for - = = ot | Listening strategies— in a ! beg your pardon? in- The i me Tony Ridgway Of | ear This article explores the relationship between written and spoken lan- for guage, and questions whether skills and strategies supposedly used in for reading can be effectively transferred to listening. It suggests that, in lis- the tening, working from the text, or from texts in general, may be a more ich productive way of approaching comprehension than working from the notion of ‘strategies’. tin ae Introduction Strategies have become a bit of a bandwagon in ELT over the past 20 bt years or so, and they have spread from language learning to | communication to reading comprehension. However, one problem about strategies is that there is still some confusion over their definition, which has varied widely, from broad, almost meaningless definitions that ng. | could have almost anything to do with language learning—such as that suggested by Wenden! (1987), for example—to more specific character- izations, as provided by Oxford and Cohen (1992). As the latter point | out, researchers often disagree about whether strategies are conscious or | unconscious. Their own conclusion is that ‘Strategy use involves some ing | degree of conscious awareness on the part of the learner’ (p. 9). In fact in the line between conscious and unconscious is not a fixed one, and ind differs from one individual to another, because of automatization. If the they are repeated often enough, operations which once cost us conscious ini- effort are later performed automatically and unconsciously—think, for example, of the effort we made as children puzzling out new words, which we now process automatically. So if we name a particular process a ‘strategy’, we may find that in one individual it is conscious, and in another it has become automatized, and therefore too rapid to enter | consciousness. However, as teachers we need to concentrate on the | conscious, because as Oxford and Cohen (ibid.: 12) point out, ‘If strategies are unconsciously and automatically used, then explicit strategy training makes little or no sense.” Once we have decided what strategies are, and whether they have | validity as psychological entities, we come up against a second problematic question—how useful are they in pedagogic practice? Once we have discovered that ‘predicting’, say, is a strategy; is it useful to then go and teach it to our students? Swan (1985: 8) displays a healthy scepticism here: «it is often taken for granted that language learners cannot transfer communication skills from their mother tongues, and that these must be taught anew if learners are to solve the ‘problem of code and context ELT Journal Volume 54/2 April 2000 © Oxford University Press 2000 179The impossibility of direct listening strategies The importance of practice ‘Authentic’ texts for the FL learner 180 correlation which lies at the heart of the communicative ability (Widdowson 1978) ° Scepticism is also well-placed when it comes to applying the comprehension strategies of reading to listening (Field 1998). If we Want to count going to the cinema as an indirect strategy to improve listening, then well and good; but if direct strategies are conscious—and if they are not, there is no point in teaching them—there is not enough cognitive knowledge to employ them during most kinds of listening, Listening and putting into operation a conscious strategy can be seen as performing two tasks simultaneously. This can be done, but as Eysenck and Keane point out: ‘Two tasks are performed well together when they are dissimilar, when they are relatively easy and when they are well-practised, In contrast, the worst levels of performance occur when two tasks are highly similar, rather difficult, and have been practised very little. (1995: 121) Listening in a foreign language is a task at a high level of difficulty in cognitive terms, and therefore demands full attention. In this context it seems odd that in some experiments on listening strategies (e.g, Vandergrift 1997) subjects are stopped during the listening process and asked what they are thinking about! One danger with a strategy-based approach to the receptive skills is that it may depreciate the value of practice. Field (1998) remarks: ‘For 15 years, it has been axiomatic that more reading does not necessarily mean better reading.’ This could only possibly be the case if the materials used were hopelessly inappropriate. In the same issue of the ELT Journal (p.70) Carolyn Walker comments on the new version of Nuttall’s Teaching Reading Skills in a Foreign Language, noting that ‘A marked change from the first edition is the repositioning of the chapter on extensive reading ... reflecting the current acknowledgement of the key role which extensive reading of easy material plays in language development and the acquisition of reading skills’. Certainly the current emphasis on automatization of word recognition and its vital role in an interactive-compensatory model of reading would tend to contradict this supposed axiom. A study by Robb and Susser (1989) indicated that a group which was explicitly trained in reading strategies did less well than one which only did reading in reading lessons. Again, Walker points out, quoting from Nuttall, that ‘the basic answer to learning to read is “to read and read” ’ (p. 40), a point which is taken up later in the chapter on the ‘teacher as reader’, in which we are reminded that reading is ‘caught not taught’, Another assumption which is widely made these days is that there is something out there which we are all aware of and all approve of called ‘authentic'—surely a cousin of ‘reality’, in Nabokov's famous character- Tony Ridgway Differences between written and spoken text ization of it as ‘one of the few words that means nothing unless it is in inverted commas’. Strategies are meant to compensate for the difference between the learner's level of comprehension and this goal of authenticity. But what is an ‘authentic’ situation for an FL learner—a native-native interaction? Native speakers all attempt to adjust their speech for the benefit of foreigners whose level of understanding may be limited, yet according to some criteria which are currently applied this would be considered inauthentic. If we revert to the principle of automatization, and the concept that reading or listening are good things in themselves, then reading or listening to a text with a high degree of comprehension will be more profitable than reading or listening to a text of which one understands little. In other words, one is practising comprehension, not incomprehension. Grading texts is problematic, and the difficulty of a given text will depend to a great extent on the learner (Anderson and Lynch: 80), but the difficulty in taking a generalized approach to grading texts should not obscure the fact that for any given listener, some texts will be more difficult