Chapter 6 – Listening or Viewing Skills
Listening/Viewing Strategies & Stories
Keli Yerian; Logan Fisher; and Bibi Halima
Let’s take a closer look at some specific strategies to improve your listening/viewing skills. These are some actionable steps based on the research and broader principles we’ve already discussed that you can incorporate into your regular language learning routine. Some of them were crowd-sourced from students in our LING 144 Learning How to Learn Languages class when they reflected on their own language learning journeys and shared some of their favorite and preferred methods. We expect to gather more example strategies from future cohorts of students.
Make sure to click on the strategies below to see more about each one. Some of them are illustrated by personal stories and media created by students.
Metacognitive strategies for listening/viewing
Make a goal to recognize 5-10 new words per week
Of course you can choose to learn more than 5-10, but we are modeling how to set realistic goals! The goal of “recognizing” means that when you are listening, you will know what a word (or phrase or grammatical element) means without guessing at the meaning or needing to look it up. This is different from (and much easier than) being able to recall the word on your own when speaking/signing or writing. We all have a much larger receptive vocabulary than productive vocabulary, including in our first language(s).
To build your receptive vocabulary, prioritize noticing words that you hear or see repeatedly across different contexts, and add these new words to your vocabulary list. If you are hearing or seeing them often, they are probably either high-frequency words or are key words for the specific topic. If they are words that you think you will need to use in your own speaking or signing, you can consciously start using them yourself as productive vocabulary.
Think about context and genre
You will mentally process spoken or signed text much more easily if you are aware of the context in which it was produced, as well as what genre the text is. For example, if you know you’re listening to a weather report on a TV weather channel, you will know what to listen for, such as the names of places local to you before listening more closely to details, assuming that the local weather is most relevant to you. You’ll also know that you need to look at the screen in order to understand “a storm over here” and “heat wave coming in this way” through the speaker’s gestures. You might also be less concerned with understanding all the technical weather vocabulary as long as you can get the gist of the report.
As another example, if you know that you are listening to someone’s personal podcast instead of a formal news show, you might value the opinions of the speakers differently. The opinions of someone invited to speak on a news show might be more credible than the opinions of someone publishing their own work in a podcast.
Think about your purpose for listening/viewing
Your own purpose for listening or viewing should also guide which strategies you use while listening. Do you just need to understand the gist, such as when listening to a podcast for pleasure? Or do you need to understand the exact details, such as when following a recipe while cooking? Do you need to be able to pull out the main points, such as when listening to a lecture, or do you need to be able to follow a timeline, including flashbacks, such as when listening to a story? Listening for key transition words in the language such as therefore, the most important, before that, then, and later on can be a good strategy for following a longer text, even when you don’t understand every word.
Activate your prior mental schemata
Once you identify the context and genre, and know what you need to listen for, you can think about what you already know about that context and genre. This can help fill in the gaps for what you don’t understand in the language. For example, if you know you are listening to a story in a fantasy genre, you won’t be surprised to hear about large animals that fly and spit fire, and you might guess that these are dragons.
Of course, sometimes our prior schemata can be wrong, especially across cultures and historical periods. In this case we might fill in details that are not accurate, which is why we should keep listening and looking for clues that help us confirm or disconfirm our guesses. For example, in another cultural tradition there might be a different creature than a dragon that also flies and spits fire. Guessing, however, is still worth doing in order to activate your prior knowledge even if your guess turns out to be wrong.
Stay open to non-literal or metaphorical meanings
When we listen to a less-familiar language, we tend to interpret what we hear very literally. For example, if we hear It’s raining cats and dogs in English and we don’t know this is an idiom, we might be very surprised and confused to imagine animals falling from the sky! All languages have idioms and metaphorical uses of language that make communication rich and creative. If something sounds strange to you in its literal meaning, stay open to the possibility that it has a non-literal meaning, and turn to a dictionary or another speaker of the language for help. For example, the sentence La route était plaine de nids-de-poule in French literally translates in English to The road was full of chicken nests. But nids-de-poule as a phrase in this context actually means potholes, which makes much more sense!
