Listening used to be regarded as the 'Cinderella' skill (Vandergrift, 1997) because of the lack of research attention compared to the other three skills – reading, writing, and speaking. While the recent two decades have seen more research attention on listening strategies, these studies tend to investigate listening to audio recordings, leaving the much more prevalent task of listening to the teacher input in the classroom underexplored. We problematise the lack of listening strategy research particularly in the English Medium Instruction (EMI) classroom because students learn content subjects through their less familiar language – second language (L2) English. Together with the well-documented findings that the classroom interaction in EMI is dominated by teacher talk, it is essential to examine how learners process and comprehend the EMI teacher input using listening strategies.
This study recruited an EMI class of Grade 11 Biology in Hong Kong. A unit of six lessons was observed and videotaped, and the lesson videos were subsequently used in stimulated recall interviews to elicit from students their strategy use. Using thematic content analysis with a combination of deductive and inductive approaches, a listening strategy taxonomy was created. The taxonomy included some strategies identified in previous research (Vandergrift & Goh, 2012; Fung & Macaro, 2021), as well as some novel strategies (e.g., division of terminology, which was particularly relevant for words with multiple morphemes in Biology). The taxonomy also contained an additional feature – that some cognitive strategies were content-mediated and some language-mediated – mirroring the dual goal of both content and language learning in EMI. In addition, through comparing the strategies employed by four students who were purposefully selected based on their levels of linguistic knowledge and Biology achievement, the findings indicated that students who would deploy a range of language-mediated, content-mediated, and metacognitive strategies in combination yield better comprehension. This strategy combination or clustering is also deemed effective in previous research (e.g., Graham & Santos, 2015), and could assist students with a lower level of linguistic knowledge in overcoming language barriers to comprehend teachers' explanations of content knowledge.
This paper ends with implications for future research and pedagogy. We would call for more research to be devoted to this important context of listening to the teacher input, contributing to making the taxonomy that we have proposed more comprehensive. We also recommend that teachers be aware of the potential of strategies in facilitating students' comprehension. EMI teachers can play a vital role in prompting students to employ strategies in arriving at an understanding because of the interactive nature of teacher input and student uptake in the classroom.
References
Fung, D., & Macaro, E. (2021). Exploring the relationship between linguistic knowledge and strategy use in listening comprehension. Language Teaching Research, 25(4), 540-564.
Graham, S., & Santos, D. (2015). Strategies for second language listening. Palgrave Macmillan.
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. Routledge.
