We’ve made some innovations in listening recently. This is part of an overall development focus and reflects a belief in the vital importance of innovation. Never before has it been possible for the humble instructional designer to collaborate with communities of language learners in the ways that we now can. In fact, it would be a dereliction of duty to neglect this marvelous opportunity to do that.
So, for now, I want to stay on the topic of listening and how we get better at it. There’s plenty to talk about. Audio is just coming into it’s own as a learning medium. We’re only beginning to see its potential.
Listening is central to the language learning process. In fact, it seems to me that human cognition itself, has only one goal: to locate and process relevant information. Whether its attention, perception, or interpretation, cognition is organized around relevance. Surely this must be the starting point of listening materials.
Fine. But the brain can only focus on one thing at time and this leaves us with a question: how do we encourage the learner to focus on the forms of the language, as well as on the meaning? Is it possible to do both at the same time? How does all this work?
Well, there’s a level at which those processes operate unconsciously. Bountiful exposure to meaningful input should set the acquisition process in motion. However, not every piece of input we encounter is acquired. (It’s sa long and convoluted story!) The task then, lies in assisting natural acquisition processes through some kind of artifice (learning strategies, technology, and such).
Form versus meaning
In oversimplified terms, the focus on meaning could be described as learning to listen, or learning to apprehend meaning. To get better at this type of listening, you focus on reception skills, word recognition, parsing, etc, as well as the broader goals of guessing meaning from context, inference, and so on.
By contrast you have, listening to learn, the process by which we store, and mentally construct the target language (in the form of ‘schemata‘ or an ‘interlanguage‘). To get better at this type of listening, we have to get good at ‘noticing’ patterns, associations, and structures. This comes through exposure to a wide variety of input.
These functions are intertwined on ChinesePod (as in the real linguistic environment). We break the overall listening challenge into a series of subskills, as exemplifued by The Fix, the elements of the daily podcast, the expansions, etc.
Anyway, right now I’m wondering about you. I want to know more about what goes on in your head when you listen. Where is your focus? Is it on the meaning? The forms? How does your focus change between the dialog, the commentary, the exercises, etc? Tell me more about this. I’m dying to know. We want to keep innovatiung and keep getting better for you. We’re good listeners, I promise.
Ken Carroll
中文 Chinese
Betty Says:
June 22nd, 2007 at 5:27 pm
I really appreciate the attitude you guys show. It’s very idealistic, but you seem to get things done. Focusing on this kind of innovation is good for us and good for you. I like the fact that we learn about learning here. It makes the whole thing more rewarding. I guess you already know that and you don’t need me to tell you, but I do appreciate it.
Ivan Says:
June 22nd, 2007 at 6:57 pm
I agree with the previous comment. I’ve been a C-Pod listener for 18 months or so, and it’s been a pleasure seeing the concept grow. Ken and his team are able to define the vision, and to make it happen. Most importantly, my Mandarin skills have improved as a result. So, well done C-Pod !
FuDaWei Says:
June 22nd, 2007 at 7:15 pm
I think it’s fair to say that the CPOD team has “learned to listen” as well.
jpv206 Says:
June 22nd, 2007 at 11:37 pm
Ken,
I’ve been thinking a lot about this questions as well, lately, so I’m glad you brought it up.
My philosophy is this: form, without meaning, is noise.
And brains don’t like to remember noise. That’s why in communicative circles (Van Patten, etc.), input has to be meaningful, in context, and in real communication.
Let’s take what you and Jenny do. I think what you and Jenny do in the break down is very sophisticated.
For example,
1) first you ask Jenny if she would tell us how to say watermelon. So now, I the listener have the meaning, and you have set Jenny up (as the native speaker) to provide the form. By asking the question, you have created a need in the listener that Jenny fulfills.
2) Then Jenny cheerfully gives you the form (西瓜). She repeats it twice. This is focus on form. We already know the meaning.
3) Then you, Ken, representing the learner, repeat the focus on the form by repeating the form, talking about the tones, and then asking Jenny to repeat again, which she does twice, and you do once more. So there is a super emphasis on the form.
4) And then we go into the dialog.