Retain essential knowledge
Unless you are only relying on lots of extensive listening to learn new words implicitly, it’s recommended to find a way to explicitly notice, identify, and take note of important new elements of the language as you are exposed to it. Keeping a language journal or notebook (including spoken or written notes on your phone) is a great way to jot down aspects of the language you are hearing frequently. Writing things down will help you retain them.
Socio-affective & interpersonal strategies for listening/viewing
Many of the strategies for interpersonal listening or viewing are the same actions you could take for socio-affective strategies, since both involve using the help of other people to practice and improve your listening.
Find content you like
There is plenty to find on the internet (movies, social media, blogs…), and in many different languages, so choose what you like from all that is available. Keep in mind you may have a harder time finding diverse materials for very minoritized languages.
A past LING 144 student, Eli (Wes) Cox, created this YouTube video to highlight two key language learning strategies. The first one is about choosing content that he enjoys (his example is food!). The other strategy is to get out and speak to people in the community (in his example, he is talking to someone in a Japanese restaurant in his hometown).
Understand that attrition is normal
Attrition refers to the loss of proficiency in a second language that you used to understand or speak more fluently in the past. This is a common phenomenon for heritage communities or people who took language in school but did not continue to use it. Attrition is a normal process, but luckily it’s typically easier to regain a lost language than to learn one for the first time. Be patient with yourself if you feel very rusty in a language or feel that you have lost it altogether. With more exposure and practice it will come back.
Not Fluent Enough by Piper Bringman
The following poem by Piper Bringman, a former LING 144 student, describes her feelings of loss for the language she was first exposed to as a child: American Sign Language (ASL).
Not Fluent Enough
Sometimes when I hear a song
I see my mother signing along
It’s like I can barely perceive it
The shadows of what I once knew
Dance along the edges of my memory
Black on black
Flickering.
Echoing.
There’s a candle in my mind
As the orange flame is slowly burning down
I recall the way her hands moved as she spoke
Explicitly intertwined
English and ASL were not two different things
They were one
I had 40 signs to every word
Then I began to speak English fluently and slowly unraveled
Until I had lost half of them.
I could not sign you a lullaby
Sing it for you? That I could do
But 1 + 1 does not equal too
I cannot recall one without the other
It sparks it but barely – just out of reach
I can’t grasp it
There’s a body double to every word I speak
There should be movement
There should be more than just lips
That is what I’ve learned to focus on
I miss what I once knew
Back when 1+1 was in fact two
My mother signs and I understand her
But do I really?
If she did not mouth the words, would I truly know what she had said?
What about everyone
I cannot understand them like I understand her
She was the entire basis of my knowledge
She was all of my awareness of American Sign Language
It all came from her
She was the one who taught
She was the creator in my eyes
She was the one who knew how to say everything I couldn’t
She communicated with me before I knew how to respond
And I unlearned how to respond back
She is someone who can help me save
What little knowledge I have left
This is about bringing it back
Restoring it like a piece of antique art
Faded from the light seeping into the attic
I have to stop behaving like that is not enough
I am enough
What I know is enough
I will never be not fluent enough
Explanation
Not Fluent Enough centers around my mother teaching me American Sign Language when I was an infant, which allowed me to know 100 signs by my first birthday, and to be able to speak in clear full sentences before the age of two. I began responding to signs as early as four-months old, and it allowed her to communicate with me about my needs much earlier than many other children.
The poem starts off with me talking about how I can barely remember it. Like I can see shadows moving in my mind if I close my eyes, and I try to bring in the feeling of reaching for that knowledge and not being able to find it. I also represent the loss that I feel when I look back to what I used to be able to understand and say, versus what capabilities I have now.
Towards the middle of my poem I talk about how “There should be more than just lips” and how “That is what I have learned to focus on.” I have a double meaning in the second line because I recently became aware that I focus on lip-reading my mother when she signs to me, but I also am portraying that I have learned to focus on what I don’t have, what don’t know, or what don’t do when it comes to my language learning journey. I felt for years and years like I couldn’t count a language as my own unless I knew it at a master level, and Linguistics 144 really gave me new perspectives on that. I’d say it was my biggest takeaway from the entire course. It was an epiphany for me to understand that I didn’t need perfection and total understanding to be good enough.
