(see also, however, a more controlled study by Field (2004) in
which this occurs). Omitted information still provides insights into parts of the incoming
speech stream which were problematic for learners, and can form part of the input for
remedial activities. Alternatively, they can be reduced by increasing the number of times the
material is presented to fit the level of learners, though one has to be cautious about
repetitive listenings and a dictation mentality, as this may promote the view among learners
that successful listening in the L2 entails wordforword recall. Initially, learners should be
informed that their comprehension focus should be on propositional understanding of the
input, as in this study. The remedial stage can then involve more repetition of problematic
parts of the input, either complete sentences, clauses, or phrases, but it should be made
explicitly clear to learners that associated activities are part of a postlistening ‘learning to
listen’ remedial stage. Moreover, like in this study, as this approach is used with more and
more classes of learners (in this case advancedlevel Japanese EFL learners), the teacher can
build up a picture of recurrent decoding errors over time for the given listening material,
enabling selective attention to decoding problems which are common to a listening text and
across listening texts for these learners. Essentially, it is a form of needs analysis. This can
also be extended to the longitudinal profiling of individual learners within a class to inform
focused selfstudy at home or in selfaccess centres. To identify the problem sources for their learners’ decoding errors, teachers need to
recognize the possible types of problems which impinge on learners’ decoding processes, as
well as be wellinformed regarding the literature related to those problems. However, this
study has shown that it can be troublesome to determine the precise type of problem leading
to decoding breakdowns. Thus, it is important for teachers to consider and address more than
one potential problem source for some decoding errors. The diagnosis of problems in this
study, based on the five examples, suggests that learners initially could be assisted with: