Listening as Acquisition

Jack C. Richards' 2005 argument that the dominant model of L2 listening instruction, which treats listening and listening comprehension as the same thing, leaves out a second role listening plays in language development. The comprehension model teaches learners to extract meaning; the acquisition model treats the same listening text as raw material for expanding the learner's linguistic repertoire. Both belong in a general English course.

The comprehension orthodoxy Richards questions

Richards summarises the consensus that has shaped listening materials for roughly two decades, including his own earlier writing:

• Listening serves the goal of extracting meaning from messages.
• Learners need both top-down and bottom-up processing to arrive at meaning.
• The exact words, syntax, and expressions of utterances are temporary carriers of meaning. Once meaning is identified, there is no further need to attend to form.

Under this orthodoxy, tasks include gist questions, selective listening, picture identification, sequencing, true/false, and summary. Activities that require accurate recall of the linguistic surface, such as dictation, cloze, or spotting spoken-written differences, are discouraged as "listening for words rather than listening for meaning." The dominant lesson shape is John Field's pre-listening, while-listening, post-listening sequence.

Richards accepts this for situations where comprehension is the only plausible goal: listening to lectures, announcements, sales presentations, service encounters. He questions it for general English or integrated-skills courses, where the text has more to offer than its message.

The acquisition argument

The complementary perspective pulls together four strands from SLA theory:

• Noticing (Schmidt 1990): learners do not acquire from input they merely understand. They acquire from input they register some feature of. "Consciousness of features of the input can serve as a trigger which activates the first stage in the process of incorporating new linguistic features into one's language competence."
• Input versus intake (Schmidt 1990): intake is the subset of input the learner notices. Only intake feeds development.
• Comprehensible input extended: Richards observes that the input most likely to become intake is "one or two steps ahead" of the learner. A fully native-speaker level is often too linguistically complex to be retainable. Krashen's i + 1 is reframed here as a question of appropriate difficulty for intake rather than for comprehension alone.
• Restructuring and stretched output (Van Patten 1993; Tarone and Liu 1995): noticing is necessary but not sufficient. Learners also need contexts that push them to use noticed items in production, forcing the interlanguage system to accommodate new material.

If these are the mechanisms, a listening class that ends once meaning is extracted has done only half the work. The text was also a carrier of noticeable form and a basis for stretched output.

The two-part cycle

Richards proposes grafting an acquisition phase onto the comprehension lesson. The listening text used for meaning in Phase 1 is reused in Phase 2 for language awareness and productive practice.

Phase 1: listening as comprehension

The standard Field-style pre-listening, while-listening, post-listening sequence. Handled as usual: set context, gist task, intensive task, check, functional-language or vocabulary follow-up. See Planning a Focus on Listening for Thornbury's expanded six-stage version.

Phase 2: listening as acquisition

Two activity types, in order.

a) Noticing activities. Return to the same recording with the learner's attention redirected from message to form.

• Identify differences between the recording and a printed version of the text.
• Complete a cloze version of the text.
• Complete sentence stems taken from the text.
• Check off, from a supplied list, expressions that occurred in the text.

b) Restructuring activities. Productive tasks that use selected items from the text.

• Pair reading of the tapescript (for conversational texts).
• Written sentence-completion requiring expressions and linguistic items from the text.
• Dialogue practice based on dialogues that incorporate items from the text.
• Role plays that require learners to use key language from the text.

Noticing feeds intake; restructuring pushes the learner toward productive use of what has been noticed.

Two warnings

Richards closes with two practical cautions that are easy to underestimate.

First, the acquisition phase is not a test. Teachers who over-correct this way risk reverting to a testing approach where listening texts exist only to be identified accurately, collapsing the comprehension phase that preceded it.

Second, noticing and restructuring activities bore learners quickly if they run on one format. Richards cites his own As I Was Saying (Richards and Hull 1986), where a cycle of role-play, then listening to native speakers perform the same role-play, then form-identification, lost learner motivation almost immediately. Once learners have done the role-play themselves, replaying it has little pull. The materials-writing challenge is to make noticing tasks as varied and engaging as the comprehension tasks they follow.

Implications for lesson design

• Diagnose the course purpose first. Comprehension-only is defensible for lecture listening, announcements, and transactional listening. A general English course needs both phases.
• Pick texts at the right stretch. Native-speaker input that far outpaces the learner supports comprehension practice but rarely produces intake. Texts "one or two steps ahead" of the current repertoire are better candidates for the acquisition phase.
• Plan reuse of the text. The same recording should front-load as a meaning-bearing object in Phase 1 and a language object in Phase 2. This mirrors the TAVI to TALO trajectory Thornbury warns coursebooks tend to collapse.
• Vary the noticing format across lessons. Cloze, differences, sentence stems, and expression checklists should rotate so no single format dominates.
• Build in restructuring, not just noticing. Without productive follow-up, noticed items are unlikely to be incorporated. Pair reading, role plays, and sentence-completion tasks provide the stretched output that anchors intake into the interlanguage.

Relation to other Atlas entries

• Planning a Focus on Listening covers Thornbury's version of the comprehension phase in detail.
• Pre-listening While-listening Post-listening is the underlying staging model Richards assumes for Phase 1.
• Noticing and Noticing Hypothesis give the SLA backing for Phase 2a.
• Restructuring and Output Hypothesis give the SLA backing for Phase 2b.
• Input discusses the input/intake distinction Richards leans on.

Reference

Richards, J. C. (2005). Second thoughts on teaching listening. RELC Journal, 36(1), 85–92. See Richards_2005_Second-Thoughts-Teaching-Listening.