Process Approach to Listening
The process approach is Field's (2008) alternative to the dominant "comprehension approach" in L2 listening instruction. Where the comprehension approach tests whether learners understood a text through gist and detail questions, the process approach diagnoses where in the processing chain comprehension broke down and designs targeted micro-practice at that level. It does not replace comprehension work; it supplements it with process-focused instruction driven by diagnostic information from the comprehension task itself.
The critique it answers
Field (2008) argues that the comprehension approach — activate schema, pre-teach vocabulary, play the audio, answer the questions, check the answers — tests listening but does not teach it. Learners who get an item wrong learn only that they were wrong, not why or how to improve. Heavy top-down scaffolding in the pre-stage lets them produce correct answers through compensation, masking the perceptual failure beneath. Thornbury's Z is for Zero Uncertainty is the teacher-facing version of the same critique.
The diagnostic cycle
- Task. Learners attempt a comprehension task in the normal way.
- Diagnose. After checking answers, the teacher identifies the level at which processing failed using Field's three-stage model (see below).
- Target. Replay the specific segment where errors occurred. Design or select a micro-activity addressing that level (phoneme discrimination, word segmentation, parsing, or inference).
- Re-engage. Re-listen, this time with the targeted difficulty resolved.
The core move is perception verification: after answer-checking, replay the exact segment and work on the decoding challenge, rather than re-explaining the passage.
Field's processing model
| Stage | Process | Typical L2 breakdown |
|---|---|---|
| Perception | Decoding acoustic input into phonemes and words | Cannot recognise known words in the stream of speech |
| Parsing | Assembling words into grammatical structures | Hears words but cannot build propositions fast enough |
| Utilisation | Integrating propositions using world knowledge | Understands sentences but misses the discourse-level point |
Most L2 classroom listening failure is at the perception stage (Goh 2000): learners do not hear what they know. The process approach makes this diagnosis operational in the lesson rather than leaving it implicit.
Relation to other frameworks
- Comprehension approach (traditional, pre-listening → while-listening → post-listening in a single comprehension-check cycle): the process approach reuses the same staging but adds a diagnostic loop after answer-checking.
- Vandergrift & Goh's metacognitive sequence: complementary. The metacognitive sequence trains learners to plan, monitor, and evaluate their own listening; the process approach trains the teacher to diagnose and intervene.
- Cauldwell's "bottom-up before top-up" (2013, 2018): aligned. Cauldwell pushes for systematic perceptual training before compensatory strategies are asked to carry the load.
Practical implications
- Every listening lesson should include some process-focused instruction, not only comprehension questions.
- When a comprehension item goes wrong, the first intervention is to replay the exact segment, not to paraphrase the passage.
- Build a repertoire of micro-activities tied to each processing level: Bottom-Up Listening Repair for perception, targeted parsing exercises for syntax, inference tasks for utilisation.
- Treat the transcript as a teaching tool, not a crutch: post-task, learners compare what they heard with what was said, noticing where their decoding failed.
- Keep process-focused stages short (5–10 minutes) and regular rather than long and occasional.
References
- Cauldwell, R. (2013). Phonology for Listening: Teaching the Stream of Speech. Speech in Action.
- Cauldwell, R. (2018). A Syllabus for Listening: Decoding. Speech in Action.
- Field, J. (2003). Promoting perception: Lexical segmentation in L2 listening. ELT Journal, 57(4), 325–334.
- Field, J. (2008). Listening in the Language Classroom. Cambridge University Press.
- Goh, C. (2000). A cognitive perspective on language learners' listening comprehension problems. System, 28(1), 55–75.
- Vandergrift, L. & Goh, C. (2012). Teaching and Learning Second Language Listening: Metacognition in Action. Routledge.