Another double meaning I am proud of in Not Fluent Enough is the little intentional typo as I call it in my line “but 1+1 does not equal too.” I am known for being a bit of a grammar person sometimes, especially when it comes to two, to and too, and so it was a bit painful to write at first. But it also brought me joy because I knew that not everyone would get the joke right away, and that some people wouldn’t catch it at all. Plus the fact that it’s only visual made my little language brain happy. By one plus one not equalling too, I am portraying the concept of “also.” Like “just because I know English does not mean I also get to know ASL, and just because I knew ASL once does not mean that I know it as intimately anymore”. I do correct my ‘too’ in a later line with the spelling when I say “Back when 1+1 was in fact two.” I wrote that line because I was taught ASL and English simultaneously when I was young, and so I did not separate out the two languages. I thought that English had a movement counterpart, and that’s something I never fully let go. It’s why I often use my hands when I am describing something. It also ties into my line about every word having a body double, and English being too still. I still catch myself fingerspelling when I cannot remember the letters in a word.
The end of my poem is what is most important to the learning I have done in Linguistics. It’s when I realize that what I do know is enough, that I am enough, and that I should focus on restoring the beautiful languages that I have retained. To build my knowledge back up and continue from there. It is so important to me that I move forward in a kindly manner with myself, so that I someday feel that I can claim the title of polyglot. Languages have always been such a passion and joy of mine and this poem is a reminder to remember and honor the work I have done as well as the language learning journeys that are yet to come.
Find online or in-person groups who want to practice the language
It’s not too hard to find groups based on interest these days. For example, Meetup is an app that allows you to find groups in-person near you who share a common interest such as language practice. Other social media apps have group options as well.
Interact with friends or family
If one of your friends or family members speaks your target language, ask if they can help you practice. Set up a time to meet or call them and ask them to stay in the target language for certain parts of the interaction, such as during greetings and small talk at least. You can also ask them to tell you how their day went, or tell you stories from the past, or tell you their plans for next week, while you listen and note down any words you don’t understand. You can follow up with a discussion about anything you want to learn about more.
Interact with language exchange partners
If you don’t have a friend, family member or group who speaks your target language, find a language partner on an app like HelloTalk or Tandem. You can make an exchange like this less intimidating if you both sometimes agree to listen in your L2 but speak in your L1. This can give the other person listening practice even if they are not feeling ready to speak as much yet.
Play online multiplayer games in your L2
If you already enjoy playing games online, try those games in your target language with others who are using that language. You can choose to mostly just listen!
Take advantage of your language class
If you have an opportunity to take a language class, take advantage of the many listening opportunities it provides! In a language class, you have many chances to listen to your teacher, to recordings that they play or to guest speakers, and to your classmates.
Use phrases to get help from the speaker
Memorize several phrases that allow you to ask for help from the speaker. How to ask these questions politely or appropriately in your target language will vary according to the language and culture. Some examples in English are:
- I’m sorry, did you say…?
- Could you say that again more slowly?
- I’m sorry, I didn’t understand that.
Notice and benefit from redundancy
Brown and Lee (2015) give us this tip about benefiting from the redundancy of spontaneous language use: “Spoken language, unlike most written language, has a good deal of redundancy. The next time you’re in a conversation, notice the rephrasings, repetitions, elaborations, and little insertions of “I mean” and “you know.” Such redundancy helps the hearer to process meaning by offering more time and extra information. Learners can train themselves to profit from such redundancy by first becoming aware that not every new sentence or phrase will necessarily contain new information and by looking for the signals of redundancy” (p. 323).
Pay attention to non-verbal communication
The language someone is speaking or signing is just one part of a communicative effort, as we know from Chapter 1, Chapter 5, and other places in this book. We communicate quite a bit through our facial expressions, gestures, body orientation, and eye contact, for example. Pay attention to the whole package of communication, as this can help you interpret communicative intent, such as whether someone is asking a question vs. telling you something. Be careful, however, as non-verbal communication can mean different things across different communities and contexts. It’s always a good idea to observe these behaviors over time, such as whether people typically smile a lot or not so much, or whether extended eye contact seems to be expected or not, and ask a trusted community member what specific non-verbal behaviors mean.