than others. This brings us on to the most important point about strategies as a concept applied to reading and listening, which is that they are essentially different because of the different nature of written and spoken text, so that caution is needed when transferring this concept from one skill to another. As spoken text is only present in time, and not in space as well, like written text, many strategies—such as breaking down a word into its component parts, looking a word up in the dictionary, or guessing the meaning of a word from its context—are either less available, or not available at all. Listening places a far greater load on the memory, as there is no option of going back to previous text in order to check or revise comprehension. In listening we do not have the option of focusing our attention on something aside from the main argument of the text, and then returning to the thread later, as one does in reading. With our attention focused on the spoken text, there is no time or mental capacity for other conscious operations. What happens, of course, is that in real situations our attention wanders on and off the text, or we listen with ‘half an ear’. One process that could be called a strategy in listening is that of controlling the allocation of our attention to the parts that are most important for our purpose. This is a common practice when we are listening out for flight departure announcements in airports, for example, or simply waiting for a particular news item on the radio. A less realistic exercise is that of making inferences from texts in order to perform tasks in examinations where often two listenings.of a recorded monologue are required in order to get from Step A (comprehending the text) to Step B (making the correct inference and performing the task). This is essentially an artificial task without any particularly useful counterpart in the real world—another example of the misapplication of a valid reading process to listening, to the point where it becomes inauthentic as a task type, however ‘authentic’ it may be asa text. Listening strategies—I beg your pardon? 181182 = The essential unit in reading comprehension is the word, clearly separated as it is from other words on the page. There is no such separation of words in the unbroken flow of speech (the ‘segmentation problem’), and word identification is further complicated by the variability of phonemes in different environments (the ‘non-invariance problem'—see Eysenck and Keane: 276) and when spoken by different individuals. All this means that word recognition is a complex listening skill in itself, before one even begins to consider higher-level skills that may also be applicable to reading, Native speakers only recognize individual words which have been spliced out of a text, approximately half the time, (Lieberman 1963), so word comprehension must be far more dependent on co-text and context in listening than it is in reading. Top-down processes must play a more important part in (fluent) listening than in reading. This would account in part for many of the differences between spoken and written text. We are all familiar with the phenomenon of hearing a stretch of spoken text in our own language and finding it totally incomprehensible until clues in the co-text or context begin to make it more transparent, So topics must be clearly set, frequent repetition or paraphrase may be necessary, and monitoring for comprehension and back-channel behaviour are important elements of the conversational event—think how quickly most people recognize that the listener does not understand what they are talking about. Listening is typically one side of a co- operative activity. ‘There is an over-reliance on recorded texts in the lower-level language classroom. Many of the ‘strategies’ we apply in listening are associated with visual clues—watching body language and lip-reading. Listening without visual clues is something we do for a relatively small proportion of our listening time. Much spoken interaction is more interpersonal in nature, whereas written texts tend to be more ideational. In inter. personal interactions, ‘comprehension’ is more concerned with giving an appropriate phatic response than with understanding the ideational content, and although functional approaches to language teaching Tecognize this, recorded texts tend to concentrate on comprehension of ideational content, because most task-types are oriented in this way (the open dialogue being a notable exception). Conclusion—skills and strategies—a useful approach? Prosodic features are an important aid to comprehension, and differ from one language to another. So what does all this add up to? I don’t think we can agree with Field that ‘the subskills of listening closely parallel those of reading’. As a reading specialist I am somewhat sceptical of a strategy-based approach even to reading. For one thing, it is very difficult to define strategies or subskills, or to differentiate them in any empirically significant way. Rost (1993) produces a wealth of evidence that ‘.. .a reliable and valid diagnosis of reading profiles is not Possible’ (p. 79). In other words, repeated attempts by a number of Tesearchers have failed to isolate any proof that subskills of reading Tony Ridgway Practical consequences ion exist. Subjects’ reading comprehension scores show a cemaably high degree of correlation between supposedly different subskills, to the extent that it is not possible to pick out a particular subject who has problems with guessing words from context, for example. All the research has been able to do is to isolate a global rating for comprehension, or at most diferentil between two variables—in ferencing and vocabulary—though even this distinction is not well- established. Studies which show differences in strategy use between ‘effective’ and ‘ineffective’ comprehenders (e.g, O'Malley, Chamot, ani Kipper 1989) beg the question as to whether particular strategies are more cognitively appropriate than others at different levels of difficu y for a particular listener, or indeed whether motivation is signifcan factor here, Robb and Susser’s results, referred to above, hough tentative, provide further cause for. scepticism. ‘Because of the differences between the two skills highlighted here, it seems that wit one’s attention focused on the activity of listening it is even less likely that listening can meaningfully be broken down into a number o} component subskills and strategies, unless these are unconscious, in which case how can they be taught? The point here is not so much tha skis and strategies don’t exist, but that since they cannot. be differentiated empirically, and since practice appears to be at a good a way of developing them as explicit training, they are no eee concepts for developing a methodological approach in the recep\ skills, particularly in listening, i a have just done, we can By looking at the nature of spoken text, as we a up with recommendations for listening classes, and these recommendations from a text-based approach have several advantages over a strategies-based approach: 1 Text is real, something one can get to grips with. Strategies are concepts of presumably varying validity. 