So all of this has been a pre-listening, linguistic support for the dialog. The listener is now listening for form (西瓜）and hopefully activating the ideas that are linked to this meaning, ideas like “sweet, juicy, refreshing, red, seeds,” etc, which they may or may not hear in the dialog that follows. And as I always say, you get 50 extra points for including the senses of taste and smell in your input.
It seems like a shame that this pattern of focus on form is not followed in Spanish Sense. In contrast..
1) Maria names the subject of the dialog,
2) Aaron talks about tapping the ipod three times,
3) and then we’re into the dialog.
In the analysis after the dialog, the team provides line by line translation. Maria reads a line, Aaron says it in English. In contrast to what you and Jenny do in Chinesepod, Maria does not repeat the line in order to return the focus on form. Instead, the team moves on immediately to the next line.
I think that the second that form and meaning are married, the learner should be repeating the form. Now that form and meaning are matched, it’s gotta be reinforced.
Later, in the analysis, Maria and Aaron repeat this pattern of form, meaning, NEXT! And by the end, Aaron serves as a spot-interpreter. The problems with spot-interpretation are that a) the listener doesn’t have to focus on form to get through the lesson, simply wait for Aaron to give them the meaning, and b) spot-interpretation doesn’t happen very much ‘in the wild,’ so it kind of misses our ideal of input in the form of meaningful, authentic communication.
You and Jenny, however, do analysis in the form of a conversation, which does occur ‘in the wild.’
So in conclusion, I would encourage your SpanishSense teams to give the listener a chance to focus on form before moving to the next item.
Henning Says:
June 23rd, 2007 at 12:37 am
jpv206 discussed this from the perspective of a concentrated follower of the audio podcast. Now let me constrast that with the “CPod as background music on the way to work” style of consumption (scenario 1) and later with the “written desk work” (scenario 2).
In both scenarios there is no clear focus - it moves constantly while I excavate different sorts of language nuggets.
Scenario 1:
On the way to work I basically *follow content* with varying degrees of concentration. Subconsciously cutting out details and unknown words is quite prevalent in those situations - which is why relistening is valuable.
When concentrated I am parallely trying to get a grip on new vocab and occasionally repeat phrases and short sentences. This works especially well in familiar older shows that are beyond the 4th repetition cycle.
Sometimes it happens that I suddently hear an interesting phrase, a word I just recently learned in another lesson, or a forgotten piece of vocab. In those cases I stop following the storyline and play around with the vocab in my head - and try jumping back into the content stream later.
Due to processing latencies in my head I do not focus much on analyzing grammar or repeating structures beyond a threshold of about 10 words.
Scenario 2:
Desk learning is much different. Here I can follow podcasts more concentrated and listen to them before and after reading the Dialogue. In that situation I can look at a) details and b) larger structures.
I do both Dialogue, Expansion and Exercises (which are basically repetitions of the Expansion sentences). Content moves in the back. Threefore I analyze words by Hanzi - they help me understanding semantics and to draw lines to other vocab. More importantly, unlike in Scenario 1, I see *every* character and therefore every detail.
Besides that I am always delighted to discover a beautiful idiomatic expression or a nifty sentence construction - which I can usually analyze but not build on my own. Those I am also certainly not able to fully embrace on the move.
Example: Today I did the Expansion on the Smoking-Media-Lesson and found this beauty:
他把自己受到的不公正待遇发表在网上后，得到了很多网友的声援。
Now that 把-construction is pure programing logic, isn’t it?
By the way:
There have been several warm days here with significant effects on wardrobe. Now *that* can create some mean distractions when trying to follow podcasts.
Henning Says:
June 23rd, 2007 at 12:48 am
To sum that up:
Scenario 1 is synthetic, Scenario 2 is analytical.
I need both.
Jeremy Uriz Says:
June 23rd, 2007 at 1:01 am
Ken,
When I’m listening I focus on the rhythm of the language, the recognizable words or phrases. My mind anchors to the known words and works around those. The best analogy I can think of is a puzzle, when you have a corner or middle section (or both) and you start trying to piece it all together. I tend to be more concerned about pronouncing the words correctly first then attaching meaning to them.
Typically I repeat the Chinese during the translation time. This helps my mind and mouth get familiar with the dialog. The ‘phrasing’ is very important to me. I can tell when I’m saying something that sounds wooden and when it just rolls out as though I’ve been saying the words since childhood. On the second or third listen I’ll speak with Jenny to try and match her timing and tones.
