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Extensive listening in the language classroom
Abstract
This chapter discusses the role of extensive listening in foreign or second language learning and teaching. It explains the language learning benefits of extensive listening, explores the kinds of material that are suitable for extensive listening, and provides practical activities that promote extensive listening in the foreign or second language classroom.
... Instead of listening to 'artificial' texts in a laboratory-like environment, learners should be engaged in extensive listening (EL). In particular, this involves listening to any self-selected listening materials that fit to their language levels and personal interests (Renandya, 2011;Renandya & Jacobs, 2016;Waring, 2008). Through simply putting their earphones on, they can enjoy listening to their favorite stories on their smartphones while, for example, waiting for the school bus, queuing for food in the canteen, and so forth. ...
... Learning can still happen at any time whether or not they attend the class. Through practising EL, learners can develop their L2 listening fluency (Chang et al., 2019), reinforce their L2 vocabulary knowledge (Chang, 2012), develop their L2 vocabulary (Pamuji et al., 2019) and get more familiar with oral language features (Renandya, 2011;Renandya & Jacobs, 2016). ...
... Insights into the advantages of EL are mostly reported by studies carried out in higher-level settings. With its emphasis on listening for pleasure to easy and compelling listening materials (Renandya, 2011;Renandya & Jacobs, 2016;Waring, 2008), extensive listening could ideally be enjoyed by EFL learners of all levels. Especially for young learners who need ample exposure to oral input for their L2 development, listening pleasurably daily is indispensable. ...
... In the process-oriented approach of teaching listening, there should be a substantial amount of actual listening to familiarize learners with how English is actually spoken (or Englishes are spoken). This is also a pressing concern because the amount of time that EFL learners listen to English is minimal in listening classes (e.g., Renandya, 2013) and outside class (see the next section). According to Renandya: In a typical 50-minute listening lesson, students listen to a two-or three-minute passage twice or three timesa total of about nine minutes of listening, which is less than 1/5 of classroom time. ...
... Saville-Troike (2012) explains this: "[R]epetition can enhance noticing and contribute to automatization, by facilitating faster processing of input, and the ability to process longer segments in working memory". Also, as scholars (e.g., Ellis, 2002;Field, 2019;Renandya, 2013) have stated, declarative knowledge is important but when it comes to actual performance or "expertise" (Field, 2019: 289), "hundreds of hours" (Renandya, 2013: 26) or even "tens of thousands of hours" (Ellis, 2002: 175) of practice is essential. There are no shortcuts to internalizing and automatizing language knowledge other than familiarizing oneself through practice. ...
... The notion of extensive listening also facilitates vocabulary learning such as fillers or stock phrases (Renandya, 2013). With more practice, learners' confidence in listening may well increase while their listening anxiety may decrease. ...
Many scholars and teachers in EFL education should agree that compared with reading and writing, listening has received much less attention. This brief article discusses important gaps existing in EFL listening and overall proficiency development. It presents the case for a greater focus on sounds and actual listening in the classroom and spoken input (SI) beyond the classroom. To facilitate the discussion, two modalities of listening, namely learning to listen and listening to learn are introduced. It is hoped that by shedding light on these substantive issues, EFL stakeholders will work towards fine-tuning listening pedagogical practices and facilitating learners' reception of more SI beyond the classroom, both of which will highly likely improve learners' listening skills, enhance their overall English proficiency, and lead to more positive EFL learning experiences.
... Recent studies in English language teaching showcased that listening skills' appropriate practices will effectively increase the learners' exposures to the diversity of English and acquire the necessary input for their L2 acquisition (Hamouda, 2013;Renandya, 2011;Rost, 2011). Besides, learning to listen to the target language does improve the language comprehension, in which, learners accustomed to the speech rate, pronunciation, rhythm, intonation, stress, or the variety of spoken and colloquial expressions used in the target language (Chang & Millet, 2013). ...