2 Listening is the engagement of the listener with the text. When this engagement is complete, there is no cognitive capacity remaining for conscious strategies to operate. is flexi be adjusted according to 3 A text-based approach is flexible, and can each particular listener-text interface. A strategy-based approach relies on a fixed armoury of supposed cognitive processes. i tion where the teacher is innately (e.g, guessing, predicting), making the process redundant ant the teacher appear patronizing. ‘The recommendations based on a text-based approach are: i i ing. The more listening the better, "Thr the subst wil! ake care of themosves as they become automatized. 183 Listening strategies—I beg your pardon?184 2 Whilst guessing skills are useful, learners learn the skills of listenin, Comprehension from what is comprehensible to them. They need te Practise listening comprehension, not listening incomprehension (automatization again). Graded texts, not necessarily authentic, wil be the fastest way forward for them. They will probably get plenty of Practice in listening to texts which are largely incomprehensible to them anyway. 3 Teachers do not need to get too hung up on syntax in listening skills lessons. In listening, as in reading (see Ridgway 1994) syntactic cues are often overshadowed by semantic and pragmatic cues. Of course listening is an important component of the grammar lesson, but not vice versa. 4 Teaching listening strategies such as making inferences is a waste of time. There is no cognitive space for employing such strategies in real- time listening, Hither the inference is made or it isn’t, There can be no going back to make inferences as we do in reading—the next part of the text is already being processed. 5 Intensive listening activities are excellent practice in coping with aspects of spoken text, such as the difficulty of word recognition. 6 At lower levels, the teacher should not forget that lip-teading and body language are important aids to comprehension. Over-reliance on audio material means one must use easier texts or make comprehen- sion more difficult. It also practises a type of listening which in real life does not happen for a very large proportion of the time. 7 Conversation or other interactive speech situations are great ways to practise listening comprehension and to get away from texts that are ideational in character. Anderson and Lynch (1988: 121-2) mention six listening strategies, of which four involve speaking. 8 Itis important to learn the prosody of a new language. Field also has some good suggestions for activities here. In conclusion, there are good strategies for listening in the type of situation where perhaps most listening takes place—verbal interaction — but these are more like communication strategies than comprehension strategies, such as negotiating meaning, or expressing incomprehension, and they are not processes which occur during listening. A good example of such a ‘listening strategy’ is the phrase ‘I beg your pardon?’ Received September 1999 Tony Ridgway se Notes 1‘... strategies will be used to refer to language earning behaviours which contribute directly to earning —what learners do to control and/or trans- form incoming knowledge about the language (e.g, guessing from context, outlining a reading); to retrieve and use this knowledge (e.g. practice strategies): and to regulate learning (noting if one understands, deciding to pay attention to one’s pronunciation). It will also refer to language learning behaviours that contribute indirectly to learning —how learners use their limited linguistic repertoire to communicate (e.g. describing or circumlocuting when they do not know a word, using gestures) and what they do to create opportunities to learn and use the language (going to movies, making friends). [Italics are Wenden’s] 2 Interestingly, the Romans didn’t do this, making the decipherment of Roman inscriptions far more difficult than the Latin with which most of us are familiar, in which the words have been considerately separated for us—a practice begun by early medie- val Irish scribes. 3 The other two involve background knowledge. References Anderson, A. and A. Lynch. 1988. Listening. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Eysenck, M. W. and M. T. Keane. 1995. Cognitive ‘Psychology: A Student’s Handbook. (3rd edn.) ‘Hove: Psychology Press. Field, J. 1998. ‘Skills and strategies: towards a new methodology for listening’. ELT Journal 52/2: 110-8. Lieberman, P. 1963. ‘Some effects of semantic and grammatical context on the production and perception of speech’. Language and Speech 6: 172-87. Nuttall, C, 1996. Teaching Reading Skills in a Foreign Language (2nd edn.). Oxford: Heine- mann. Listening strategies—I beg your pardon? O'Malley, J., A. Chamot, and L. Kiipper. 1989. ‘Listening comprehension strategies in second language acquisition’. Applied Linguistics 10/4: 418-37. Oxford, R. and A. Cohen. 1992. ‘Language learning strategies: Crucial issues of concept and classification’. Applied Language Learning 3/1 and 3/2: 1-35. Ridgway, A. J. 1994. ‘Reading theory and foreign language reading comprehension’. Reading in a Foreign Language 10/2: 55-76. Robb, T. N. and B. Susser. 1989. ‘Extensive reading vs skills building in an EFL context’ Reading in a Foreign Language 5/2: 239-52. Rost, D. H. 1993. ‘Assessing different components of reading comprehension: Fact or fiction?” Language Testing 10/1. Swan, M. 1985. ‘A critical look at the commu- nicative approach (1)’. ELT Journal 39/1: 2-12. Vandergrift, L. 1997. ‘The comprehension strate- gies of second language (French) listeners: A descriptive study’. Foreign Language Annals 30/3: 387-409. Walker, C. 1998. Review of Nuttall (1996) in ELT Journal 52/2: 169-73. Wenden, A. 1987. ‘Conceptual background and utility’ in A. Wenden and J. Rubin. Learner Strategies in Language Learning. London: Prentice Hall. ‘Widdowson, H. G. 1978. Teaching Language as Communication. Oxford: Oxford University Press. The author Tony Ridgway is Head of TEFL at the Queen's University of Belfast, where he teaches on the MA in English Language Teaching. He has a PhD in ‘Applied Linguistics from the University of Seville. His interests include foreign language reading comprehension, the role of background knowledge, and pragmatics. Email: 185Introduction Some questionable assumptions Assumption 1: more equals better 186 ‘Not waving but drowning a reply to Tony Ridgway John Field Strategic approaches to second-language skills acquisition offer an easy target, given the inconclusive nature of much of the research in this area, 