there is nothing to do to improve your listening because it is already there.

Hope I am clear?

--
OM

[olim21]

Hi,

Honestly I don't understand what you are trying to accomplish here. You seem to just dump as much as you can of a google search in a post pretending it means something. Have you even some ideas of your own, do you even understand what you are copying? Have you read it?

So let's try again to see where it will lead us.

Speech is the fundamental means of human communication.

What is so fundamental about it? If you mean that it's the preferred means of communication between human then yes. But so what? Is it so surprising? We are born with everything we need to speak after all. Writing on the other hand is a lot less efficient and require additional tools. So yes we prefer to talk when we can.

We mainly speak because it's more convenient, not because we are somehow wired for it (whatever that means). Death people seem to be able to read just fine without speaking. Also it still takes 5 years for a 5 years old to learn to speak like a 5 years old. That "fundamental" wiring does not seem to give us much of an advantage.

Perhaps the greatest proof of the importance of speech comes from the deep and broad ways that humans have evolved to process and understand speech.

Well, no. We evolved to have a brain capable to understand speech. But the same brain also gives us the ability to read and tie our shoes, among countless other things. So what proof is there? Do you think our brain is specially wired to tie our shoes?

people with IQ scores as low as 50

Man, it smell like last century in here. What an IQ score even measure? Maybe we should focus less on IQ and give the same chance to everyone regardless of a meaningless score. Maybe we would finally realize that people with supposedly lower IQ are as capable after all.

Also I don't see the relation between IQ and the ability to speak. Learning a language is not a difficult task. It does not require a lot of thinking. So the fact that you can speak with a low IQ does not surprises me.

or brains as small as 400 grams (one-third the size of a normal human brain) can speak.

So what? It just means that you do not need a full brain to be able to speak. A more interesting question would be: can they read?

Although scientists debate whether the brain contains a “speech organ,”

What is a speech organ exactly? What advantage does it give us considering we still need to learn to understand and speak? Is it really worth our time to debate about something nowhere to be found with no effect on the real world?

there is no question that speech implicates more parts of the brain than any other function

Of course it does. What you call speech here is not only speaking but also listening and understanding. So obviously it uses more parts of the brain than just listening. What's your point?

Humans are so tuned to speech production and processing that from about the age of eighteen months, children on average learn eight to ten new words a day and typically retain that rate until adolescence.

It still takes an awful lot of time and effort to learn to speak. Does not seem that well tuned to me.

Humans are also the only species that is wired to understand speech fully

Sure, it looks that way. Also our brain is a lot more complex, so there is that.

I don't think the rest of your quoted points really deserve any answer. Entertaining reading thought.

the human genome cannot contain any instructions for reading-specific brain circuits.

Of course not. Why would you think that in the first place. DNA does not encode anything related to speech either. Those functions are just side effects of the complexity of our brain, not by design.

A large set of regions of the left hemisphere is identically activated when we read a sentence and when we listen to it

Well, yeah. So we agree then: reading and listening are mostly the same thing from our brain perspective.

All of these regions are thus not unique to reading.

Of course not. It's 2018, we have known for a long time now that our brain is not made of discrete zones responsible for specific functions.

Rather, these are spoken-language areas, and reading provides access to them through vision.

Why? You could also say that there are common understanding areas that activates when you listen or read. Makes a lot more sense to me.

They obviously reflect an ancient and probably evolved system responsible for spoken language acquisition.

What? Why? Where does that come from? This is obvious, really?

What this child has to acquire is the visual interface into the language system.

You mean reading, right?

Neuro-imaging studies of single-word reading have begun to clarify the localization and organization of this visual interface system.

So what can we learn from that? For example "localization", what are we talking about here? Should I remind you that neuroimaging is a very very very crud tool for the job. But even if we could pinpoint precisely what neurons are involved, would that help us understand anything about how we process speech?

Let's talk about AI for a minute, not long ago an AI trained to play GO has won 4-1 against one of the best human player on the planet. But my point here is not about the result. My point is about the fact that we have access to the whole AI, we can look at any variable that make up the AI. Yet it doesn't not give us any insight into how the AI perceive the game, how it reasons about it, how it takes the decisions it takes. Nothing!

To make thing even worse: if you would train a second AI on the same data, in a different order, you would end up with a comparably capable AI but made of different variables. So you see the actual variables and their location is quite irrelevant. What is significant however is how all those variables work together. The problem is that even for an AI merely capable to play GO, the number of variables to consider is enormous and basically we just can't keep track of it all.

Now, if we go back to our brain, the number of variables is several order of magnitude larger. So how are we suppose to learn anything from that?

It is always located at the same coordinates in the left lateral occipito-temporal sulcus, within a few millimeters.

"within a few millimeters", we are already talking about ~200,000 neurons here. We are nowhere near being able to pinpoint anything.

Despite your massive mix of google-copy-paste, I see no evidence for speech being more fundamental than any other skill. Also I'm not sure it helps us answer your original question either way.

About your original question:

It seems to me that telling people to learn to listen does not make more sense than telling people to stop translating. In both cases there is nothing to be done by the student. You will stop translating and start to understand oral speech more and more as your comprehension develops. And to increase your comprehension there is nothing better than reading large amount of text that you can understand.

