Does Listening Comprehension have a Threshold?

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luke
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Does Listening Comprehension have a Threshold?

Postby luke » Sat Jul 17, 2021 4:33 am

Some researchers say 98% comprehension is necessary for effective extensive reading.

Professor Arguelles did a presentation that included this point: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUqME-RTtIs

Basically, he argues, among other things, that there's a significant difference between 97% and 98% comprehension when it comes to reading extensively. 97% is not quite good enough.

Is there a similar phenomenon with listening?

I.E., is there a point at which things go from "fuzzy understanding" to "almost completely comprehensible"?

I understand there are different situations, different media, different speakers, etc. But in a given context, say, "a situation", or "a particular speaker", or "a particular media source, such as a particular series", do people ultimately experience an "ah ha" moment? Something like, "the fog seemed to slowly clear, but then suddenly, I could understand almost everything"? (for that particular speaker, media source, situation, etc).
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Re: Does Listening Comprehension have a Threshold?

Postby gsbod » Sat Jul 17, 2021 8:22 am

For me, there have been two noticeable thresholds with listening comprehension.

The first threshold was being able to follow the thread of what I was listening to even though I couldn't understand everything. This makes things like watching TV shows a good use of time, and really helps in conversations too. It does depend on your language knowledge but also I think it is a skill in itself, because having reached this threshold in one language it was easier to do so in the next. I don't think I had a single moment of clarity on reaching this point, but it happened over a few days of watching a TV series where there was a noticeable and disproportionate boost to my comprehension.

The next threshold I've only reached in German. This is where I can understand everything, even if I can't understand everything. I think what is happening is that my general language knowledge is so good that my brain handles the gaps in a similar way to when there are gaps in my comprehension of my native language, and just fills things in, in a mostly sensible way, without me even noticing. This isn't about making wild guesses "from context" or anything, it is too accurate for that, and happens automatically. I think this ability does depend on a thorough knowledge of the language, so I haven't achieved it in any other language.
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Re: Does Listening Comprehension have a Threshold?

Postby Iversen » Sat Jul 17, 2021 8:53 am

I would say that there are several tresholds, but it is too simplistic to identify any of them with a certain percentage of known words.

For instance the sound quality is important - it doesn't matter that you know the words if you can't hear them. Background music or competing voices or a bad pronunciation will make it hard to understand anything, so to even demand a proportion of known words you need to assume that yoour source is clearly spoken and devoid of irrelevant noises. And since listening a second time will make it easier for you to catch enough words from the stream you also have to make allowances for repetitions. ANd one thing more: with living conversation partners or films you also have to add the information you get from gestures and mouth movements, but subtracting the impact from irrelevant visual distractions.

But the situation is even more complicated since there is not just one treshold to take into account.

The bottom level requirement is that you can parse the stream of sounds into syllabels, words and phrases (known or unknown, it doesn't matter yet). I have several times written about the notion of 'listening like a bloodhound' - i.e. listening for the simple linguistic structures without caring a bit about the meaning (like a dog that follows a trail without even lifting its nose from the ground).

Above the rock bottom 'parsing' level there is a semantic treshold: some of the words you hear will be known, others not. If you have to think hard to get the meaning then you lose several seconds of the speech, which in itself is harmful to comprehension. So for comprehension 'on the fly' you can only rely on known vocabulary whose meaning (or function) pops up in your mind automatically. You may claim that you have got 'the gist' if you just hear a small number of meaningful words - like for example that somebody is speaking about China if you hear several Chinese names. But that isn't enough: to get a comprehension level that encompasses the whole speech the very least you can demand is that you can understand so many words that they form a continuous fabric - probably with holes, but nevertheless something that covers the whole thing. The 'gist' is just guesswork, not comprehension.

And here there is a new treshold: you can only say that you have basically understood the speech if you know enough of the words to make their meaning/function pop up automatically as mentioned earlier. In theory this may correspond to a percentage of known words, but I would be hesitant to put it as high as 97 or 98 % of the words. You can form the fabric of meaning even if the speaker mentions some institutions names or butterflies or flowers or VIPs which which you aren't familiar, as long as you can at least guess the category to which they belong. For instance I don't know all the names in a ladies' magazine or the sports news, but I can assume that the names refer to persons - and maybe I don't even want to know more. And I may know that Troyes is a town in France, but do I really have to know where it is or whether it has a cathedral?

So above the low level compehension treshold there is one more treshold: the one where you say that you really have understood just about everything, and in principle you then have to know the meaning of each and every word and understand the role of all grammatical element and structures - and maybe even know some facts about Troyes. Maybe that's where the famous 98% known words come into play. In a written text this would basically imply that you only needed to (or felt tempted to) look a few words up per page. With speech it is harder because you don't have time to look anything up so here the necessary percentage may be higher than with written texts.

But hey, maybe you don't need to understand everything to the last iota ...
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Re: Does Listening Comprehension have a Threshold?

Postby s_allard » Sat Jul 17, 2021 11:35 am

luke wrote:Some researchers say 98% comprehension is necessary for effective extensive reading.

Professor Arguelles did a presentation that included this point: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUqME-RTtIs

Basically, he argues, among other things, that there's a significant difference between 97% and 98% comprehension when it comes to reading extensively. 97% is not quite good enough.

Is there a similar phenomenon with listening?

I.E., is there a point at which things go from "fuzzy understanding" to "almost completely comprehensible"?
....


Before attacking a couple of the big questions raised by Iversen in his interesting post, I would like just to touch on how the word comprehension is used. There are two very different concepts at work here. Vocabulary scholars such as Paul Nation speak of word coverage when referring to the number of words known in a text. Typically you need around 98% coverage to say that you fully comprehend a text.

