Two-Way Listening
YONGQI GU
Framing the Issue
Two-way listening is also known as interactive listening, interactional listening,
reciprocal listening, participatory listening, or collaborative listening. It refers to
listening in a communicative situation where the listener is interacting with at
least one other person. Two-way listening is distinguished from one-way listening, which is often referred to as transactional listening. In one-way listening, the
purpose of listening is message- or content-oriented, such as in listening to news
broadcasts or lectures. In two-way listening, on the other hand, the purpose is
people-oriented. Many times the message can be partially inaudible or not
completely understood, and yet the conversation goes on happily as a vehicle for
maintaining social coherence.
The distinction originates from discourse analysis, where two principal functions of language, that is, transaction and interaction, are distinguished based on
communicative purposes (Brown & Yule, 1983). Other similar functional dichotomies include “representative vs. expressive,” “referential vs. emotive,” “ideational
vs. interpersonal,” and “descriptive vs. social-expressive” (p. 1). TESOL scholars
(e.g., Richards, 1990) have found the distinction useful in terms of conceptualizing
the target task of learning to listen in a second language.
Complex processes are involved in two-way listening, from disambiguating and
decoding speech sounds, to meaning-making, to detecting potential hidden intentions, and to deploying strategies to maintain conversation and social harmony. As
in one-way listening, the two-way listener should be able to
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perceive speech sounds, segments, lexical boundaries, stresses, and prosodic
features,
decode word meanings and contextual meanings,
process the meanings decoded and integrate them with top-down anticipations, hypothesize, and
synthesize and comprehend the overall message.
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.eelt0578
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Two-Way Listening
In addition, due to the social as well as ephemeral nature of two-way listening
tasks, the listener has to quickly complete the following:
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perceive intentions behind literal meanings;
detect lack of comprehension or miscommunication;
deploy language use strategies such as clarification requests to solve detected
problems;
exercise social skills such as turn-taking, or starting and ending a conversation; and
deploy communication strategies (e.g., verbal back-channeling, affirmative
feedback; non-verbal smiling, nodding, eye contact, hand gestures and shrugging) so that the social relationship between/among the interlocutors is maintained as desired.
This may already sound like an overwhelming number of skills needed for the
learner and user of English as a second language. However, in today’s globalized
world where English is increasingly used as an international language, the twoway listener is often confronted with conversation partners from multilingual and
multicultural backgrounds. In addition to the skills listed above and a flexible ear
to accommodate a variety of accents, inter-cultural communicative competence
and inter-cultural problem-solving strategies are often needed in order to maintain social harmony in these situations.
Effective two-way listening involves the listener playing two interactive and
dynamic roles in communication: the listener and the speaker. Five distinctive
components can be identified in a two-way listening cycle: receive, comprehend,
interpret, evaluate, and respond (Thompson, Leintz, Nevers, & Witkowski, 2004).
All five components are present in each instance of two-way listening, although
the listener’s emphasis may be placed on one or more of the components based on
the listener’s judgment of the purpose and context. In a serious debate, for example, the listener must focus on interpreting and evaluating the speaker’s message
and logic before presenting his/her own response. In a friendly conversation,
however, judgmental evaluations will play a minor role. Instead, responding
appropriately and in the right time and manner will be much more important.
Even in a debate among friends involving a fair amount of evaluation, deciding on
what, when, and how to respond becomes crucial in order not to rock the
friendly boat.
Making the Case
Listening is a skill crucial to human communication, and needs to be learned.
Nevertheless, it is so basic and ubiquitous that we often take it for granted. In this
sense, a distinction needs to be made between hearing and listening, in the sense
that the former is an ability most people are born with while the latter needs
learning and practice. Being able to hear is a prerequisite for sound perception
and decoding, but it does not guarantee comprehension, nor will it guarantee
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communication. Communication problems often occur with listening in our first
language; it is even more of a problem in second language learning.