What I’ve been trying desperately to find and hoping that ChinesePod would produce are more lengthy discussions/stories/dialogs in Chinese, with little to no English at the Elementary level.
Repetition of phrases and words within the 2-5 minute (or longer!) dialog/story thingy would be a huge help. 30 seconds for a dialog is a bit too short for my mind to do anything with. I’m still trying to process the first sentence when the last one is being spoken.
Mr. Me Says:
June 23rd, 2007 at 2:02 am
Ken,
I read your blog post twice, and still don’t quite understand it. The technical pedagogical jargon is a bit beyond me, I can’t really answer it meaningfully.
For my part, I can’t learn words unless I read them. Listening comprehension comes only after acquiring vocabulary by extensive reading. Spoken sentences with unfamiliar words tend to just dissolve into a blur of indistinguishable sounds. So I do most of my language learning outside of ChinesePod, and use it mostly to work on listening comprehension.
For some reason listening comprehension in Chinese is uniquely difficult, for me at least, far more so than in the European languages I’ve studied. Perhaps because there are so many homonyms, or because all syllables tend to have the same length, unlike European languages where syllables of multisyllabic words are spoken much more quickly than in one-syllable words. Chinese characters make reading uniquely challenging, but the advantage is that you can read at your own pace, while listening always has to take place in real time, at the speed of the speaker, which is somehow always too fast. And the homonym problem doesn’t occur with reading, in fact it’s the exact opposite, with a wide diversity in character forms and shapes.
So I can read and understand at a much higher level than I can listen and understand. If I had to learn by listening alone (or if I had to study some language in the Amazon rainforest that had no written form) I probably would have given up a long time ago.
I wonder if others learn languages in the same way (acquiring a reading knowledge before listening comprehension and conversational ability).
hanyu_xuesheng Says:
June 23rd, 2007 at 3:10 am
My learning method since 17 years is the BIRKENBIHL method.
Please read this:
http://195.149.74.241/BIRKENBI.....nglish.pdf
The first step is always to understand the meaning of the words. This is done by a word-by-word translation, created in process called “de-coding”. This process is important because the de-coder (the learner) gets a lot of inside into the language structure and grammar patterns.
The second step is to listen actively and to read the decoded text in parallel, so that the words, their meanings and the pattern can sink into memory.
In a third step - now you understand the text and audio fully- you listen passively while doing other things without consciously listening at all.
Further steps are learning characters, writing them, and more - see the PDF.
Orlando Kelm Says:
June 23rd, 2007 at 7:23 am
Ken,
As to listening, I might add that cpod does a nice job of recycling vocabulary. Especially at the newbie level, I’ve been impressed how some of the same vocabulary words are reused in a new context. (For example, we have seen words like ‘internet’ and ‘wireless’ used differently in at least 5-6 lessons.) I also remember learning the word ‘waimian’ (outside)during the lesson about smoking and then later hearing the word ‘waitan’ when talking about the Bund in Shanghai. It was great to make the association.
Anyway, when it comes to listening, I believe that we learn in chunks and recycling them in new contexts helps to build those chunks.
Bill in AK Says:
June 23rd, 2007 at 9:20 am
Ken,
When I embarked on my journey to learn Chinese I decided to follow in the steps of my now 5 year old daughter. When she was about 3 she started speaking. But well before that she understood. The lesson I learned, was that by being exposed to the language, any language, is primary to picking it up. Even though she couldn’t speak at 2, she definitely understood. She slowly put this together and now talks non-stop, and very loud I might add.
In my study of Chinese, now 10 months long, I’ve only made it to lesson 60. I re-play the lessons just to have more exposure to them. I find that, just like with a song you get stuck in your head, I’ll end up repeating some phrase over and over.
This has been good. I definitely recognize words when I hear them in a new lesson. Sometimes I will know the meaning, sometimes, even though I’ve heard the word, I don’t remember the meaning, and that’s what I need to work on next. So I think I’ve got the sounds and the hearing down, and just need to work on the cognitive part.
I’ll need to remember back and see what conclusions I can draw from my daughters’ experience to help with this next step.
Bill
Ken Carroll Says:
June 23rd, 2007 at 5:30 pm
jpv206,
These are really insightful comments. In the case of Jenny and I you have identified exactly some of the strategies we use to attack those listening subskills, open the synapses, and make connections.
