Task-Based Approach to Listening

STEVEN BROWN

Framing the Issue

When considering a task-based approach to listening, we must begin by defining

“task-based” as well as “listening.” Task-based learning has been defined in many
ways (Samuda & Bygate, 2008), but most definitions have in common the follow-
ing features. First, a language-learning task focuses on meaning, not on forms.
That meaning is, ideally, personalized by the learner; the content of the task is
about, or reflects, the learner’s life. Second, a pedagogic task mirrors or anticipates
a real-world task that the learner will engage in outside the classroom. Third, the
learner sees an end point: there is a clear outcome for the task, at which point
the learner knows that the task is completed. The task can be assessed by looking
at the outcome.
“Listening” in the classroom has been defined largely as listening comprehen-
sion. The goal of the listening lesson, in this view, is to comprehend a piece of
audio or something that the teacher says. This is a practice-based view of listening,
which essentially sees listening comprehension as a complex skill that gets built
up through multiple exposures to realistic conversations and, perhaps, lectures.
This view has been characterized by Richards (2005) as “the comprehension
approach.” Richards argues for adding “listening as acquisition” activities to the
classroom mix. These activities would include the learners’ working with the
vocabulary and syntax found in the audio in order to increase their own language-
learning opportunities. Richards’s stages of first listening and then working with
the aural material leave out the many classrooms that include significant instruc-
tion in listening strategies. In fact, though comprehension is the focus of many
commercial materials, many teachers have always adapted lessons so as to include
teaching their students how to listen. Tasks based on comprehension, acquisition,
and strategy use or metacognition all have a place in a task-based approach to
listening.

The TESOL Encyclopedia of English Language Teaching, First Edition.

Edited by John I. Liontas (Project Editor: Margo DelliCarpini).
© 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2018 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
DOI: 10.1002/9781118784235.eelt0613

eelt0613.indd 1 10/31/2017 8:01:39 PM

 2 Task-Based Approach to Listening

Making the Case

Research on listening tasks as tasks has centered on how input is made compre-
hensible (Ellis, 2003) rather than on the efficacy of task-based listening in the
classroom. Nevertheless, a number of claims about tasks in general can be applied
to listening tasks more specifically.
A task-based approach to listening addresses several issues that were raised in
earlier approaches to listening. Early listening lessons were often limited to
answering comprehension questions. Students would hear a conversation and
then answer questions like How many trains are there from London to Paris? What time
does the last train arrive? Because they were almost always asked after rather than
before the listening session, comprehension questions of this kind are now seen as
more of a memory test than as a measure of comprehension. Task-based listening
addresses this issue by alerting the learners about their task before they listen. It
also gives them something to do while listening that minimizes the use of other
skills, such as reading and writing, so that they may focus on listening itself. That
is, rather than reading comprehension questions and writing answers to them,
learners typically write numbers, check a box, or otherwise respond minimally, as
they are more likely to do in real life.
An important problem in listening classes was that teachers could not tell how
learners arrived at their answers. The process of listening goes on inside our
heads and is thus not available for observation. While we still cannot be entirely
certain what goes on in learners’ heads during listening, task-based listening
allows us a window into the process by focusing student responses on those
numbers, boxes, and minimal responses mentioned above rather than on prob-
lematic sentence-length answers. Teachers can then probe the process of listen-
ing. Why did students get the wrong answers that they did? How were the
successful students successful?
Contemporary listening classes see the process of listening as one of active model
building. Listening is not a transfer of information from the speaker to the listener.
Instead, the listener must interpret the speaker’s intent, infer meaning, form and
confirm hypotheses as the conversation continues, and predict the direction that
the conversation will take. Listening is a process of joint meaning making.
Task-based listening responds to this model of listening by offering opportunities
for talking about the listening process itself, either between listenings or at the
post-listening stage. This metalinguistic reflection is, Van den Branden (2012)
argues, a main feature of tasks. Additional important features of tasks, according to
Van den Branden, are that they are relevant to student needs; they are motivating
and challenging; and they facilitate communicative interaction. Tasks are relevant
to learner needs because needs analysis is a central feature of any task-based
approach. Needs analysis in listening must take into account the purpose for
listening (social interaction, information gathering, entertainment, etc.). Needs
analysis may also take into account the distinction between transactional listening
(getting things done, as in buying a movie ticket) and interactional listening (as in
having a friendly conversation) and the distinction between reciprocal listening