In real-life situations, two-way listening happens most of the time, even in some
listening situations where we would normally consider to be typical of one-way
listening. For example, in listening to lectures, the audience may need to ask questions or provide comments. In the second language classroom, many teachers
would equate listening ability with listening comprehension; and most classroom
activities directed at the teaching of listening would focus on sound perception
and interpretation rather than the “enacting skills” for two-way communication
(Vandergrift, 1997). As Rost (1990) puts it, “language is fundamentally a form of
human social action … realized as interlinked patterns of activity between interlocutors, rather than as a representational correspondence of ideas” (p. 155). In
order to develop the listening ability fully, “the listener must experience ‘intake’ of
language in its interpersonal domain: the listener must experience directly the
effects of language understanding” (p. 155). Therefore, “regular classroom practice
that equips students with useful reception strategies would facilitate the development of interactive listening skills and further enhance L2 learning” (Vandergrift,
1997, p. 494).
Indeed, research on listening strategies has demonstrated the usefulness of
strategies for two-way listening. Rost and Ross (1991) elicited the questioning
strategies used by a group of Japanese learners of English while listening to a
story. They found that their high proficiency listeners were more likely to use
forward inference (inferring how what has been heard is related to whole story;
asking a question using information provided by speaker) and continuation
signals (verbal or non-verbal indication to go on); whereas the low-proficiency
listeners used more lexical reprise (either asking about a specific word just heard,
or trying to repeat the word with a rising intonation) and global reprise (asking
for a repetition of preceding information). Similar patterns were found in
Vandergrift’s (1997) study of high school learners of French in Canada in a testlike interview. The novice listeners were found to rely heavily on overt kinetic
body language to indicate non-understanding, accompanied by frequent global
reprises. These strategies gradually decreased as the proficiency level increased,
till a point when they almost disappeared at the intermediate level. At the
advanced level, listeners no longer needed to signal lack of understanding.
“They could pinpoint more precisely where they needed help in comprehension
or they could verify comprehension when they wished to check their current
level of understanding of the discourse” (p. 501). In other words, “their greater
facility with the language allowed them to become more involved partners in
interactional listening.”
As has been argued earlier, high levels of second language proficiency will not
necessarily entail skills in smooth communication. Non-comprehension and
misunderstandings can happen at all levels of proficiency. When this happens,
being able to deploy strategies to arrive at a fuller understanding, to resolve
misunderstanding, and to maintain social harmony, is a set of complex skills that
need to be learned. While it is true that listeners’ use of strategies is constrained
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Two-Way Listening
by their current level of proficiency in the second language, researchers also agree
that teaching listening strategies can empower learners by providing them with
useful tools for solving communication problems and enhancing interpersonal
communication. Indeed, Rost and Ross (1991) taught questioning strategies to a
group of learners, and found that “strategies used by more proficient listeners can
in fact be taught to learners who might otherwise not normally attempt to use
them” (p. 266).
Pedagogical Implications
Inside the second language classroom, decisions as to the what and how of
instruction are very much dependent upon the teachers’ knowledge of who their
students are, what purposes of listening represent the students’ target tasks of
language use, and what difficulties and problems the students normally encounter during two-way listening. For example, low-level listeners may benefit from
knowledge of auditory phonetics in terms of classifying, diagnosing, and predicting problems in lexical segmentation (Field, 2003). However, if perceptual
processing is not so much a problem as the lack of communication strategies,
low-proficiency learners should also benefit from being taught lexical reprise,
that is, asking a question about a specific unknown word in the preceding conversation (Rost & Ross, 1991). In the context of two-way listening, immediate clarification requests may well help the low-proficiency listener reduce the cognitive
and anxiety burden for instantaneous response and achieve social coherence at
the same time.
In addition to assessing the learners’ background information, their purposes
for listening, and a diagnostic assessment of learner listening needs, it should be
good if teachers become aware of a range of typical tasks for two-way listening,
and know how strategy instruction can best be done to ensure smooth two-way
communication. Being able to make informed choices is a prerequisite for differentiated instruction.
Typical Two-Way Listening Tasks
Typical tasks for two-way listening involve oral interactions with an emphasis
being placed on the input side of the interaction (Vandergrift & Goh, 2012).
Vandergrift and Goh (2012) introduced six types of interactive tasks. (a)
Creative dictation: each student holds an incomplete version of the same text.