4 certain amount of terminological confusion, and the haphazard taxo. nomies that have been proposed. But it is unfair to blame the message for the package in which it comes, and Tony Ridgway is hasty in dismissing the concept of strategy instruction as readily as he does. He is also prone to overlook the ideas of those (among them, myself) who adopt a more pragmatic task-driven approach to the issue. And, while | endorse the points that he makes about the nature ofthe listening skill, the conclusions that | draw in respect of the L2 listener are very different from his. In this article, I question some of the assumptions which underlie Ridgway’s thinking attempt some definitions, respond to the main arguments that Ridgway puts forward, and examine the alternative which he proposes, Underlying Ridgway's paper are three large assumptions. In drawing attention to their shortcomings, I trace a rationale for the very approaches which Ridgway rejects. When I wrote (1998) that ‘more reading does not necessarily mean better reading’, I assumed that nowadays the proposition was uncontroversial. It is indisputable that many readers and listeners do indeed improve with practice: increased exposure to the target language leads to vocabulary development and heightened language awareness as well as providing greater experience in applying the skills. But, as every teacher can testify, there are some weak readers and many more weak listeners who simply do not improve. Their failure to puzzle out meanings at an early stage results in a loss of confidence. When a teacher (following the kind of graded approach advocated by Ridgway) confronts them with texts of ever-increasing complexity, these learners simply withdraw their co-operation. They give up. I recognize the value of extensive reading schemes; but, in proposing them as a solution to the problems of L2 readers, Ridgway is confounding two different issues. He wants readers to have accessible and interesting texts because such texts give rise to what could be termed content motivation: the wish to read more. But he ignores a different kind of motivation—let’s call it process motivation—which reflects faith in one’s ability to apply a skill competently, or at least ELT Journal Volume 54/2 April 2000 © Oxford University Press 2000 | Assumption 2: skills and strategies are transferred automatically from Lt competently enough to meet the demands of a particular task. If a reader lacks this faith, then every new text, however interesting, will pose a threat rather than a pleasure. What we need—and what a skills approach aims to provide—is a principled way of tackling readers’ processing problems at local and at text level, so that reading becomes easier and thus more enjoyable. By tackling the process of reading (particularly, by diagnosing what is going wrong with it) we enable readers to achieve precisely the greater automaticity that Ridgway argues for.' ‘The issue of process is even more important for second-language listeners than for second-language readers. At the very least, an L2 reader can tackle a text like a jigsaw puzzle, seeking pieces that fit together. A listener who has difficulties in identifying words in connected speech has no key at all to unlock the text, no matter how stimulating its content. Offering this listener more listening passages will simply add to their sense of failure. Hence the case for a remedial approach (Field 1998) where we determine which sub-skills are giving rise to problems of understanding, then devise micro-exercises to practise them. Ridgway does not make clear whether this transfer of skills takes place at the outset of learning a new language or only once a basic foundation of lexis and syntax has been laid. A ‘threshold’ theory of second- language reading (Alderson 1984) holds that learners need to achieve a certain level of linguistic knowledge before they are able to employ the kind of natural reading process which is available to them in their native language. I have some reservations about the hypothesis, but let us assume that it can be extended to listening. The question remains: how do learners manage to communicate during the longish period before they reach the knowledge threshold? They must have to adopt a different, more strategic, type of listening from that which they use in their first language. Thus, even on this ‘strong’ transfer hypothesis, there must be a period during which learners have need of strategies and might benefit from strategy training, It could be argued, of course, that no specific strategy training is needed because the appropriate compensatory strategies are already available in L1. When two native-speakers talk in a noisy street or bar, they supply by guesswork the parts of their conversation that are inaudible. Could this technique not be transferred automatically to a second- language context? ‘The premise fails to take account of individual learning styles. Second- language listeners appear to fall into two distinct groups. The first are risk-takers who are prepared to form hypotheses as to meaning even where they have recognized little of the signal. 'The second are risk- avoiders who demand a large amount of hard bottom-up evidence before forming conclusions as to overall meaning. Neither group reacts in the way they would to first-language problems deriving from a noisy ‘Not waving but drowning’: a reply to Tony Ridgway 187| Assumption 3: simpler language leads inevitably to greater understanding Some grey areas | 188 environment. Risk-takers tend to cling obdurately to the hypotheses they have formed instead of checking them carefully against what comes next. Risk-avoiders feel inhibited by their inadequate recognition skills and are reluctant to make inferences. One of the purposes of the kind of strategy training I advocate is to encourage risk-avoiders to take more risks and to encourage risk-takers to proceed more cautiously. It might seem obvious that by simplifying a listening text one enhances understanding. But this need not be the case. Firstly, what is gained by syntactic simplification at sentence level (for example, the substitution of simple for complex sentences) is often lost in terms of coherence and cohesion at text level. Simplification can also result in much greater density of information—particularly as scripted texts often omit the kinds of rephrasing and repetition which abound in authentic ones, Weak coherence/cohesion and closely-packed information are proble- matic enough for the second-language reader. They pose even greater problems for the listener, given that (as Ridgway points out) listening takes place under pressure of time and without the opportunity of checking back. Secondly, the simplification assumption confuses knowledge of a word or grammatical structure with the ability to recognize it. A recent piece ofresearch (Field unpublished) showed a large percentage of