Chapter 6 – Listening or Viewing Skills
How Do We Know? Support for the Principles
Logan Fisher; Bibi Halima; and Keli Yerian
In this section, let’s dive deeper into the theory and research on second language listening (or viewing for signed languages), and think about how these apply to the principles we just covered. This section is not a comprehensive overview of all theories, research, or approaches regarding L2 listening/viewing. However, these helped inspire our principles, and they might help you come up with other listening strategies of your own. The goal of this section is to highlight some of the research that supports our principles and to provide ways for you, the reader, to discover more.
First, let’s talk about choosing content slightly beyond our current level in order to challenge ourselves but still be able to understand what we are listening to. This idea became popularized by Stephen Krashen in 1982 in his book Principles and Practices of Second Language Acquisition. He observed that children are not explicitly taught the rules of their first language(s). Rather acquire learn language systems implicitly through extensive exposure to language in context, and they only acquire language when it is meaningful to them in that context. Krashen proposed that adults can acquire language this way as well, saying “We acquire […] only when we understand language that contains structure that is ‘a little beyond’ where we are now” (p. 21).
Krashen’s work had an enormous influence on the field of language learning, and research since then supports the idea that meaningful language input (comprehensible input in Krashen’s terms) is key to successful second language learning. Vygotsky’s Sociocultural theory (see Chapter 7 on Speaking/Signing) also states that learners will only learn when they are in the zone of proximal development, or ZPD. Being in the ZPD means that you are learning with the help of someone (a teacher, mentor or peer) or from learning materials, that push you beyond what you can do on your own. Companies that make language learning apps and publishers of modern language textbooks follow this idea of scaffolding very carefully. They control the new language items that learners see and hear so that the learning process is never too overwhelming at once.
You can think of this process as like planting a garden. The seeds of language take root when the conditions are right, and with water and sun (comprehensible input and the ZPD) the garden can grow at its own pace and become a beautiful, diverse ecosystem over time. When you are exposed to language input far beyond your level, however, it might feel like being thrown into an unfamiliar jungle! You have no clue what the names of any of the plants or animals are, and might not feel comfortable or safe. These feelings can block you from exploring and understanding the language more. This reaction was described by Krashen as the affective filter. This term, originally conceived b