Getting the Most from Textbook Listening Activities
Thomas Lavelle

Most EFL/ESL textbooks include a listening component within each unit. It is part of an attempt to provide an integrated skills approach with separate sections devoted to speaking, listening reading and writing. It is unfortunate however that these sections are not really integrated but are isolated. I have always felt an odd sense of unfinished business when I announce to the class, "OK that`s the end of the listening practice. Please turn to the conversation on the next page."
The purpose of this article is to show how almost any listening activity in a textbook can be expanded to include an opportunity to work with grammar, an interactive speaking opportunity as well as a chance to broaden lexical, collocational and idiomatic knowledge.
My overall approach to textbook listening activities consists of five phases:
Top-down listening
Bottom-up listening
Grammaticisation
Focus on lexis
Personalization
The Listening Phase
According to Nunan, (1989a) successful listening involves information encoded in the messages we hear combined with a broader knowledge of the world. This process involves two types of listening, top-down and bottom-up.
My listening practice begins with a bottom-up phase. Learners will be listening for key words or phrases to focus on as they listen. There is a worksheet with a list of twelve or so key words or phrases from the listening passage. When they hear a particular word or phrase, they check it off on the worksheet. If they don`t hear a particular item, they leave it blank. These items on the worksheet should be the key lexical elements of the listening passage.
The bottom-up phase has the effect of reducing the cognitive load of the listeners. Now they are ready to listen again for meaning. Part 2 of the worksheet contains questions which learners must answer based on their understanding of the whole passage. This will require so- called top-down listening, or taking in the meaning from the flow of passing language. After they have listened again, the teacher can review the answers with the class, calling on different students to answer the questions.
The Grammaticisation Phase
The basic listening task as presented in the textbook is finished but there remains quite a lot of potential with the material just listened to by learners. Next I would like to discuss how to exploit the lexis learners have just met through listening. I apply a method of language production, which uses the processes of grammaticisation. Batstone (1996) proposes this method whereby learners begin with lexis, which, in this case has already been supplied through a bottom- up portion of the listening task. Learners will take these discrete words and phrases then modify and combine them by applying some appropriate grammar to express themselves. The usual procedure is to teach the grammar and then add lexical items but there is a strong case for reversing the process. (Givon, 1979)
The learners, in pairs, are now instructed to prepare the listening passage they have just heard using the words and phrases they have just studied as a speaking cue. They are encouraged to make their formulations as clear as possible but it is their choice as to how they try to combine the lexical items from the listening passage and their own knowledge of grammar. If the listening passage was based on a dialogue, a role-play reconstruction would be suitable. If the listening activity was a narrative, then a brief summary of what was listened to would be appropriate.
Such a procedure widens the possibilities for students to create their own way of expression. Because of this freedom, there are likely to be mistakes in grammar while trying to re-create the listening passage. When this happens, the teacher can help reformulate some of the learners` language.
Another potential benefit of this exercise is that during the struggle to re-create the listening passage, a need has been created by each learner to speak coherently in English and this indicates to them where there is a gap in their knowledge. At the end of this exercise, a public performance by chosen pairs would be possible or the teacher could hand out a copy of the transcript to let learners compare their performance to the native speaker on the tape and learn from the transcript as well as from listening to other students.
This activity is clearly not meant to replace grammar study but is used to exploit the potential for increased learning through collaboration and communication with each other and the teacher. The second benefit of grammaticisation is that it forces the learners to begin using the highlighted words and lexical phrases they have just encountered through listening.
The `Focus on Lexis` Phase
During the bottom-up listening phase, learners encountered a series of lexical items. During the top-down phase, they attempted to process meaning, and, through grammaticisation, they began to use the new lexical items in speech. Let`s imagine that the topic of the listening passage was `work` and that one of the lexical items was `get a job`. This could be the perfect opportunity to explore with the class some typical collocations of the word "get." As Lewis (1993:119) says, a major element in