A Question about Teaching Listening Processing - answers welcomed!

Last week I did a listening activity with Year 10, where they listened to the same track several times, tracking their level of comprehension on a live graph. I explained in an earlier post how the activity worked. Above the line indicates that the pupil felt they understood. Below the line meant they weren't following it anymore. (The image on the left will give you a very good idea of what it looks like, but it isn't the actual graph from a pupil in this lesson.)

The text we were working on was from the OUP GCSE Spanish textbook that I co-authored for the old Controlled Assessment version of the GCSE. It is the very start of a unit on talking about where people live. The book has the text printed as a reading, but also as a listening track. For most of the activity, pupils were in fact listening to me reading the text aloud at different speeds.

In between readings of the text, we did different interventions. For example simply pooling words the class thought they heard on the board. Or working with a partner on a list of topic words, testing each other. Or discussing the main structure of the text and key signpost words. Or talking about tenses we thought we heard. At one point I gave them comprehension questions in English, which they didn't have to answer, just to show how they help scaffold understanding. And also at one point they opened their textbooks and we read through the text together.

All of them had graphs which showed increasing level of comprehension and ability to follow, as we used the different ways to tackle the passage. I also came back to it the next lesson and we did it again a day later.

The graphs weren't scientific enough to see which interventions had most impact. But we discussed what had made the most difference. With many classes, seeing the questions really helps structure their understanding of the text and give signposts to follow. Very rarely is it vocabulary that is the issue. 

With my Year 10 class, they said the thing that really helped was seeing the text. But not as you might think because of being able/unable to turn the stream of Spanish sounds into words. Their phonics are secure. It was their ability to process sentences, holding in their heads enough to be able to put ideas together in detail. This had me wondering just what is involved in this mental processing and how we can develop it.

In another lesson this week, we were in the computer room with headphones, working on the same listening. Each pupil was able to pause or rewind the track as they wished. And they transcribed the whole passage word for word in Spanish. There were some errors - "tanta gente" as "tan tajente" but by and large they were transcribing accurately, including making good decisions that required understanding of the sentence, not just transcribing sounds.

So this brings us back to what they wanted to emphasise in our discussion in the lesson before. They hear sounds accurately and can make them into words. They can read the passage and make sense of all of it. But as a listening, we are going to have to work on their ability to process sentences in their heads.

There are micro skills we can practise around building processing power in Listening: Dr Gianfranco Conti and Steve Smith are very clear on these in their excellent book "Breaking the Sound Barrier", full of focused and practical activities for developing Listening.

I would like to know more about developing Listening for the GCSE style word-by-word texts which pupils have to parse in their heads. These texts have all the normal listening cues removed, such as normal speed and intonation and exchanges between speakers. All the things that I wrote about here in discussing listening to authentic speech. Is this a realistic expectation that can be successfully developed in language lessons?

To be absolutely specific: 

These Year 10 pupils can transcribe the passage accurately. 

They have the phonics knowledge. 

They can read and understand what they have transcribed. 

They have the vocabulary and grammar knowledge. 

But doing those two things simultaneously in their head is where they find it difficult. 

Is that a feature of knowledge of the language we can work on? Or a skill that can be broken down? Or is it an ability that we can acquire through long term immersion? An innate cognitive ability? Or a skill that is gradually acquired in other areas of life outside the language classroom? 

The GCSE panel are keen for the Reading to be a test of what can be learned in language lessons. Is there a similar situation in Listening? If pupils who have the knowledge of phonics, vocabulary and grammar find that there is a further demand. And a very high level of demand in terms of processing the Listening. 

I would love to know your thoughts...