Pairs or groups then dictate their version to their partners and finish the whole
piece by negotiation. (b) Description: each student has a drawing or a piece of
written text that their partners do not have. They then listen to each other’s
descriptions and draw the picture or write up the text. (c) Simulation: groups
of students take on roles in a simulated situation to discuss an issue or solve a
problem. (d) Discussion: students form discussion groups to voice their
opinions or suggest solutions to a problem. Unlike in simulation, they do not
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have to take on simulated roles. (e) Role play interview: Pairs of students play
the roles of an interviewer and an interviewee on a selected topic. (f) Presentation
or debate: Students listen to a presentation or a debate, take notes, and ask
questions.
Another interesting list of two-way listening tasks was derived from typical
interactive listening tasks summarized from 34 English language tests (Guan
& Jin, 2010). Guan and Jin’s list also included six major task types: conversation, information exchange, role play, discussion, interactive task, and collaborative task. Since test tasks are meant to cover target language use tasks in
real-life scenarios (Bachman & Palmer, 1996), teachers interested in teaching
two-way listening will find test tasks involving interactive listening equally
useful.
Conversations in settings where the interlocutors involved are of relatively balanced status are excellent tasks to practice two-way listening. In an unbalanced
power relationship, of course, a conversation can turn into a question-and-answer
session where the listener’s responses become unnatural. Conversations involving
two vs. more interlocutors will demand different two-way listening skills (e.g., in
turn-taking), so do face-to-face conversations vs. conversations on the phone. It is
known that students who learn English as a foreign language to a very high level
in the classroom often find it difficult to hold a friendly conversation or to make a
phone call in English. For these students, various semi-authentic conversation
tasks can be introduced to the classroom to help them with the two-way listening
skills they need.
The information exchange task, by definition, involves an information gap
between the listener and the speaker. In an information exchange task, each side
holds partial information and needs to ask and answer multiple questions to negotiate meaning in order to jointly produce the full picture. Unless the gap is onesided, in which case one party is the main speaker, and the other party is the main
listener, two-sided, jigsaw types of information gaps tend to elicit extended listening input and listener-speaker interactions. An example for teaching can be cutting
a picture into two pieces. A pair of students each holding a piece then negotiate
with each other to draw the complete picture.
Role plays are another type of task that can be used for the training of two-way
listening. In a role play, there is normally a communicative situation with a communicative goal to be achieved, with the real-life roles played by the interlocutors
involved. Doctor-patient, sales person-customer, tour guide-tourist, for example,
are among the many roles that learners can play to elicit questioning and requests,
answers and elaborations that are dependent on extended listening in a two-way
situation.
Discussions necessitate the exchange of information, ideas, and opinions.
Discussion tasks inside the TESOL classroom prepare students for academic discussions and other types of discussions among friends and classmates. In a discussion, listening is very much two-way and interactive. Each side not only tries to
understand each other’s points; they will have to evaluate these points and
respond in socially and emotionally appropriate ways. In such a task, all elements
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Two-Way Listening
of two-way listening are involved in the negotiation of meanings, opinions, and
social roles.
An interactive task usually starts with an oral prompt by an interlocutor, and
this happens frequently in interviews. The listener’s role is to respond to the
prompt by asking clarification questions to find out more or by making comments
to voice his/her opinion. Depending on how this is done, the listener begins with
reception, comprehension, and interpretation, and may or may not end up doing
much evaluation and responding.
In a collaborative task, a pair of students can be first given different visual
stimuli to share, and then asked to carry out a joint decision-making task based on
the shared information. Collaborative tasks involve a communicative purpose and
listener-speaker negotiations. Interlocutors begin with interactive listening to
make sense of the task, and keep extended negotiations in order to get the decision-making task completed. For example, the pair can be given different or partial
clues to find “hidden treasure.” They have to listen to each other carefully, synthesize the information, think-together, and negotiate plans and routes to get the
task done.
All the two-way listening tasks above involve two parties, listeners and speakers. The purposes of these tasks include information exchange, opinion exchange,
socializing, and other real-life functional uses of two-way listening. These tasks
overlap, and have traditionally been used mainly as speaking tasks (Goh & Burns,
2012). Classroom teachers can assign different roles to their students based on an
assessment of student needs. In a customer complaint, for example, the customer
support role is more on the receptive side than the customer doing the complaining who, in turn, does more speaking than listening. In a customer-consultant role
play, on the other hand, the customer would be doing more listening than speaking. Friendly conversations would provide balanced roles, but demand more
empathizing ears and socially pleasant listening skills.
