A Word of Warning
There is a danger in advocating the use of listening texts as a basis for
language acquisition. It is that teachers may misunderstand the reasons
for recommending this teaching strategy, they might ignore the importance
of teaching listening as comprehension and revert to using listening
texts as the basis for a testing-approach to teaching listening, in effect
concentrating exclusively on accurate identification of the content and
language of a text.
A second concern is the difficulty of creating noticing and restructuring
tasks that do not bore the students to death. In one of my earliest
attempts to build noticing into classroom materials (Richards and Hull
1986), Hull and I developed a set of speaking activities around role plays.
A novel feature of the materials was that after students had practiced each
role play, they listened to a recording of native speakers performing the
same role play and completed exercises that required identification of
linguistic features employed by the native speakers. The cycle of activities
used in the materials soon induced boredom on the part of learners,
however. Once they had carried out the role play themselves, there was
little motivation to listen to the same role play again. Exclusive dependence
on a single exercise type (close dialogs) as the basis for the noticing
exercises likewise soon became repetitive and tiresome. The challenge for
materials’ writers therefore is how to create noticing activities that match
the interest level possible when teaching listening as comprehension.