learners at Intermediate level failing to recognize known and frequent words when they occurred in connected speech. Ridgway admits the recognition problem, quoting findings for first-language listeners, but does not draw any implications for his own arguments. He mistakes the true nature of second-language listening if he believes that it can take place without a considerable amount of what he terms ‘listening incomprehension’. Even with graded texts, there will be sections that are not understood; second-language listeners at most levels depend upon compensatory strategies to fill in blanks. Ridgway has a point when he refers to inconsistencies in the strategies literature—though it is worth stressing that differences of interpretation and terminology do not invalidate a theory. There has been some disagreement as to what a strategy is, while catch-all lists such as Oxford’s (1990) have stretched the notion of ‘strategy’ about as far as it can go. There has been discussion of the extent to which a strategy has to be ‘conscious’ (Faerch et al. 1983: 35-6, Cohen 1998: 10-11). Many who have written on communication strategies focus exclusively on strategies of production (especially spoken production) and fail to extend their remarks to include receptive strategies. Some writers use the terms ‘skill and ‘strategy’ very loosely or interchangeably without defining them. Others confiate communication and learning strategies without recog- nizing that they are different in form and purpose. Ironically, Ridgway’s ‘own piece falls into the last two traps. Here are some attempts to clear up areas of confusion. John Field ‘Strategy’ defined. Cohen defines strategies in terms of ‘action taken to enhance the learning or use of a second or foreign language, through the storage, retention, recall and application of information about that language’ (1998: 4). This seems a good, if general, point of departure, and rather better than the Wenden definition quoted by Ridgway, which relates to learning strategies rather than to strategies as a whole. Strategy types. Note that Cohen specifies two classes of strategy: learning strategies and strategies of use (ic. communication strategies). This typology was recognized early on by Faerch and Kasper (1983: 2): learning strategies contribute to the development of [interlanguage] systems, whereas communication strategies are used by a speaker when faced with some difficulty due to his communicative ends outrunning his communicative means. ‘The classification is useful because it distinguishes two different motivations on the part of the learner and two different interactions between working and long-term memory. Communication strategies represent @ response to an immediate problem, whereas learning strategies relate to the need to store and retrieve linguistic information long-term. Granted, the use of a communication strategy may at times lead to learning, but this will by no means always be the case.” As Iearning strategies assist the acquisition of form, so communication strategies are associated with the development of fluency. It is the latter which provide the basis for a principled approach to strategy instruction in the language skills in general and listening in particular. When Ridgway mocks fringe learning strategies such as ‘going to the cinema’, he rather misses the target. Skills and strategies. We should make a clear distinction between the terms ‘skill’ and ‘strategy’, which Ridgway uses interchangeably. I have suggested (1998) that in listening we employ ‘skill’ (or ‘subskill’) to refer to one of a set of aptitudes which the first-language listener possesses and which the second-language listener aims to acquire. We can then reserve the term ‘(communication) strategy’ for those techniques which 12 listeners employ in order to compensate for their less than complete knowledge of the syntax and vocabulary of the target language. Obviously there are occasions where the two overlap; but the distinction is a useful one because of the implications for methodology. Ridgway’s discussion should surely have distinguished between: 1 a skills-based approach to listening, consisting of either teaching the subskills of listening as part of a structured programme of micro- listening exercises or determining how and why understanding breaks down, then providing remedial practice in the subskills involved. 2. a strategic approach, based upon the recognition that much second- Tanguage listening is dependent upon the learner's ability to compensate for gaps in understanding. ‘Not waving but drowning’: a reply to Tony Ridgway 189| | { 190 . _ Ridgway’s Ridgway expresses a number of reservations about skills- and arguments based approaches. Some of his points, I fully accept: aa the major differences between the listening and reading processes the interactive nature of much listening the doubtful value of teaching certain strategies individually though u would cod very different conclusions to his, Other remarks (especially on authenticity and the role of workin; (especialy ona 1g memory) should not ‘Authenticity has been over-valued’ Ridgway rather misses the point when he dismisses the use of authentic materials as a fad.’ There are two reasons for choosing such materials in listening. The first is that they are usually unscripted—and thus embod; the rhythms and pause patterns of natural speech, as well as providing examples of conversational features such as hesitations, repetitions, and false starts. The argument here is that learners need to be exposed to the true rhythms of the target language rather than encountering onl artificial variants produced by actors reading aloud from a script in a studio. The second virtue of authentic materials is that they are ungraded. This means that learners gain practice in dealing with the kind of situation that occurs in real life, where they cannot expect to recognize all that is said, and need to compensate by inferring meaning, ‘Problems of “decoding” prevent learners from applying strategies’ Ridgvay offers an northedox acount of working neton eget that low-level learners have to focus so much attention upon ‘decoding? that they have insufficient memory capacity left to engage in listening strategies. This is inconsistent with interactive-compensatory theory (Stanovich 1980), which Ridgway himself mentions and which many commentators have applied to second language reading. The theory envisages ‘a trade-off between the amount of information we obtain (‘bottom-up’) through the words of a text and the extent to which we have to draw (‘top-down’) upon contextual evidence. When decoding is difficult (because a text is partly illegible or because a reader has word- recognition problems), the reader compensates by relying upon context in a way that can assuredly be described as ‘strategic’. There is no suggestion here that decoding problems prevent strategy use. Far from