... Thus, learners are expected to manage more outclass listening practices to think about how they listen and what they could do to improve their listening skills (Gillian, 2015). EFL teachers can expose the learners to the target language through comprehensive listening practices (Renandya, 2011;Renandya & Hu, 2018). ...
... Researches in listening have also revealed that setting up the extensive listening strategy in learning to listen to the L2 is beneficial for the learners. It helps learners establish their cognitive map to obtain the fundamental knowledge related to the use of the target language (Nation & Newton, 2009, as cited in Renandya, 2011). For the lower proficiency learners, repeated listening and extensive listening practices will also help them control the speech rate in learning to interpret the diversity of spoken language. ...
Learning English as a foreign language is very challenging for both teachers and students in Flores, East Nusa Tenggara of Indonesia. The challenges are primarily caused by their lack of exposure to the authentic environment of English. In dealing with this phenomenon, the appropriate listening practices expect to help the learners to obtain and construct their knowledge of English as well as to acquire more comprehensible input. This article reports an investigation on the EFL learners� attitudes toward the extensive listening practices. It applied mixed-method research procedures involving 55 students of the English language and education program of Universitas Katolik Indonesia Santu Paulus Ruteng. The data were collected through a survey coupled with Focus Group Discussions with 15 participants. This research revealed that the learners' attitudes are identified into two main categories called positive and negative attitudes. In this case, 38 % of the participants have positive attitudes toward extensive listening practices and 62% of the participant reflected the negative attitude toward the extensive listening practices. Learners with a positive attitude had a very strong awareness of the significance of listening skills in L2 learning. To improve their listening skills, they develop their listening practices outside the classroom consistently. Meanwhile, learners with negative attitudes were categorized as dependent learners who practiced their listening skills during the listening course only. This group of learners was less aware of the significance of listening skills in L2 learning and their listening practices were highly dependent on the teachers' instruction. It showcased that both of the learners� internal and external factors were strongly contributed to this poor extensive listening practices.� The EFL teachers are then strongly suggested to strengthen the learners� awareness on the significance of Listening Skills in L2 learning as well as design more instructed extensive listening practices outside the classroom.
... Listening activities that students do in language classes mostly take the form of intensive listening activities. Renandya (2011) defines intensive listening as an approach that is still widely used in the foreign or second language classroom and instrumental and helpful for beginner and intermediate learners. The activities focus on intense practice involving pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary. ...
Extensive listening has gained popularity in the past few years due to its benefits for foreign/second language learning. It improves language learners’ listening skills in a less stressful way because they can choose topics based on their interest or do the activity simply for enjoyment. Also, in the implementation, students may choose any multimedia resources in extensive listening activities. In this descriptive study, students’ preferences of multimedia resources used in extensive listening activities were explored. In addition, aspects of the resources they found easy and challenging and why they choose them were also investigated. Research data were collected from 109 learners’ extensive listening journals over a semester. Results of the data analysis indicated that there are 17 types of multimedia resources used by the students. Most of them selected the listening materials based on their interests and curiosity. Moreover, the speakers’ accent and speech rate, and limited vocabulary are aspects some students found challenging. Further studies may want to compare types of resources used and reasons for choosing them by high and low proficient listeners. How learners used the resources may also be of interest to future researchers.
... Third, since the meaning-making process occurs beyond the boundaries of processing linguistic inputs, other modes of emotions, motivations, learner characteristics, cultures, and social contexts definitely merit consideration. Last but not least, follow-up activities such as reflecting, retelling, transferring, and tweaking after the viewing/ listening becomes of paramount importance to know whether the students are doing it (Ivone & Renandya, 2022). In other words, students should have rooms during (synchronously) or after (asynchronously) classes for (i) sharing their opinions about the viewing topics (reflecting), (ii) articulating their own words to retell their viewing (retelling), (iii) using graphic organizers to visualize their comprehension (transferring), and (iv) adding modifications and changing something in the viewing contents to make it more interesting (tweaking). ...