Actual comprehension is a rather fuzzy concept that refers to what the reader or listener perceives relative to what information the writer or speaker has intended to convey. The subject matter may be something specific and require comprehension of things like numbers, names, facts, etc. On the other hand, a literary work will use words in a different way. And remember that the text, spoken or written, can be comprehensible or incomprehensible to some degree as well. After all, texts can be written anywhere between poorly and clearly.

Since comprehension is a difficult concept to study, most vocabulary studies focus on word coverage. The interesting observation here that it is a basically an all or nothing game.You need around 98% word coverage to approach full comprehension, whatever this means. 90% word coverage does not mean 90% comprehension. In fact, 90% comprehension doesn't mean anything and is probably useless anyways.
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Re: Does Listening Comprehension have a Threshold?

Postby elka » Sat Jul 17, 2021 4:23 pm

There have been several ah ha moments in my English studies. Oddly enough, they always corresponded with me moving a level up on the CEFR scale (although I never suddenly progressed one whole level up, it was more like going from B1.1 to B1.2 or from B2.3 to B2.4 - which was for me one level down form C1.1). The biggest ah ha moment was when I was listening to an audiobook (can’t remember which one but I do know that the person had a Scottish accent) and I caught around 90% of the content as I always did but then I tried really hard to concentrate so that I can understand more and be kind of like ‘ahead’ of the speaker where I’m not just barely keeping up with his pace but waiting for new words to be said because I already comprehended everything - and then in the third chapter I managed to focus in a special way that I can’t describe with words and I understood almost everything comfortably (this comfort grew as I further progressed). I agree with gsbod on this being a special skill one learns because I have just recently tried to bring that special kind of attention to a TV show I have been watching in Spanish and I had a eureka moment after a couple of episodes and now I understand exactly what is going on (but definitely not every word).

I don’t think there is a magic number at which you comfortably understand the text, I think it really depends on the specific text you’re reading or the audio you’re listening to. Therefore I also don’t think there is much of a difference between 97% and 98% but again I am currently learning my second foreign language so I don’t have much of a say on this matter.

To finish with a little bit of a digression, I believe that there is one more skill you have to acquire in order to understand an audio or a text and that is the ability to be comfortable when you’re barely understanding everything. This is much harder than paying a lot of attention. Essentially, when you want to understand an audio in a foreign language you have to dive deep into the unknown waters of the target language (beyond level A2 that is). This is in my opinion the hardest part of learning a language and why most people fail as courses can only get you so far.
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Re: Does Listening Comprehension have a Threshold?

Postby sirgregory » Sat Jul 17, 2021 6:02 pm

A related thing I've been wondering about is if progress with listening comprehension is more or less linear or if there's a tipping point with it. In other words, do you just gradually work your way from 35%, 36%, 37%, etc. as you learn new words or is it more about getting the core structures of the language to click? My intuition here is that there is something like a binary switch somewhere in there and it's probably related to fluency with the basic grammatical structures (and very core vocabulary like pronouns, common verbs, prepositions) and being able to understand the most important constructions in real time. Acquisition of vocabulary seems more linear, though I would guess it probably accelerates after the tipping point (assuming such exists).
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Re: Does Listening Comprehension have a Threshold?

Postby Lawyer&Mom » Sat Jul 17, 2021 6:53 pm

It’s hard to even know how much you comprehend, because at a certain point your brain will just decide it understands. Sometimes I’ll watch a show and enjoy it enough that I’ll watch it again with my husband, but with subtitles so he can follow along too. It’s wild to find out how much you missed, when your brain didn’t think it missed much at all. I think this tipping point is when you understand enough to follow 98% percent of the plot, which is *not* the same as following 98% of the dialogue!
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Re: Does Listening Comprehension have a Threshold?

Postby 白田龍 » Sun Jul 18, 2021 12:00 am

I understood nothing at first, and years later I understand almost everthing. But my feeling has been that comprehension improved slowly and continuously. Day by day, I did not consciously see it getting better. It evolved from picking a word here and there to phrases...
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Re: Does Listening Comprehension have a Threshold?

Postby luke » Sun Jul 18, 2021 12:22 am

白田龍 wrote:I understood nothing at first, and years later I understand almost everthing. But my feeling has been that comprehension improved slowly and continuously. Day by day, I did not consciously see it getting better. It evolved from picking a word here and there to phrases...

That reminds me of something I was going to respond the next time someone asks, "do you understand"?

Entiendo casi nada y a veces, mucho menos. :lol:

(I understand almost nothing, and sometimes a lot less).

Which isn't quite true, but it's funny and sounds a little Sancho Panzaesque.
Last edited by luke on Wed Jul 21, 2021 2:51 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Does Listening Comprehension have a Threshold?

Postby Sumisu » Sun Jul 18, 2021 4:47 am

elka wrote:The biggest ah ha moment was when I was listening to an audiobook (can’t remember which one but I do know that the person had a Scottish accent) and I caught around 90% of the content as I always did but then I tried really hard to concentrate so that I can understand more and be kind of like ‘ahead’ of the speaker where I’m not just barely keeping up with his pace but waiting for new words to be said because I already comprehended everything - and then in the third chapter I managed to focus in a special way that I can’t describe with words and I understood almost everything comfortably (this comfort grew as I further progressed).


I don't want to derail this discussion but I just wanted to say that this is one of the best descriptions I've read of how one should practice active listening. I hope to have a similar ah ha moment someday but I think we can all work on trying to be "ahead" of the speaker as you describe, even at lower levels of comprehension, and that this will surely improve our listening comprehension. I'm looking forward to putting this into practice.
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