Pay attention to cohesive devices
Prioritize learning and listening for the words and phrases that help listeners follow a speaker’s train of thought. These include words and phrases such as and, but, so, then, however, yet, in other words, you know, I mean, okay, in fact, for example, and well in English, among others. Examples in Spanish include pues, bueno, y, así bien, aunque, es decir, o sea. Speakers of every language use these kinds of cohesive devices. These can help you, as the listener, follow the logical flow of what someone is saying. For practice hearing these in spoken discourse, you can use Youglish to search for them in videos on the internet (see below).
Listen for cognates
Most languages have shared linguistic histories with other languages, which means that they share words that look similar and have similar meanings. These are called cognates. An example of cognates that are descended from the same Indo-European ancestor are night in English, nuit in French, noche in Spanish, and nacht in German. When new words in your L2 are cognates with other languages you know, it makes it much easier to guess at and remember their meanings. Sometimes, however, words may look alike but have distinct meanings, such as the famous example of embarrassed in English vs. embarazada (pregnant) in Spanish.
Listen for prosodic cues (volume, pitch, length, voice quality)
Other important clues to meaning in communication can be signaled through prosody, which refers to the suprasegmental level of sound in a language. In other words, how high or low your pitch is, how loudly or quietly you are speaking, how long you pronounce certain sounds, whether you are speaking in a breathy or creaky voice, and so on.
Some languages, like Mandarin and Thai, rely very strongly on pitch changes to convey the meaning of a word. For example, ma with an even tone means ‘mother’, while ma with a falling-then-rising tone means ‘horse’. Many languages rely on prosodic cues to show emphasis on certain words. For example, in English the difference between “I cut the pizza” and “I cut the pizza” (with a change in pitch, volume, and length on pizza vs. cut) changes the focus of the utterance. “I cut the pizza” highlights what the speaker cut, whereas “I cut the pizza” highlights what the speaker did to the pizza (cut vs. ate, for example). Noticing the prosodic patterns of the language you are learning can help you interpret the communicative intent of the speaker.
strategies specific to Viewing signed languages
Practice viewing fingerspelling
On websites like asl.ms, you can practice reading finger spelling as it happens in real time with no repetition. As a novice learner, you can set the speed and quantity of letters low and increase both as you improve. The website gives you immediate feedback and tells you if the word you typed matches the word signed. A lot of ASL uses fingerspelling, so it can be important to know how to interpret fingerspelling quickly and accurately!
Watch the interpreter on the news
If you have access to live news, chances are that there is an interpreter available on the screen! To practice viewing ASL, you can opt to only watch the interpreter while listening to the news to learn vocabulary, or you can turn off the volume and rely on the interpreter to get all your news for the day! You can combine this with some of our other principles, such as focusing on key concepts while sacrificing small details to get the main point.
Try to look at a signer’s face, not their hands
Proficient signers will look at the faces of other signers and maintain eye contact with them, rather than looking at the hands of the signer. Facial expressions such as widening or narrowing the eyes, raising or lowering the eyebrows, frowning or smiling, and even blinking can communicate important linguistic information in addition to emphasis or emotion. As much as possible, practice seeing signs while looking directly at the signer’s face.
Interpretive listening strategies for online media
Listen to music and see what you can understand
Listening to music is enjoyable for many of us, but it’s important to remember that lyrics in songs are typically harder to understand than regular speech. You can look at written lyrics to better understand the song, or you can just focus on listening without needing to understand it all (in our first languages we often can’t understand all the lyrics either!). To match your level, you can start with slower music and just a few clear and repeated lyrics and then progressively listen to more difficult songs as you become more comfortable with the language. You can also listen to songs you already know that have been translated and re-recorded into your target language.
Listen to podcasts, videos, etc. made for language learners
Many streaming platforms including but not limited to Spotify and YouTube have channels dedicated to language learning materials. For example, Logan practices listening to Portuguese with SlowPortuguese on Spotify. Many of these materials also cover cultural themes or pragmatic elements that are useful to learners of any language, such as customs when ordering in a restaurant. This can be a chance to also practice your reading if you’re watching a video instead of listening to a podcast since many videos also have subtitles in your target language.
