Selective listening in L2 learners of French

Abstract

This paper considers the issue raised in 2008 by Gillian Brown in her article ‘Selective listening’ regarding whether nouns are ‘privileged’ in memory over verbs during listening tasks, and whether attention to nouns, at least in the early stages of L2 learning, is a desirable strategy to be taught to learners, as Brown suggests it might be. The question of verb/noun recognition was explored in the present study using data from 30 lower-intermediate learners of French in England. Learners completed a listening task on two occasions, six months apart, producing recall protocols for short oral passages in French. We also explored learners’ attentional strategy use by asking them to report on this in writing immediately after the recall task. An analysis of verbs and nouns recognised indicated that verb recognition was lower than that of nouns, and that progress in verb recognition over six months was negligible. A qualitative analysis of learners’ strategy use indicated that learners with a more balanced verb/noun recognition profile took a broader focus, tending to focus their attention consciously at phrase/sentence level rather than at word level. These findings are discussed in terms of the development of listening skills over time, and the implications of this for L2 listening pedagogy.

Keywords:

• listening
• second language
• learner strategies

Acknowledgements

The research reported here is drawn from the project ‘Strategy training in Year 12 French’ funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (Grant no. RES-000-23-0324), awarded to Ernesto Macaro and Bob Vanderplank (University of Oxford), and Suzanne Graham, Brian Richards, and Kristyan Spelman-Miller (University of Reading), with research assistance from Denise Santos and Shirley Lawes. We thank Brian Richards and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.

Notes

We would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for suggesting that these issues might be important.

Myles (2003) does not specify the sense in which she uses ‘verb phrase’ in her study. We have, however, taken it to mean ‘equivalent to the whole of the predicate of a sentence’ (Crystal, 2003, p. 490).

As based on an analysis of the AQA examining board core vocabulary list for French (AQA, 2009).

Gendner and Adda-Decker (2002), in their analysis of two large corpora of oral and written French from radio/TV broadcast transcripts and Le Monde newspaper, report slightly higher percentages of nouns (approximately 50%) as compared with verbs (approximately 25%). Nevertheless, by comparison, the AQA list still seems skewed away from verbs.