eelt0613.indd 2 10/31/2017 8:01:40 PM

 Task-Based Approach to Listening 3

(the kind of listening that we do conversationally) and nonreciprocal listening (the

sort we do by ourselves, as when we listen to the radio). Also involved in needs
analysis are special uses of listening, such as the need for university students to
understand lectures.
Tasks are seen as motivating because they are relevant to what learners will do
in life. Input in task-based listening is realistic. Responses are as close to authentic
as possible: writing down numbers, following a route on a map. Task-based listen-
ing also has the potential for individualization and for mediating difficulty in
ways that lower anxiety. The learner can complete the task alone, at his or her
own pace.
Tasks should be challenging, which implies that the tasks be graded and the
curriculum be sequenced from less difficult to more difficult. Both cognitive and
linguistic difficulties should be taken into account.
Tasks ideally elicit communication. In terms of listening, this can happen when
learners and teachers discuss how the listening task was completed. But programs
often forget about the interactional element in listening. Curriculum developers
tend to think of listening as listening to audio, but listening also goes on in so-
called speaking classes, as learners listen to each other during pair work, for
example.
Finally, tasks are an example of learning by doing, a method with a long, distin-
guished past.

Pedagogical Implications

A task-based approach to listening begins with considerations about the input, the
task, and the learner. The role of authentic input in language learning has been
extensively debated, and this is not the place to continue that discussion. However,
the instructor or materials developer will have to address that issue when choos-
ing or constructing the input. In principle, a task-based approach does not demand
authentic materials for every level of learner, from beginner to advanced, but,
because such an approach tries to connect pedagogical tasks to real-world tasks,
the input should in some fashion reflect what would be heard in the learner’s daily
life. Central to characterizing the input are the following ideas: genre (e.g., narra-
tive, conversation, radio broadcast), familiarity with the topic (and how motivat-
ing the topic is), and amount and density of the information contained in the input.
A task-based approach requires a string of tasks building from one to another.
The response to each task should be appropriate to the nature of the task itself. For
example, any task completed while listening should require minimal reading and
writing, because the learner should be focused on listening and not on some other
skill. If the instructor elects to work with the input through dictation, reading and
writing as well as listening will be appropriate.
Tasks should be graded in terms of difficulty. Brown and Yule (1983) see four
groups of factors that must be taken into account when grading oral and aural
skills: speaker, listener, content, and support. Speaker factors include the number

eelt0613.indd 3 10/31/2017 8:01:40 PM

 4 Task-Based Approach to Listening

of speakers, the speed of speech, and the familiarity of the accents. Listener factors
include the role that the listener plays (e.g., participant or eavesdropper), the level
of required response, and interest or motivation. Content factors are grammar,
vocabulary, information structure, and assumed background knowledge. Support
includes any physical objects, visual aids, or printed texts that help learners under-
stand the input or the task.
In task-based listening, learners must have a purpose for listening. In our daily
lives we make a distinction between hearing something (e.g., the rain on the win-
dow) and listening to something, which implies a more focused activity. When we
listen, we usually have a purpose. Pedagogically, purposes for listening might
include listening for the main idea or the gist of the input or listening for specific
details within the input. Listening tasks also frequently ask learners to infer
the  speakers’ meaning or to assess their purpose (informing, persuading, etc.).
In  the real world, we frequently listen for pleasure as well, and enjoying the
music or the audio tracks of films or television shows is a valid classroom purpose
for listening. Giving learners their purpose for listening focuses their listening
behavior. A useful classroom activity is having learners listen to the same piece of
audio for different purposes each time. This gives them a strategy they can use
outside the classroom.
Providing a purpose for listening in the classroom often exists in combination
with providing the context for what will be heard. When we listen, we not only have
a purpose, but also a context for what we hear. We have expectations about what we
will hear that are based on the speaker, the addressee, the place, the time, the topic,
and what has already been said (Brown & Yule, 1983). Thus the textbook may note:
“Hiroshi is talking to a friend about what they did last night.” It may ask for specific
information about last night’s activities. The listener is thereby better prepared for a
successful completion of the task. She has a context and a goal for the task.
Purpose and context serve to frame the pre-listening activity of a given lesson.
Pre-listening often includes schema-activating activities. Schemata are abstract
mental representations based on prior experience. They constitute our background
knowledge, in other words. Listening comprehension is facilitated by process of
our linking what we hear to what we already know. In the classroom, teachers
allow time for the learners to figure out what vocabulary they know about a topic.
They also pre-teach the vocabulary needed for comprehension, if necessary. It is
possible that knowledge of particular grammatical structures or pragmatic rou-
tines would be useful for facilitating comprehension, too; and in that case the
teacher should pre-teach those as well. The pre-listening vocabulary, grammar,
and pragmatic tasks may also be geared to the purpose of listening. For example,
if the purpose is to listen for specific information, a vocabulary task might be par-
ticularly relevant. If the context is taking a trip to a particular country, information
about that country might be part of the pre-listening tasks.
Having a purpose for listening can be linked to motivation to listen to a particu-
lar piece of audio. Motivation may come from input with interesting content,
which is relevant to learners’ lives. It may arise from the activation of a schema,