Strategy Instruction
Strategic listening can serve two purposes: Proactive listening strategies prevent
listening problems, and reactive listening strategies help the listener get around a
problem and complete the communication task (Gu, 2017). Preparing for an important listening task, anticipating potential problems, and planning for solutions
offload much of the cognitive burden for spontaneous processing. Monitoring the
listening process and detecting problems such as misunderstanding will help the
listener stay on task. Evaluating the listening at the end of the task gives the listener
an opportunity to reflect on how s/he can become a better listener in the future.
Vandergrift (1997) suggested three steps in strategy instruction.
1. Provide useful expressions for clarifying meaning and confirming comprehension, for example, Pardon me? I didn’t catch that last word. Can you give me
an example?
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2. Use training videos where different reception strategies in a two-way listening
task are demonstrated, and
3. Model and practice reception strategies in class.
A similar but more formalized procedure for strategy instruction has been found
useful. The cognitive academic language learning approach (CALLA) designed by
Chamot and her colleagues (Chamot, Barnhardt, El-Dinary, & Robbins, 1999) proposed a five-stage cycle involving preparation, presentation, practice, evaluation,
and expansion. With this model, a strategy or a cluster of useful strategies need to
be identified first. Then the first steps can be followed. From the time when the
learners start to learn a strategy to the point when they can use the strategy when
needed, the responsibility for strategy use gradually shifts from the teacher to the
learner.
Two-way listening is a set of complex skills that are often neglected in language
learning. Thompson et al. (2004) showcased how instruction of two-way listening
strategies could even help native speakers become better listeners. Richards (1990)
listed a number of exercises that can be used to enhance the second language
learner’s bottom-up and top-down listening skills for two-way listening.
Classroom teachers can start from an assessment of their students’ listening problems and needs, and make informed choices as to what they can do best to support
their students in learning and communicating.
SEE ALSO: Teaching Listening Strategies; Types of Listening
References
Bachman, L. F., & Palmer, A. S. (1996). Language testing in practice: Designing and developing
useful language tests. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
Brown, G., & Yule, G. (1983). Discourse analysis. Cambridge, England: Cambridge
University Press.
Chamot, A. U., Barnhardt, S., El-Dinary, P. B., & Robbins, J. (1999). The learning strategies
handbook. White Plains, NY: Longman.
Field, J. (2003). Promoting perception: Lexical segmentation in L2 listening. ELT Journal,
57(4), 325–34.
Goh, D. C. C. M., & Burns, A. (2012). Teaching speaking: A holistic approach. New York, NY:
Cambridge University Press.
Gu, Y. (2017). Approaches to learning strategy instruction. In A. U. Chamot & V. Harris
(Eds.), Learning strategy instruction in the language classroom: Issues and implementation.
Clevedon, England: Multilingual Matters.
Guan, X., & Jin, Y. (2010). Interactive listening: Construct definition and operationalization
in tests of English as a foreign language. Chinese Journal of Applied Linguistics, 33(6), 16–39.
Richards, J. C. (1990). The language teaching matrix. Cambridge, England: Cambridge
University Press.
Rost, M. (1990). Listening in language learning. London: Longman.
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Rost, M., & Ross, S. (1991). Learner use of strategies in interaction: Typology and teachability.
Language Learning, 41(2), 235–73.
Thompson, K., Leintz, P., Nevers, B., & Witkowski, S. (2004). The integrative listening
model: An approach to teaching and learning listening. The Journal of General Education,
53(3/4), 225–46.
Vandergrift, L. (1997). The Cinderella of communication strategies: Reception strategies in
interactive listening. The Modern Language Journal, 81(4), 494–505.
Vandergrift, L., & Goh, C. C. M. (2012). Teaching and learning second language listening:
Metacognition in action. New York: Routledge.
Suggested Reading
Rost, M. (2011). Teaching and researching listening (2nd ed.). Harlow, England: Longman.