it: strategy use replaces decoding» The interactive-compensatory hypothesis is even more pertinent to listening than to reading because of the greater likelihood of gaps in what is understood. The cause may be limited knowledge of L2 or limited listening skills, or both; but the outcome is that the listener relies heavily upon strategic techniques to supply missing pieces of text. Ridgway himself recognizes the phenomenon (‘word comprehension must be far more dependent on co-text and context in listening than in reading’). The major difference between us seems to lie in his reluctance to use the term ‘strategy’ for this trade-off process. John Field “The subskills approach to reading cannot be extended to listening because the listening process is very different’ Ridgway draws attention to the on-line nature of listening and the extent to which listeners are dependent upon an abstract mental model of the text rather than hard evidence on the page. But there is no reason why these characteristics should make a skills approach to listening untenable: it simply demands a different set of subskills to those which feature in reading, and different exercise types based primarily upon dictation. Here, a comment of mine may have been misinterpreted. In making a case (1998) for a skills approach to listening, I suggested that the subskills of listening parallel those of reading—not that they are the same. My point was that similar levels of processing apply. For example, the decoding of word-shapes in reading is paralleled in listening by the (very different) subskill of word segmentation. Incidentally, although Ridgway makes much of the differences between the two skills, he is prone to assume that certain concepts from reading (extensive exposure, decoding, automatization, the effects of simplifying texts) can be extended without qualification to listening. One also notes that the comments and findings which he cites in support of his arguments are mainly drawn from reading. Surely some dangerous assumptions are being made here of exactly the kind that Ridgway rightly warns against. ‘Real-life listening is often interactive’ Ridgway makes an important point here; but it is difficult to see why interactive listening situations are incompatible with a strategy-based approach to teaching the skill. Indeed, Rost’s list of listening strategies (1990: 197) was formulated precisely with such situations in mind. Compensatory strategies can be applied to a five-second utterance just as much as to a three-minute text. Ridgway argues that, in an interactive context, a listener could simply appeal for help. It is not always as easy as that—especially in a conversation involving more than two people. And Ridgway’s formula (‘beg your pardon’) is itself a type of communication strategy—a repair technique to be used when understanding breaks down. Repair strategies should certainly be included in a strategy programme. As well as formulae (Sorry? What was that? I didn’t quite catch that.), one might teach repair techniques (‘repeat up to the point where under- standing broke down’), stalling tactics (Really?), and ways of giving up politely on the message. "We cannot agree on a definitive list of subskills and strategies’ ‘Again, Ridgway has a point. In teaching reading, the processes which we term ‘subskills’ are very miscellaneous, as were the listening subskills identified by Richards (1983). We should beware of treating these skills lists like a product syllabus (Rost 1990: 151) and working through the items regardless of their relative importance. One way of focusing our aims more clearly is to reclassify ‘subskills’ into techniques such as skimming and scanning, discourse skills (co-reference, markers) and ‘Not waving but drowning’: a reply to Tony Ridgway 191192 types of reading (reading for gist, pl p q plot, detail, ete.). Another, driven, solution (Orquhart and Weir 1998) isto categorize cach tenn, f the depth of reading or listening it demands; introduce appropriate subskills as required. A third possibility, already mont Xo interpret breakdowns of understanding in tems ofthe failure of cular subskills, th ide intensi i Particular subskill, then provide intensive practice in the subskil So far as strategies are concerned, i , the situation has not been hel the tendency of some commentators (even O'Malley and Chamot 198) to conflate communication and lamin strategies. Particularly unforte categorization (1990) of compensatio: ies as a sub-type of learning strate; Ps ist i Sater substype of Ie By. Oxford’s list includes a numb ‘sate! which ae sxtcemely peripheral Cusing laughter) ater ny Tea ess (‘paying attention’) or nebulously toue any Fearing process (peying stent sly touchy-feely : iy’, ‘making positi , i Seepticism is understandable. ens) Here Ridgway's Srrategy training may not produce results’ 0 Suppor this asetion, Ridgway quotes research by Robb and Susser ) fat greater progress was achieved following an extensive readin, pes anjeea i x ig programme than by those subj subskills teaching. The study is ice, since the recearchers ; : ly is an odd choice, since th admit that their findings ma i “mention the t y not be conclusive: they menti unsatisfactory ‘nature of the subskills material that was weed. bi tac races in time spent reading. They also specifically suggest (p.245) greater suctess of the extensive materials may indicate that their subjects were at a stage of linguistic iguistic development i 4 more important role than subskil Pn Where traces played Nevertheless, Ridgway here touches upon what is perhaps the most Grusial issue in the discussion: can strategies (specifically, receptive Naat be taught? Some commentators (Chamot 1995, lieve that they can and they have ar; 1 1 gued for approach listening based upon a type of strategy training developed at ersity of Georgetown, where strategies are practised jn expiity (ie. with the aims of the exercise explained raeae 18). However, there is insufficient evidence as yet that this succeeds. Rubin (1994; 213-15) and Ch "i&-24) mention eran u : amot (1995: 18-24) mention tw pieces of research which involved explicit training i eae pieces it trainin, listening strategies; of thes et ambiguous finding, liste tegies; e, only two produced unambis i indicating an improvement in jx partyin ie r performance. The problem li i difficulty of establishin, istenng kills have nee ig through tests that listening skills have i But, more importantly, even wh Become better tung b ; ere learners have become be i the target strategy, it seems that the employing et strategy, it \ey may not be capable of employing i appropriately in relation to a particular listening text or of combining it cessfully with other strategies that th is rai sues with oer tea that they have encountered. This raises However, it does not imy i However, ply that the whole idea of strategy training i ainin; invalid. A compensatory strategy represents a response sometecs John Field Ridgway’s solution individual, to an immediate problem of communication, and the conclusion I draw is that it is best practised by modelling the problem. [On the other hand, I continue to maintain that subskills, which form part of the general process of listening, can profitably be practised singly.] An alternative to working through a check-list of strategies is to guide learners in their handling of a particular text, One very general procedure might be: 1 Learners listen to part of the text and write down the words they understand. In pairs, learners use the words to form hypotheses as to overall meaning. 