The expectancy model is a good one for foreign learners for very practical
reasons. First, when they are listening to spoken language, learners are
often worried when they do not understand every word. They miss a word,
wonder what it was, and miss the next few words. However, native speakers
do not listen to every word: they exploit the redundancy of any piece of
language, make predictions and then check their predictions by sampling. It
can be good for foreign learners' confidence to be made aware of this. And
the principle immediately suggests ways of preparing listening comprehension
materials (cf. Brown, 1978, and below on "helping the listener").
Learners have to listen like a native, as Brown puts it. A comparable point
holds for reading comprehension where it is sometimes difficult to break
learners of the habit of looking up every unfamiliar word in a dictionary.
Again this leads to many obvious reading exercises involving guessing word
meanings from context and the like (e.g. see Clarke and Nation, 1980, for
many suggestions). It is worth also pointing out to students, that in order to
find the meaning of a word in a dictionary, this assumes that part of the
meaning has already been guessed from context. All words are ambiguous in
isolation, and dictionary users have to select the relevant dictionary entry.
Students can therefore gain a more sophisticated theoretical understanding
of both word meaning and of the organisation of dictionaries. The general
aim of the model of listening and reading comprehension is to make students
independent: of dictionaries, teachers and so on. This might be proposed as
the whole aim of education: to make students independent of teachers. This
was certainly an important consideration on the present course, where students were used to very formal teacher-centred classes, and lacked any
confidence in their own ideas.