This paper seeks to address how captioned videos are used as an instructional aid in classrooms of English as an additional language (EAL). The paper employs a narrative literature review to synthesize prior studies and reach pedagogical conclusions for utilizing the captioned videos. The results argue that captioned videos have pedagogical, cognitive, and psychological benefits to language teaching and learning with the awareness of some influential factors during instructional implementations. First, the paper elaborates on the roles of videos in language teaching and learning (Why), underlying theories of employing videos (How), and influential factors of utilizing the captions (When and Who), followed by an emphasis on captioning effects on language learning (What). Then, it discusses some classroom implications as concluding remarks.
... With this type of listening, the focus is on meaning, not form. To put it another way, learners should achieve high levels of comprehension and be able to listen at or below their comfortable fluent listening ability (Renandya, 2011). ...
The teaching of listening seems to be an under-researched topic (Field, 2008) although scientists have asserted that listening is an integral part of language development. This study examines the employment of extensive listening as a method to enhance EFL learners’ listening comprehension. The experiment in the study involved two intact classes with 42 learners attending an English program at a language center in Vietnam. An extensive listening program was set up for the treatment group to follow. The control group, in the meantime, was given listening exercises as homework. A pre-test and post-test was used to measure the participants’ improvement in listening comprehension. The results showed that the treatment group significantly outperformed their control group counterparts. This suggests that extensive listening facilitates EFL learners’ listening comprehension.
In the fall semester of 2019, 237 Japanese university students were placed into three groups, 97 in an extensive listening group, 104 in an intensive listening group, and 42 in a control group. Participants were given a 100-question TOEIC listening test to assess L2 listening proficiency, and then placed into their respective group. During the 14-week semester, students completed six listening assignments adhering to either principles of extensive or intensive listening (as well as a control group which received no L2 listening homework). At the end of the semester, students were given another 100-question TOEIC listening test. Results indicated that the mean difference between the pre- and post-test scores was significantly larger for the EL group than the IL group t(193) = 2.14, p <.05. Among the suggestions for future research are a codification of EL and IL methodologies, a linkage of testing instruments to account for variability in testing conditions, and greater scrutiny of the participants' adherence to the intervention.
This study compared the effects of employing the senior review activity in two modes of anonymous and non-anonymous reviews. There were seven senior students who have made reviews on the essay writing drafts of two junior classes on the same topic. It was found that the two groups of junior students had positive attitudes toward the mode of reviews they participated in and that senior students had made more constructive comments on junior students’ writing when their names were not disclosed. The findings on senior students’ attitudes also informed that even though they had no problems with the review conditions of either being anonymous or non-anonymous, they preferred to know whose work they were reviewing. The paper discusses some implications for the application of a review activity in a writing classroom as well as directions for future studies.
For many years, research effort has been devoted to understanding the nature of listening strategies and how listening strategies used by good listeners can be taught to so-called ineffective listeners. As a result of this line of research, strategy training activities have now become a standard feature of most modern listening coursebooks. However, in this article, we maintain that given the lack of evidence of success with this approach to teaching lower proficiency EFL learners and the fact that strategy training places a heavy burden on teachers, an extensive listening approach in the same vein as an extensive reading approach should be adopted. © The Author 2010. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved.
Evidence shows that aural comprehensible input plays a critical role in the early stages of language acquisition. While uncontrolled casual conversations may be too difficult for beginning and intermediate foreign language students to comprehend, Narrow Listening, the repeated listening of several brief tape-recorded interviews of proficient speakers discussing a topic both familiar and interesting to the acquirers, offers them a valuable and rewarding alternative. In the present study, a survey of beginning and intermediate college French as a foreign language students' reactions to Narrow Listening and their assessment of its impact on their language development was conducted. Results indicate that students found Narrow Listening to be interesting, very helpful in improving listening comprehension, fluency, and vocabulary, and in increasing their confidence with French.
This article explores the relationship between written and spoken language, and questions whether skills and strategies supposedly
used in reading can be effectively transferred to listening. It suggests that in listening, working from the text, or from
texts in general, may be a more productive way of approaching comprehension than working from the notion of ‘strategies’.