eelt0613.indd 4 10/31/2017 8:01:40 PM

 Task-Based Approach to Listening 5

which may in turn involve (a) a discussion of what the class knows individually
and collectively about the topic or (b) a game based on the topic.
Next in the series of tasks in task-based listening are the tasks of the during-
listening phase. We have already seen that minimal responses are the norm in this
approach. Learners demonstrate comprehension by responding directly to input.
Reading, writing, and speaking demands are kept to a minimum. The teacher has
several options at this stage. Decisions must be made as to the number of times the
input is given and the audio played. General practice is to give learners two or
three opportunities to listen, depending on their proficiency level and the diffi-
culty of the input. Some commercial materials offer a different reason for listening
for each repetition of the input, and this is something that teachers might consider.
The first listening might require learners to come up with the main idea, while the
second might ask for details. A first listening to a song might require students to
fill in a version of the lyrics missing with words or phrases, while the second
listening might be for pure enjoyment.
A metacognitive approach to task-based listening (Vandergrift & Goh, 2012)
would include in this larger series of pre-listening and while-listening tasks
opportunities for learners to reflect on their learning. At the pre-listening stage,
in addition to (a) seeing the purpose and context of the listening task and
(b) working with the vocabulary, routines, and structures necessary for the suc-
cessful completion of the task, learners can be given an opportunity to make a
plan for listening that is based in part on the listener’s purpose, the context of
listening, and the learner’s prior knowledge. For example, if the listening task is
to locate and label buildings on a map on the basis of conversations overheard
between a series of strangers who were asking for and giving directions, learners
may first orient themselves to the map, note the blank spaces for writing the
building names or numbers, and decide that their task is to listen for specific
information: names of stores, names of streets, and the words “right” and “left.”
They are thinking strategically about how they will approach the task. Between
listenings, then, the teacher would ask the students how their approach was
working and in what ways they needed to revise their plan or their general
understanding of the input.
Similarly, the post-listening stage could continue with the metacognitive
approach, which evaluates the learners’ success in listening. Also typical of the
post-listening stage of a task-based approach to listening is the addition of (a) a
speaking activity linked to the topic; (b) structures of the listening input; or,
increasingly, (c) activities of acquisition such as working with the transcripts of the
input in order to make students focus on the language used in the input.

SEE ALSO: Comprehensible Input; Listening Activities; Listening Processes;

Metacognition in Second Language Listening; Needs Analysis; Task-Based
Approach to Listening; Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT); Taxonomies of
Listening Skills; Text Types in Listening; Texts for Listening Instruction and
Assessment

eelt0613.indd 5 10/31/2017 8:01:40 PM

 6 Task-Based Approach to Listening

References

Brown, G., & Yule, G. (1983). Teaching the spoken language. Cambridge, England: Cambridge
University Press.
Ellis, R. (2003). Task-based language learning and teaching. Oxford, England: Oxford
University Press.
Richards, J. C. (2005). Second thoughts on teaching listening. RELC Journal, 36, 85–92.
doi:10.1177/0033688205053484
Samuda, V., & Bygate, M. (2008). Tasks in second language learning. Basingstoke, England:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Van den Branden, K. (2012). Task-based language education. In A. Burns & J. C. Richards
(Eds.), The Cambridge guide to pedagogy and practice in second language teaching (pp. 132–9).
Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Vandergrift, L., & Goh, C. C. M. (2012). Teaching and learning second language listening:
Metacognition in action. New York, NY: Routledge.

Suggested Readings

Brown, S. (2011). Listening myths. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
Field, J. (2008). Listening in the language classroom. Cambridge, England: Cambridge
University Press.
Rost, M. (2016). Teaching and researching listening (3rd ed.). New York, NY: Routledge.

eelt0613.indd 6 10/31/2017 8:01:40 PM