2 Learners listen again, write down more words, check their hypotheses. 3 Learners share their hypotheses with the class as a whole. 4 The class listens again and discusses whose hypothesis appears to be the most accurate. ‘This kind of training models strategy use in relation to actual problems of understanding. It demonstrates to learners the true nature of second- language listening—making it plain that incomplete understanding is the norm, and not a sign of inadequacy. It also allows for individual variation: risk-avoiders are required to make guesses, risk-takers to check their guesses more carefully. What alternative does Ridgway propose to skills- and strategy-based instruction? He argues for what he terms a ‘text-based’ approach. This ‘would seem to involve grading listening and reading materials according to level of difficulty—and presumably scripting the materials to ensure that difficulty level is consistent. One cannot escape the feeling that we have been here before. Few practitioners would deny a role for scripted and simplified materials at lower levels of English. It might then appear an obvious step to grade fa class’s materials so that they progress from ‘easy’ to ‘difficult’. Until, that is, one confronts the issue of what makes one text harder to understand than another. The task is problematic enough with reading where we can no longer pretend that the key lies in lexis and syntax alone, It is even more so with a listening text, where factors contributing to difficulty include number of speakers, speech rate, accent, and source of recording.® My point is not that we should abandon the use of simplified materials, but simply that it is impossible to determine text difficulty at any but the grossest level. If we adopt an approach based upon the supposition that we can fine-tune text difficulty so as to provide learners with gradually increasing challenges, then our teaching will very quickly run into the sands of the many variables involved. “There is a widely-recognized alternative, of course, which is to grade the difficulty of the task that is set rather than that of the text. Anderson and Lynch's sensitive discussion of difficulty in listening (1988: 80-96) 193 ‘Not waving but drowning’ a reply to Tony Ridgwayunderstanding? explores this possibility, though it accepts that the grading of tasks can itself prove a complex matter. Task-grading certainly provides an answer to Ridgway's resistance to the use of authentic materials at lower levels. Is it a more practical proposition to shape a task to reflect what learners «are capable of, or to edit a text to eliminate all potential problems of programmes for listening similar to extensive reading schemes. The notion of ‘extensive listening’ has had an airing recently, but itis going to need careful thought. How is one to deal with the many learners who (whatever their knowledge of grammar or vocabulary) experience difficulty in recognizing words in connected speech? One answer is to supply them with tapescripts; but this has the unfortunate consequence of creating a ‘divided attention’ situation (Norman and Bobrow 1975). If limited working memory capacity forces a learner to choose between reading and listening, the result will probably be a strong attention bias, towards the former, since it affords checkable information in a tangible | form. No harm in this—but it means that the listening experience will | | | | A supplementary proposal made by Ridgway is that we should develop | | constitute little more than cued word recognition. | One might perhaps choose more demanding material in the form of | videotapes with L1 subtitles. Another option is to hold back the extensive programme until learners have been adequately prepared for | independent listening by means of instruction in compensatory strategies and in skills such as lexical segmentation. On this analysis, | extensive listening is not , as Ridgway implies, an alternative to strategy | training; Conclusion isa natural development of it. ‘The weakness of Ridgway’s position is that it focuses upon the product of listening and ignores the process. Only if we manage to tap in to how our learners are listening will we be able to assist them to listen more effectively. It was precisely because of the limitations of a product-based approach and because of our inability to assess text difficulty that we turned to skills- and strategy-based instruction. They may have their faults—Ridgway hints at two major areas of concern in the teachability of strategies and the danger that teachers will work through check-lists of skills without regard to learner needs. But they are the best and most learner-centred option we have. Let us improve the lifebelts rather than relegate our swimmers to the paddling pool. Received September 1999 Notes 1 Incidentally, a skills approach also aims to equip the reader with techniques for handling a range of types of reading (see Urquhart et al. 1998), whereas many reading schemes focus solely on reading for pleasure and hence on ‘medium- depth’ reading—neither as deep as reading a safety instruction nor as shallow as reading a TV | schedule. 194 John Field 2 Faerch and Kasper recognize that a communica tion strategy may sometimes become incorporated into a learner's interlanguage. Indeed, it may even become automatized to the point where (if the syntax or vocabulary involved is only partially accurate) it could be regarded as evidence of fossilization 3 L recognize that my distinction between skills and strategies differs from that made by other com- ‘mentators. McDonough (1995) represents strate- ‘gies as conscious techniques and skills as auto- ‘matized versions of them which develop later in. the learning process. This formulation appears to fit productive strategies rather better than recep- tive ones. It does not seem to allow for those compensatory strategies in listening which become less relevant as language knowledge and listening competence increase, 4 Tdefine authentic materials as those which are not specially designed or modified for the language learner. They cover a range of formality—from interviews to informal conversations in pubs. Some (news reports) might be scripted; most would not. § Ridgway's allusion to working memory capacity relates to a second and very different use of context, which is to enrich meaning. Skilled readers (in ELT terms, more advanced ones) decode words with a high degree of automaticity; this releases memory capacity, enabling them to make greater use of context when constructing higher-level meaning. Stanovich explicitly distin- guishes this use of top-down information by skilled readers from the compensatory use made of context by less-skilled readers. 