Gianfranco Conti: Breaking the Sound Barrier

I had already been following Gianfranco’s ideas on teaching listening and had begun to incorporate some of his suggested activities into lessons and homeworks for my Y10 group. I have to say that his approach to listening has absolutely revolutionised the way I plan to teach, and this is not an exaggeration! I think that it is far, far too easy in teaching to become sluggish and set in your ways – often because you aren’t exposed to new ways of thinking and doing things. I’ve mentioned before that CPD is often dreadfully lacking, but since becoming active on Twitter and having my eyes opened to what people are doing, I feel empowered to revitalise my practice. It has to be said that the change to the GCSE specification has helped there too, because it has pushed me to think about new ways of teaching. But back to listening. I don’t know why I had never thought about the fact that our first language is acquired by listening. I don’t know why, as a language specialist, I was unaware that a whopping 45% of real-life communication is through listening. It’s clearly key.

Up until now, I had used the listening activities in the coursebook as they were, sometimes adapting the exercises, but always expecting students to comprehend, to pick out information, to work out who went shopping and at what time and what they bought. To my great shame, though, I have never equipped students with the skills they need to be able to do this with confidence and efficiency. I never, ever understood why, every time I said we were “doing some listening”, they would, without exception, groan and ask “are we doing a test, Miss?” I would respond that, no, it wasn’t a test. It was just another activity, like the reading we’d done ten minutes ago. Now, I see that they had it better than me: of course it was a test! A test of their ability to understand spoken French, but without teaching them how; not much different from throwing them into the deep end of a swimming pool, without teaching them to swim, and withholding the inflatables! Gianfranco pointed out that first of all, aural exposure to L2 is too limited and in addition, instruction is not principled (SO true. I will be FAR more principled in future!) and aural tasks are under-exploited (hopefully no longer!). A big problem, though, is that speed of delivery is inaccessible. How many times have I paused a recording to reprimand students for the inevitable “whaaaaat?” that emerges from the otherwise silent classroom? Many. But if you haven’t equipped them with the skills, even the slowed-down speeds of coursebook recordings is too great for some to follow. Moreover, if a recording contains more than 10% unknown words, it represents incomprehensible input to the listener. And when faced with incomprehensible input, what happens? Panic zone, demotivation, loss of confidence and the eternal refrain: “I just can’t do French.”

We should be listening to TEACH not to TEST.

What even are listening skills, though? I think I would have struggled to answer that question, had it ever been asked of me (should it have, as part of my PGCE course?), before Gianfranco’s presentation. He explained that the following processes have to take place in the act of listening:

• decoding – the ability to segment what you hear into individual words and underneath that, into individual sounds
• lexical search – having heard the sounds, the brain that sorts through its lexicon and attempts to locate a match (and this is why we should praise students for getting a sound right, even if ultimately, the word is wrong. They can learn.)
• parsing – putting the lexical item into syntactic context. What is its grammatical role?
• meaning building – now we know what we’ve heard and where each word fits grammatically, what does it actually mean?
• discourse construction – I think that this must mean placing what you have heard as a whole into a conversation and formulating an appropriate reply. Please correct me if I haven’t quite got this bit!

Gianfranco argues – very convincingly – that language skills are acquired like any other: by teaching from the bottom up. You can’t learn how to ride a bike if you don’t know which way round to sit on the seat, where to put your hands and feet and what action to make with your legs. You have to learn the components of what riding a bike actually is and then practice them, with the support of stabilisers, before you can become an “expert bike rider.” The same is true of learning to listen. Gianfranco explains it like this: “becoming an expert requires acquiring automaticity in the execution of key skills and achieving expertise requires the novice to gradually adjust their performance to the way in which an expert listener behaves.” We simply can’t expect our students to behave like expert listeners in L2 without showing them how and giving them ample opportunity to practice – and to feel good about what they are doing. They need greater exposure to L2, but in a very targeted way: input must be comprehensible, so vocabulary must be carefully selected and speed of delivery adapted, and activities must be exploited to allow teachers to model (and students to practise) skills, rather than jumping to the final hurdle and expecting them to build meaning and construct discourse around what they have heard.

There are lots of activities recommended by Gianfranco to develop these skills, which you can find on his blog here and here. I find that the students really enjoy them, too. Based on the principle that daily exposure is ideal, I am trialling a daily listening HW with Y10 and include an example here. We’ve been doing the unit on reading habits from the Studio coursebook.

hw_listening_week_7 (1)

I recorded the input myself.

Gianfranco’s own write-up of his presentation is here.