The strategies of effective and ineffective L2 listeners
Various studies have looked at the approaches taken by ineffective and effective L2 listeners.
O'Malley et al (1989) asked intermediate Spanish-speaking high school students enrolled in English as a Second Language classes to 'think aloud' at various stages in completing listening comprehension tasks. The reports of students classified by their teachers as effective and ineffective listeners were compared. The following differences were highlighted:
| Effective listeners | Ineffective listeners |
| Use intonation and pauses to help 'parse' what is being said | |
| Focus on phrases or sentences, but shift attention to words when there seems to be a breakdown in comprehension | Focus on individual words |
| Don't allow unknown words to divert their attention from the continuing stream: trust that they will be able to 'get something' | Get easily diverted and disheartened. Get lost in the stream of sound. |
| Actively make connections between what they hear and what they already know; try to elaborate on the elements understood in order to arrive at a plausible understanding | |
| Ask questions about what they have understood in order to try to fill in missing information |
It seems, from this research, that effective listeners are more able to integrate bottom-up and top-down processing than ineffective listeners. It is difficult to know, however, whether ineffective listeners have problems because they don't mobilize their existing knowledge sufficiently well or whether their bottom-up processing may be impaired by restricted language knowledge, ie they simply can't 'catch' enough language in order to mobilize top-down processing.
The truth is likely to be in between these two hypotheses. Certainly, there is a danger for weaker listeners that poor word recognition skills will lead to inability to mobilize any existing knowledge, which in turn will lead to a sense of 'being lost', which will lead to demotivation and a reluctance to attempt any compensatory guess-work at all.