6 For this particular skill, dependent as it is upon constructing mental representations and storing them in long-term memory, I suggest that the most important considerations’ might well be text length, the density and complexity of the ideas, and text ‘transparency’, ie. the clarity with which ideas are expressed, and the degree of repetition and rephrasing. References Alderson, J. C. 1984. ‘Reading in a foreign language: a reading problem or a language problem? in J. C. Alderson and A. Urquhart (eds.). Reading in a Foreign Language. London: Longman, Anderson, A. and T. Lynch, 1988. Listening. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chamot, A. U. 1995. ‘Learning strategies and listening comprehension’ in D. J. Mendelsohn and J. Rubin (eds.). A Guide for the Teaching of Second Language Listening. San Diego: Dominie Press. Cohen, A. 1998. Strategies in Learning and Using a Second Language. Harlow: Longman. Faereh, C. and G. Kasper. 1983. ‘Plans and strategies in foreign language communication’ in C. Faerch and G. Kasper (eds.). Strategies in Interlanguage Communication. Harlow: Long- man. Field, J. 1998. ‘Skills and strategies: towards a new methodology for listening’. ELT Journal 52/2. Mendelsohn, D. J. 1994. Learning to Listen. San Diego: Dominie Press. McDonough, S. H. 1995. Strategy and Skill in Learning a Foreign Language. London: Arnold. Norman, D. A. and D. G. Bobrow. 1975. ‘On data- limited and resource-limited processes’. Cogni- tive Psychology 7. OMalley, J. M. and A. U. Chamot. 1990. Learning Strategies in Second Language Acqui- sition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Oxford, R. 1990. Language Learning Strategies. Boston, MA: Heinle and Heinle. Richards, J. 1983: ‘Listening comprehension: ‘approach, design, procedure’. TESOL Quar- terly 17: 219-39, Robb, T. N. and B. Susser. 1989. ‘Extensive reading skills vs skills building in an EFL context’. Reading in a Foreign Language 5/2. Rost, M. 1990. Listening in Language Learning. Harlow: Longman. Rubin, J. 1994: ‘A. review of second language listening comprehension research’. Modern Language Journal, 78/2: 199-221 Stanovich, K. E. 1980. ‘Toward an interactive- compensatory model of individual differences in the development of reading fluency’. Reading Research Quarterly, 16: 32-71. Urquhart, 8. and C. Weir. 1998, Reading in a Second’ Language: Process, Product and Prac- tice. Harlow: Longman. The author John Field teaches on the MA course in Applied Linguistics and ELT at Kings College London, and is completing a PhD on listening at the University of Cambridge. He has been a materials writer and teacher trainer with experience in Europe, the Middle East, the Far Bast and Africa, He has written secondary school coursebooks for Saudi Arabia and Hong Kong; he is the author of a beginners series on BBC English by Radio; and he worked for two years in Mainland China, designing distance-learning materials for TV. Email: ‘Not waving but drowning’: a reply to Tony Ridgway 195Field and I are in total agreement on this: ‘Can strategies be taught?’ is i sar * se at, ion, thinki d i Hang on a Minute! the most crucial issu inthis discussion. A lot more lear thinking an i A definition of terms is needed,” and a lot more research into what learners | ar eply to John Field need and don’t need to be taught. | ‘ ote) Suter 11974, Intelanguage’ in. C. Richard i re orofobscurus fio as Horace would Selinker, L. 1974. Interlanguage’in J.C. Richards | | Tony R idgway : prow id Rendered the nine T struggle to be (ed.). Error Analysis (pp. 19-27). London: | | brief, the more unintelligible I become’ by Maeve ongman. | | Binchy. . Manchon-Ruiz, 1997. ‘Learner’s strategies in L2 | .2.The distinction between strategies and strategic ornposing’. Communication and Cognition 30) T agree with John Field’s article more than he realizes, and I fervently behaviour in R. Manchon-Ruiz (1997) goes a SOmpasine 1 hope I am guilty of fewer simplistic assumptions and misconceptions Jong way towards this. | than he imagines. However, I don’t think he has addressed the central point of my article, which is this: if listening strategies are conscious, how can they be employed while listening? And if they are not, how can they be taught? Field’s distinction between strategies and skills is of no help in this context, and although there may be grey areas between conscious and unconscious, such as ‘potentially conscious’, this does not really affect the argument except with regard to automatization, where | practice is of primary importance. One extremely effective strategy, for example, is looking in the dictionary. This is something that can be done while reading, but not while listening. Both reading and listening in a foreign language demand full conscious attention, but reading can be temporarily abandoned in order to apply conscious comprehension strategies. This being so, a different approach clearly needs to be taken with listening (and, incidentally, reading for pleasure). This approach, as it cannot be strategy-based, must be text-based, with a particular listener in mind. This does not necessarily mean the nightmare of uniformly graded texts that Field holds forth for our disapprobation. I entirely endorse what he says about simplified texts.' There is nothing wrong with authentic texts, whatever they are, but what meaningful distinction is there between texts that are specially designed or modified for the language learner (Field’s definition) and all other texts, which are specially designed or modified for their particular audience, whoever they may be? My approach is essentially process-based, and compares the cognitive Processes of listening and reading. Field’s process-based exercises in | elements of listening are praiseworthy, but these provide practice, the goal of which is automatization, not strategy training, the goal of which is presumably a strategic approach to listening, something for which there isn’t cognitive time or space. It is worth remembering that the term ‘strategy’ was first used by Selinker in ‘Interlanguage’ (1972), and that there is no such thing as interlanguage in the receptive skills. The use of terms like ‘commu- nicative strategies’ and ‘compensatory strategies’ with the receptive | skills sometimes seems to call forth the phantom of a receptive interlanguage, Hang on a Minute? A reply to Not Waving but Drowning 197 196 ELT Journal Volume 54/2 April 2000 © Oxford University Press 2000