Also watch media in your target language that was NOT made for language learners
Don’t rely ONLY on graded materials. Find authentic materials at your level and in a domain or subject you know. You can find authentic materials more easily by searching for the topics in your target language, for example in Spanish you can search the word deportes instead of sports.
Change your language settings in streaming services
Did you know that you can change the language setting in many streaming services so that you can watch some movies in another language? If you recall back to the secrets of a polyglot section in Chapter 1, Logan was watching their favorite American TV show in Spanish to maintain their listening skills. There are many ways to incorporate this practice into your language learning. First, you can familiarize yourself with a show in your L1, then switch the audio to your target language while keeping the subtitles the same. Next, you can switch the subtitles to your target language, and then once you become very comfortable, you can take away the subtitles altogether. This is just one way to increase the difficulty step by step.
Use the control tools on media
You can use different control features and apply the level of control on your selected media to make your learning experience more personalized. For example, you can pause after you have heard something you did not understand. If you need to adjust the playback speed, you can slow down to make sure that you get the most out of the content. You can always repeat or replay and go back to catch details that you think you have missed. In short, these features and tools make the content more accessible to you and help improve your comprehension.
Use tools like Youglish to listen to words in context
If you want to hear how a specific word is used in context, either for its pronunciation or its usage in a sentence, Youglish is a great tool. Choose your target language, search for the word, and you’ll see a multitude of videos from YouTube that contains that word.
‘Live’ interpretive listening
Take notes in class
Try to write down key words you hear in class. This will help you grasp the main ideas and remember them later. It also can be a way to test yourself to see if you can catch the main ideas. If you just listen without taking notes you may not realize whether something is going over your head.
Ask questions of the teacher or your peers
Most teachers welcome questions from students while they are explaining something. Don’t hesitate to raise your hand to clarify what you heard. If you’re sitting with a classmate and it’s not disruptive to talk, you can check with them also.
Use predicting strategies
As you’re listening, try to make guesses about what is coming next, based on the context, your own past experience or knowledge, visuals, and what you have understood so far. What will come next in the story you’re listening to? What is an example of the point that the speaker is making? Even if your predictions are wrong, you will remember the content better if you have tried to predict it first.
Can you think of any other listening/viewing strategies that we could add to any of the lists above?
References
Brown, H. D. & Lee, H. (2015). Teaching by principles: An integrative approach to language pedagogy (4th ed.). Pearson Education, Inc.
Duke, I. (2009). The everything sign language book: American Sign Language made easy (2nd ed.). Adams Media.
Paige, R. M., Cohen, A. D., Kappler, B., Chi, J. C., & Lassegard, J. P. (2006). Maximizing study abroad: A students’ guide to strategies for language and culture learning and use (2nd ed.). Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition, University of Minnesota.
Shelly, S. & Schneck, J. (1998). The complete idiot’s guide to learning sign language. Alpha Books.
Having the quality of receiving, taking in, or admitting. In the context of language, taking in input in the form of language
Having the power of producing; generative; creative. In the context of language, creating output in the form of language
A specific type of written or spoken text, such as novels, newspapers, blogs, speeches, conversations, etc
Our prior framework of knowledge that organizes and interprets information based on our prior experiences in the world
The most basic sense of a word or expression
A type of phrase that has a new meaning different from the definition for the individual words put together
A figurative, imaginative, symbolic use of a word or phrase
The language learning technique of listening or reading extensive amounts of text to improve general comprehension. It is done without stopping to look up words or analyze the text
Strategies focusing on the social and emotional needs of learners
The loss of proficiency in a second language that you used to understand or speak more fluently in the past
The language you are currently learning
When something is repeated. Sometimes this is unnecessary repetition, but other times the repetition can be useful, as in this case for listening
Words genetically related in origin, descended from the same ancestral root
The set of speech variables, including rhythm, speed, pitch, and relative emphasis
Speech characteristics that affect syllables, words, and phrases rather than only individual sounds
A text that has been simplified or originally written to contain a limited set of forms (in this context, 'forms' refers to vocabulary and grammar)
Materials that have not been designed or modified for language learners