That's all there is to it, I think.

--
OM

[aaleks]

So what I'm trying to say is that in order to improve your listening you should not waste too much time by listening more. What you should do is improve your comprehension by reading more instead (once you know how the language sound, of course), and you listening comprehension should follow.
<...>
Now, you could improve your understanding by listening to something you mostly understand over and over, but that's way easier to simply read large amount of text that you understand, instead. The other advantage of reading is that you will meet a lot more words. The spoken form in comparison is limited.

Not instead.
I do believe that reading helped me to improve my listening at the beginning stage. But. I've been listening a lot, and way above my level, since the day one. Reading has been my main source of vocabulary, I don't use wordlists, Anki, etc. And in the overall, I think reading really speeded up my progress. But that's always been listening + reading.

[Dragon27]

What I mean by listening is not a skill is that it does not require to be learned. Your ability to understand the spoken language is directly dependent on your ability to understand. If your comprehension increase, your listing ability will increase too.

But it does require to be learned. To wit:

What you should do is improve your comprehension by reading more instead (once you know how the language sound, of course)

You should at least learn how the language sounds first. And you can't do that just by reading.
Of course, listening and reading are interwoven (connected through that pure "understanding" you're talking about, maybe), so reading can help you with listening a lot, no doubt about that.

What you should aim for is developing reflexes. When you hear or read a word it should immediately trigger the corresponding thoughts. Like in your first language. No retrieval at all. If you need to think to recover the meaning of a word, that's already too late, you have probably missed 10 words.

But doesn't it mean, that listening is a skill? You develop reflexes: hear a word (a whole bunch of words, actually) - immediately understand the underlying meaning (or react emotionally, or whatever). Kinda sound like a developed skill to me.
If listening is easy (like a simple speech by a well articulated narrator), you can relatively quickly learn to understand that and copy sounds and intonations in your head, so that your reading won't harm your auditory representation of the language (much). At the end of the day, even when we're reading, or memorizing written words, we keep sounding them out in our heads (language is primarily spoken). But speech can be more difficult, and in order to understand that, you need more of a "listening" skill. You should listen to real speech and be able to quickly transform a string of sounds into meaning. That's a skill. You should learn to recognize the words pronounced in different ways (accent, phonetic changes, emphasis, speech simplifications, etc.), so your brain needs to develop a library for a word (or a phrase), which contains different ways of pronouncing it. You should also learn to recognize a word even if no phoneme was actually properly enunciated (sloppy speech, noise, whatever), so your brain needs to develop a sort of "sound sketch" for the word (or phrase) so it could recognize it even if it never heard it pronounced that way. That all needs to be developed by training your listening skills.
And, of course, reading can help you learn more words and phrases faster, so you can guess what you heard easier. But it still can't replace listening.

No, that's exactly what I was trying to explain in my first post: there is no parsing at all. Please re-read the part where I describe how the brain can possibly process speech.

Contrary to what you think our brain is a very very slow device. We are talking a few 100Hz at best here. Compare with modern CPU at 4GHz to get an idea how slow the brain is.

So given that lack of speed there is no possibility to do the parsing, recognizing, pattern matching, etc. There is simply no time for it. The brain is way too slow.

I'm not sure if you're serious or not. We don't do all the pattern recognizing work consciously, of course, but our brain certainly does do it. It needs time to learn, and we still don't fully understand exactly how it does the job, but it does it. And better than our computer programs, obviously (at least, at certain tasks).

I strongly disagree with that. The spoken language is no more important that the written one. Both are often a variation on the same theme. They are on the same level. They are just too media for the real language in our head: the actual primary language.

Spoken language is certainly more important for a hearing person. Written language was created to catch the spoken word in the paper, and over time it became very important on its own, with writing influencing our speaking practices and pronunciation even for native speakers (especially with those rare "big" words, that not too many people actually use in real speech). But it still goes after the spoken language, and should be learned after one has more or less learned the sound system of the language.
But I'm not sure what is this primary "brain language" you've mentioned here a couple of times. I have the impression that this "brain language" for a native is much closer to the spoken form of the language (and should be the same for the foreigners learning a language, ideally), because native learns it first.
As far as I know (from quora answers and such), deaf (from birth) people "think" in sign language (which is usually their primary language), pictures, sometimes printed words and even lip movements. They just don't have sound in their heads. In the minds of hearing people sounds definitely should play the primary role, when we're talking about thinking in language. There are, of course, non-language thoughts ("pure" concepts and ideas, which probably have a significant visual component to them), but this should be independent of language, if that's what you're talking about. We don't need to learn that.

What I'm saying is that, if when you read a word you immediately understand it, and you know how to pronounce it, you will understand it when you hear it. So there is nothing to do to improve your listening because it is already there.

I think that that's just the basic aural skills (if we're talking of the beginning stages of learning a language), and listening still could (and should) be improved even further.

[Kraut]

olim21 hat geschrieben:
I strongly disagree with that. The spoken language is no more important that the written one. Both are often a variation on the same theme. They are on the same level. They are just too media for the real language in our head: the actual primary language.

One has to read no further.

[reineke]

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