The ability to comprehend spoken forms of a target language is a crucial factor for second language development and yet in many EFL curricula, the explicit teaching of listening skills draws little pedagogical attention. As noted by well-known linguist David Nunan, listening is the Cinderella skill in second language learning, always overlooked for its elder sister— speaking.
Teachers and curricula tend to focus on grammar or vocabulary, leaving listening skills to develop on their own. However, when students in Japan are not given instruction into how English is naturally enunciated, they struggle to comprehend the meaning. And, given that language needs to be comprehended for it to lead to acquisition, this deprives many language learners of opportunities to further learn.
Firstly, being able to listen and comprehend a foreign language requires an understanding of that foreign language’s sound system. Secondly, the phonologies of human language are not universal constants. English, for example, is a stress-timed and has a regular rhythm pattern. That is, stressed syllables in salient words tend to occur at regular intervals.
However, not all languages are stress-timed. There are syllable-timed languages such as Korean, where the time between each syllable is roughly equal. In addition, there are also mora-timed languages such as Japanese, where the time needed to pronounce each mora is roughly equal. These languages are phonologically very different from English.
English is even by prominent syllable, and the tendency for salient word to be prominent at regular intervals, irrespective of the actual number of syllables between prominence, results in function words being reduced to accommodate the regular spacing of syllable prominence.
As a result, syllable-timed and mora-timed languages often lack many of the common suprasegmental phonological features found in English. For Japanese learners, the phonological structure of Japanese can interfere with the comprehension of naturally spoken English.
Listening skills can broadly be divided into two categories: bottom-up decoding and top-down interpretation. Bottom-up decoding refers to the process of decoding and assigning meaning to auditory input. Top-down interpretation describes the process of using knowledge of grammar, discourse, context and culture to assign meaning, both filling in the gaps of understanding and augmenting meaning.
Received pedagogy, based on numerous empirical studies, has been to explicitly teach learners about the sound system, both its segmentals and suprasegmentals, and also teach a regime of top-down strategies. Although, well found in the research literature, this aspect of teaching is frequently overlooked.
In Japan, the teaching of the sound system is very much subservient to grammar. One likely reason is that most Japanese universities do not have a listening component on their entrance exams. As a result, there is little incentive for high schools to add listening to their curricula. Yet, when many students struggle with listening comprehension, this omission puts students at a disadvantage.
Furthermore, it is well understood that comprehensible input is crucial for language acquisition. Students need massive amounts of input to acquire an understanding of a target language. The more comprehensible input one gets, the more one will learn. So when learners from a mora-timed language background are not taught about the English sound system, they are often unable to comprehend auditory input that would otherwise be comprehensible, and thus lose vital opportunities for L2 language acquisition.
The development of listening skills should be a priority from early education on to maximize learning opportunities. That it is subservient is perhaps one reason for the chronically low English abilities that the Japanese Ministry of Education, Science and Technology is currently seeking to change.
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