Listening and authenticity in language teaching
Jono Ryan
In his recent post, Michael pointed out the benefits of using authentic materials in the ESL/EFL/ESOL classroom and provided a set of very useful activity types [link]. This week, I'm picking up that thread in relation to listening.
In ESL contexts, most English learners will have an experience something like the following. In the classroom, listening’s fine, and their confidence grows. When the teacher talks, they don't understand every word, sure, but with a bit of repair, they at least get the gist of it most of the time. The teaching materials? Those are even easier. Over 4/5 or 5/5 for most exercises. Listening to classmates? Sure that's the easiest (except for that one guy—what's up with him anyway?). And when it comes to the assessment, sure, nearly everyone passes listening. It's the lightweight test that you won't need to practice or rehearse for. It's writing that most people fail or re-sit, while speaking is nerve wracking in other ways. Listening is a walk in the park.
Until the student actually does walk in the park. A friendly looking older couple walk by and say something—but they might as well be speaking an alien language. It's utterly impenetrable. A little later, another disastrous conversation, with just enough decipherable words to confirm that it is indeed English they're hearing. They return home dejected.
What's going on here?
A lot. (And my collaborator and I unpick some of the less appreciated elements in an article due in 2025). But perhaps the most important issue is the difference between the idealized form of language that appears in print and in textbooks, and the much more complex and varied range of sounds and rhythms heard in ordinary speech. Or more to the point, the widespread neglect of phonology-based listening instruction.
These are the principles by which a sentence like ‘I would have done that’ has the potential to be rendered as something like ‘I wədəv done that’ or ‘Idə done that’. These are not random changes but are rule governed and predictable within certain parameters.
A brief digression first to link back to the issue of authenticity. I once worked with someone who was always trying to be very helpful to students by attempting to speak with hyper clarity. She would contort her face and enunciate EV-E-RY SING-LE SYL-LA-BLE, yes, you read that right—she’d even create a third syllable in ‘every’. The trouble was that she was distorting the English language. She was treating the printed form of words as the correct basis for pronunciation, and so not only creating new syllables, but erasing English of word stress and sentence stress. The natural sounds and rhythms of the language were completely lost, and the result was something bizarre, confusing, condescending, and not at all helpful.
What she was doing was more radically inauthentic than anything I’ve heard from a textbook. There are, of course, philosophical questions here of how we should define authenticity (see especially Will, 2018), but in this case, despite her genuine attempt at communication in a real-life scenario (both criteria for authenticity), all of this was undermined by her ill-advised distortions of the language.
Too often, learners are presented with very inauthentic models of language that don't prepare them for listening outside the classroom. What we should be providing is a bridge between simplified, idealized listening and the authentic sounds of language heard beyond the classroom.
For the Chasing Time English series The Last Hustle, we took inspiration from the approach of Cauldwell (2018). Cauldwell introduces a garden metaphor for the sounds of language, contrasting the contexts of the glass house, the garden and the jungle. In the glass house, plants appear in a form that reflects the gardener’s idealized notion. This is like words in a dictionary. In the garden, plants have more scope to realize their genetic potential within that environment, though their form is overseen by the gardener, who will nurture, feed, prune, and cut back as required. This is like typical listening texts—there is rhythm and weak forms, but it is still very carefully crafted. In the jungle, plants grow according to their nature, the environment, and the plants around them, sometimes crowding out or being crowded out by others. This is like language in casual speech.
The approach is not simply to force difficult, authentic texts on learners—that would be frustrating and unhelpful. Instead, in The Last Hustle, we take individual lines of dialogue from video episodes and provide exercises that walk learners through the journey from the glass house to the jungle. They learn the underlying principles that provide the parameters for how spoken English can sound in casual speech. After some practice, they are then walked back again from the jungle to the glass house.
This approach is not one of authenticity in terms of text origin, but one of authenticity in terms of the language that is modelled. And of course, we firmly concur with Cauldwell that this is an essential step towards equipping learners to handle listening in authentic contexts.
References
Cauldwell, R. (2018). A syllabus for listening - Decoding. Speech In Action.
Will, L. (2018). Authenticity in English language teaching: An analysis of academic discourse. Waxmann.