Can You Really “Teach” Language Listening Comprehension?

As a former French teacher, I have a hot take: the hardest language skill to teach isn’t what you think. It’s not the subjunctive or conjugations of irregular verbs. It’s not how to read, write, or—despite what you may think—speak the language.

No, the most challenging language skill to teach is actually listening to (and understanding) the language. 

Listening is an invisible cognitive process, and as a teacher, I can’t observe it inside a student’s mind. I can’t guide the process like I can guide their reading, writing, or even speaking skills.

Those skills offer more concrete evidence of internal processes. I can more confidently extrapolate the underlying cause of a reading, writing, or speaking error than I can when it comes to listening comprehension. How would I even know if a student has misunderstood something until or unless they’re prompted to respond to it? 

I think that’s why so many language teachers view listening—consciously or not—as a more “passive” skill that cannot be taught and is instead developed naturally through speaking and writing. While speaking and writing can help strengthen listening comprehension, it is incorrect to assume listening is anything resembling passive. 

Listening is a skill that should be taught

When students aren’t taught how to listen, any listening activity they encounter is essentially just testing their existing ability to understand spoken language. This has the unintended consequence of keeping students stuck within that existing ability, never able to grow their threshold in any meaningful way. When students get stuck at a comprehension level, they tend to experience more anxiety and feel less confident as they progress through the language. 

And we see evidence of this time and time again. It’s one thing to have a high score on a mobile language app, but quite another to be dropped in the middle of that target language’s home culture. You may be able to understand the phrase “The Loch Ness monster drinks whiskey,” but without more explicit listening instruction, you’re unlikely to understand a server asking how you’d like your steak cooked or a concierge advising you on seedy parts of town. 

The bottom line: we must be more purposeful in teaching listening as a skill, rather than treating it as a byproduct. 

How to teach listening comprehension

Bottom-up and top-down approaches 

I read the research so you don’t have to, and here’s what I discovered: many of the best practices identified by our second-language acquisition (SLA) researchers are intuitive. Here are some examples. 

I always encouraged my French students to listen to music, podcasts, and audiobooks outside of class. I told them I didn’t care if they understood anything they heard, either. I just wanted them to become more familiar with where French words began and ended, and how sentences sounded and flowed. 

Turns out, this suggestion effectively captures the “bottom-up" approaches of listening instruction, wherein teachers instruct students to focus on word segmentation (where words begin and end) and prosodic features, like stress and intonation. Granted, my suggestion didn’t include enough accountability or structure to count as a true “bottom-up” listening approach, but if you provide specific and measurable exercises that develop these skills, it would. 

Then, there are “top-down" approaches, which focus on the metacognitive skills that aid in listening comprehension. In top-down approaches, students reflect on personal factors (like anxiety or auditory processing issues), task purpose, and learned strategies to help them make meaning of spoken language. 

I didn’t know I was taking a top-down approach at the time, but a good example of this is when I used to advise my AP French students on how to approach the exam’s persuasive essay task. 

I would always remind them that Source 1 (the article) and Source 3 (the audio excerpt) nearly always offer opposing viewpoints, whereas Source 2 (the infographic) is nearly always neutral. By giving them this framework, I bolstered their metacognitive awareness of the task, which helped them better comprehend the audio source. 

So, bottom-up and top-down approaches are at least somewhat intuitive for experienced language teachers. But in isolation—or without intentionality—they aren’t transformative. Instead, researchers suggest combining them, and that is anything but intuitive.

The combined model

The combined bottom-up and top-down model features some unique elements based on findings that collaboration and purposeful sequencing boost overall listening comprehension. I’ll spare you some of the more nuanced and jargon-y justifications for the seven steps of this model, but they are prevalent throughout SLA research and listening instruction articles. 

Here is what the exact sequence research recommends to teach listening comprehension effectively. This sequence is not intended for listening assessments (which have their own domain in the research) but instead for everyday listening practice with an individual audio sample.

Listening comprehension activity framework

Adapted from "Stages of Listening Instruction and Related Metacognitive Processes" (Figure 2.2) in “Teaching and Testing Listening Comprehension”  by Larry Vandergrift and Christine Goh.

1. Pre-listening
   Establish the topic and text type with students, then ask them to predict the kind of information and possible vocabulary they may hear. 
    
2. First listen
   During the first listen, students should attempt to verify their prediction, correct it as necessary, and note any additional information they understand. 
    
3. Debrief
   After the first listen, students should compare their notes with peers, modify them as required, and choose an area for concentration during the next listen.
    
4. Second listen
   Students should concentrate on areas of the audio text where they may have disagreed with their peers or aspects of the text that they did not understand during the first listen.
    
5. Reconstruction
   After the second listen, the teacher convenes a class discussion in which all students contribute to reconstructing the listening sample’s main ideas. The teacher should inquire how students attributed meaning to certain words or parts of the audio.
    
6. Final listen
   Students listen to the audio a third time, specifically listening for information revealed in the class discussion that they may not have deciphered earlier. Alternatively, they may listen for discrepancies between the audio and a transcription of the text (like a student-generated dictation transcript or teacher-provided transcript).
    
7. Reflection
   Students reflect on the activity and write goals for strategies they’ll use next time. Alternatively, a class discussion focused on discrepancies between the audio text and its transcript (student-generated or teacher-provided). 
    

By guiding students through these seven steps, they will understand the target language more in the short term,  improve their listening processes, and have greater success in the long run.

Yes, you can teach listening comprehension

Don’t leave your student’s interpretive listening skills to chance. Draw from both your intuition as a professional and the SLA research being done in higher education to improve listening outcomes in your classroom. 

Far from being a passive skill dependent on a student’s existing skillset, listening is an active process that can be guided and honed by structure exposure to genuine target language speech. 

So yes, you can teach listening comprehension. And you should.

Looking for a world language curriculum that actively supports listening instruction?