Can students’ over reliance on strategic competence when attacking difficult listening material actually hinder (rather than enhance) long-term language learning?
Yes, I believe it can. Let me explain why.
I have just come back from a 5-day stay in Buenos Aires, which is hands down one of my favorite cities in the world. Despite their alleged reputation for grumpiness, my Portenho friends have always been gracious with my feeble, embarrassing attempts at Spanish, and despite my atrocious Portunhol (=mix of Portuguese and Spanish), I usually manage to get by. I can understand everyday conversations, the weather forecast, the gist of the local news and the occasional traffic report. In other words, I can get things done.
“That’s because of all the cognates”, you must be telling yourself. Yes, to a certain extent, but that doesn’t tell the whole story.
One of my last adventures in the city was a 40-second shopping transaction in which I was able to (1): move to another check out line, (2) switch credit cards, (3) produce my ID and (4) exchange the stuff I’d just bought.
All of that without understanding a single word of what I heard. I was drawing on strategic competence alone.
Well, I might’ve grasped a word or two, but I missed 95% of what was said. It was my shopping schemata that helped me make it through the whole interaction. In other words, I was able to get things done because of background knowledge and strategic competence, rather than my command of the language.
So the question that prompted me to write this post is a simple one:
Did my over reliance on strategic competence matter? Maybe not.
Would it have mattered if I’d been trying to learn Spanish at the time?
Yes, I believe it would.
No one knows exactly how people learn or acquire (I tend to use the two terms interchangeably) a second language, but this much we know for sure: first, you must understand what is said. Comprehension is the raw material for the whole process, regardless of whether we believe that this input must be noticed or even analyzed. The discrepancy I described in my anecdote (getting things done vs. decoding the message) might be an extreme example, of course, but in our daily lessons, aren’t we constantly watching small doses of this conflict unfold before our very eyes? If twenty years ago, most adult learners didn’t have a good repertoire of listening strategies and tried to understand every single word, now I’m under the impression that some of them might be doing just the opposite: relying too much on strategic competence / contextual clues and bypassing a lot of what is actually said.
In other words, over relying on strategic competence and top-down processing.
For example, have you ever played an audio / video extract in class and, at the end, simply asked students what they could recall from the passage? Chances are high that some of their contributions were never even remotely mentioned in the text, which exposes a rather perverse side effect of over-reliance on schema-driven inferencing skills and strategic competence:
The inability to understand what was actually said.
Now, does that matter?
From a “getting things done” perspective, not necessarily. Students will continue to be able to answer gist questions, circle true or false and even grasp more specific details – often on a “that sounds plausible” basis, drawing more or less heavily on strategic competence. However, understanding less and less of what is actually said does matter in terms of long-term language acquisition, I think.
Click here and here for two must-read articles addressing the issue of strategic competence vs. language acquisition.
Thanks for reading.
and, as any very good teacher would do, you keep us coming back for more…:D can't wait to read part II.
Thank you, Miriam 🙂 What a nice thing to hear on a dreary Sat afternoon!
Stay tuned!
Nice post Luiz. I think you know that I agree with this! It was useful when ideas concerning strategies (and indeed, subskills) came in to ELT thinking, but it’s resulted in an over-concentration on them, to the detriment of bottom-up, language-based factors. My own experiences with Portuguese (especially when I first came to Brazil, but still now, 2o+ years later) changed my mind about listening almost totally. I now believe that strategies and subskills do not exist alongside linguistic competence (lexis and phonology in particular) but in fact depend upon it – i.e. it’s only when you can cope well linguistically with the input that you can draw on other competencies. Swan and Walter reckon that learners start to understand L2 texts when …
‘… they have reached the point where they can access their already-existing comprehension ability on the basis of L2 input. Earlier difficulty with L2 comprehension is best understood as resulting from overload: readers are fully occupied with decoding at the word and sentence level, and have little spare working memory capacity for higher-level processing.’
And I think they’re dead right, and it’s even more true for listeners than it is for readers.
Cheers!
Dear Jeff,
Yes, I know you hold the issue of bottom up vs. top down processing near and dear to your heart!
Thank you so much for your comments and for the Swan and Walter quote. Unlike many ELT gurus, I think Michael Swan has remained impervious to most ELT fads over the past 30 years and is still relatively unscathed!
Hi Luiz,
Really good post and one which chimes with my own thinking about listening. I fully understand the case for top-down approaches and see this work as completely necessary in classes, but I think bottom-up skills get left behind. My own approach is to do the top-down work first and then concentrate on the bottom-up. I’m a CELTA trainer and teacher trainer in my school which means I see a lot of classes. In not a single one of those classes have I seen a teacher do a dictation, for example (very unfashionable these days..). I’ve never seen anyone play a section of the CD again and again for learners to hear the exact words. I’ve never seen these aural texts used for connected speech work. These are all things I do in my own classes, amongst others, and the learners seem to appreciate them (it’s not easy for them!). I also highlight these things in observation feedback, where appropriate, and have done workshops on them too.
Anyway, thanks for the post, which I’ll forward on to people.
Chris
Dear Chris,
Thank you for your comments.
I agree 110% with you that bottom-up processing is still the poor cousin in ELT. In common with you, I’ve rarely observed CELTA lessons in which teachers REALLY helped students go beyond gist or those old hat specific information tasks. Who’s to blame? Hard to tell.
But if you look at the big picture, the pendulum seems to have swung towards “getting things done” in a big way: fluency, task-achievement, message conveyance to the detriment of accuracy, precision and complexity. And this goes both ways, doesn’t it – speaking (output) and reading/listening (input).
By the way, I really liked your blog and I’ll put it under my recommended sites list.