As for Maria’s approach, I won’t try to defend her or otherwise. There’s more than one way to skin a cat and she has her own approach. What I can do, however, is pass on these well-considered points from an observantlanguage learner.
Henning,
You’ve convinced me that mobile listenign (the synthetic bit) may be fundamentally different than desk-bound listening (the analytical bit). Much food for throught here. You’ve also illustrated the difficulty of sustained focus - attention is selective and not under the full control of the individual - no matter where you are.
Jeremy,
Apparently the studies show that most people (if not all people) tend to focus on meaning before structure, and on content words before function words. We’re pre-wired to look for meaning, so it isn’t surprising that your mind gravitates towards those anchors. As for longer passages, we can certainly look at that.
Mr Me,
Apologies if my post lacks clarity.
I think your point about reading is interesting. It’s a true case of different strokes and on your own terms. Do whatever works for you. Some people appraoch a new language without a single written word, but clearly that’s not for everyone. Go with what works for you.
Hanyu_xuesheng,
I’ve heard much about Birkenbihl from German friends and I know it has made a powerful impact on many learners. Thus far, however, I haven’t really had the time to resarch it. On first blush, however, I’m not sure I get it. Decoding is most certainly the first step in listening - receiving the sounds, recognizing the elements, etc. But this is not news - it is the default setting for the human brain. I guess I’m missing soemthing here. I’ll try to do some research over the weekend if I can get the time.
Orlando,
Chunks and recycling are definitely all good!
Bill,
Watching a child learn is one of the most fascinating things you can do. Piaget built a career, and a place in scientific history, by observing his own kids.
There are crucial differences between how they learn and how we grown ups do it, but its a great topic. Your observations are welcome.
Ken Carroll
Eric in Portland Says:
June 25th, 2007 at 1:23 pm
What fascinates me these days is the difference between how I listen to English and how I listen to Mandarin. The fact is that I don’t know how I listen to English, and it feels like if I don’t stop trying to work it out I might end up losing the skill! (Is this the language theory equivalent of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle?). However, I can easily observe what is happening when I hear Mandarin. Like Jeremy says above, it feels like assembling a jig saw puzzle. Unfortunately, I usually fail to get the puzzle together before the speaker has reached the end of the sentence. But it is really exciting when I succeed.
My theory is that what happens when I hear English is reflex. And what happens when I hear Mandarin is not even pre-reflex. So question is how to go from puzzling over words, to reflexively associating meaning.
Most theorists agree on one thing: it takes lots and lots of input. So maybe the more interesting question is what can we do to minimize the amount of input required. [I should probably stop now, but I will go on]. This is the part where is really gets interesting, because each person is different. We each need to find the path on our own. Some people need writing, others are distracted by it. Some need form first, then meaning, etc.
I really appreciate that Ken and company brings together such an eloquent group of language learners, because it is really helpful to see all the different perspectives.
TaiPan Says:
June 27th, 2007 at 4:29 am
Ken,
No time to post a proper response to your questions but I’ll try later. Two things real quick:
I would be interested in what user robertk says about this topic. You should invite him to this thread.
Also, The Fix hits both levels, meaning and form. Add to that the very real third-dimension with Mandarin - Tones.
Tones make spoken mandarin 3-D, not limited to just form and meaning.
Being very aware what goes on in my head, I believe I would be better trained in both form and meaning by a sandwich or club-sandwich format that you use in the newbie/elementary lessons between you and Jenny.
For instance in The Fix(my live thoughts in parentheses):
Amber/Dave says a line: ‘What would you like to eat?’
I say, ‘Nin xihuan chi3 shenme?’
Connie gives the answer, ‘Ni xihuan chi1 sheme?’
(I’m thinking: wow, i got it right but i used a more polite form and i messed up the tone for eat. The grammar was correct, the character, even the word choice but not the vocal expression of it)
…then we’re onto the next line.
If The Fix used a sandwich format by having a blank space after her correct answer, I could correct myself using her answer as the model and really hit the next layer of understanding).
If The Fix had a club sandwich/big mac format on the longer sentences, with her correct answer repeated yet again, I might be able to hit all three meaning, form, and tonal expression.
Great topic.
jonathan