Part 2: Inquiry into language learners

Developing
autonomous habitswith extensive

listening
IJK Matthew Apple
Doshisha University,
Institute of Language
and Culture
matthewtapple@yahoo.co.jp
About Matthew

I have taught English for seven years in Japan, first as an assistant language teacher,then as a cram school teacher, and finally as a university instructor. I have been trying
to combine my two master's degrees (MFA and MEd) by helping students become
more creative while improving their sense of autonomy.
nt>Q7mzfcr)i£'fQ ¥£#@$tt£K»*->Sr, HRftttfcSfrfc&fcJ:

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to my collaborative partners for their helpful comments, to the MAYA
editors for their guidance, and to mywife for her unswerving support and patience!

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Abstract

During the fall 2004 semester, 12 Japanese university learners in a Special English program weekly
speaking/listening course were encouraged to set their own listening goals. In addition to English
pronunciation and listening strategy training activities inside the class, learners were also asked tofind listening materials outside the class, including keeping a weekly record of new words learned,
strategies used, andproblems encountered. At theendof thesemester, learners submitted an extensive
listening portfolio, which included cassette tapes of learner conversations in English, copies of theirweekly listeningrecords, and several essays asking learners to reflect on theirgoals and strategy usage
for listening. Reflection essays and follow-up interviews indicated that while strategy use varied, themore successful learners used socially-oriented strategies andactively sought opportunitiesfor English
conversation outside theclass, leading to a greater sense ofpersonal autonomy in their English speak
ing and listening.
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DjSofcXy±-11filtiLMZ?lfZc Xy±-1ftffiRZfi$m<D'iy?¥a--\Z&Z>t, 7r-7xv-<73f£ffl\£ffi*T'$>Z--jj. if3^ajLfc^S#Sf. a#W*r-7xv-£*iJfflU Slil^T^fg^fiJfflf
zm^^mmzM®, ^mnxn-^y?'- ^y.zzy^izBn^mAm/i^m'ii^^omux^rzz.

i. Listening Courses: The L2 instructor's dilemma

In his final extensive listening portfolio reflection essayin the fall of 2004, a learner in thisstudy voiced an often-heard EFL learner belief about English language listening:

In my opinion, it is difficult to raise my listening skill in Japan, because I do not prop
erlyhear Englishin my dailylife unless I intend to listen to English. I want to hear
natural English.. .1am going to Australia on studying abroad course of the university
in February. I am sure that it will be one of the largestchances to improve my listening
ability. (Takeo1)

The problem of access to L2 aural input in an EFL context is only exacerbatedby learner
beliefs such as Takeo's—namely, that study abroad is the only way to improve English listening
skills. While it may be true that limited exposure to authentic oral/aural English is a daunting
obstacle for EFL instructors and learners in Japan, there are actually many sources of English
listening available to Japanese learners of English. NHKTVbroadcasts a number of programs
either in English or about the English language; English language music CDs and movies on
VHS or DVD are available in most university libraries; and BBCand CNN news broadcasts caneven be downloaded from the Internet.2

Unfortunately, it is not always possible for instructors to use these materials in class, nor arethese materials always effective in class, particularlyif learners have different levels of English
listening ability or do not share the same listening genre interests. What instructors can do in
the classroomis to exposelearners to strategies useful for decoding aural English, while at thesame time giving advice about listening materials and requiring learners to listen to English
outside the classroom. This paper presents learner reactionsto a listening class that combined
inside classroom strategy and phonemic recognition skill training with outside classroom
extensivelistening through the use of an extensive listening portfolio.

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Developing a u t o n o m o u s h a b i t s . . .

2. A SOCIAL THEORY OF 1.2 LISTENING

According to Rost (1994), listening is composed of psychological and socialskills. Psychologi
cal, or cognitive,skills include the ability to recognizewords, to parse speech into grammar
components, and to process discourse according to underlying cohesion, logic, and culturalschema. Socialskills include the ability to give and understand back-channel signals during
conversations and to "repair" the conversation when misunderstandings occur. Based on thework of Ur (1984), Rost further breaks down cognitive skills into various "component" skills.
Learners can focus on one skill at a time when practicing, but in order to improve listening
overall, all the component skills must be integrated including:Sound discrimination

Recognizing words

Recognizing stress and groups of words
Understanding functional words in conversation

Making connections between intonation, stress, and gestures or objects
Using background knowledge and context to predict or confirm meaning
Recalling important key words, topics, and ideas
Giving feedback to speakers

Reformulating speakers' utterances (Rost, 1994,p.142)
One problem with this analysis of listening is that it assumes that learners have aninterlocutor to whom to listen. Access to L2 speakers is "essential,"argues Rost, because,"Spoken language provides a means of interaction for the learner" (p. 141). EFL learners are ata distinct disadvantage when it comes to finding this access to natural L2 aural input. Without
the social interaction that ESLlearners in the U.S. or the U.K. might have, EFL learners in Japanencounter difficulty improving their listening ability because they cannot effectively integrate
all the skills necessary for understanding naturally-spoken English.
Rost himself seems aware of this difficulty. In his opinion, L2 listening is harder than LI
listening partly because "once we have learned the basic objects and concepts in the world andhave associated them with words, we have lost one of the principal motives to learn language—
self-expression" (p.134). This is particularly true for older learners such as high school oruniversity students; as L2 learning takes place at a more advanced level of cognitive and social
development, L2 learning becomes more closely related to cognitive and social motives forlearning. Because L2 input is not often available for older L2 learners, "it seems to be that themost successful learners will often be those who develop the social strategy of making friends
who will provide them with the right kind of language input." (Rost, 1994, p.136).

If speaking and listening in L2 are related, and social skills are necessary to improve both, a
key question is whether L2learners in an EFL situation such as Japan can use social strategies
to improve their listening. Contact time with native speakers in the listening classroom is often
extremely limited: in this study, the students only saw the instructor 80 minutes per week for
13 weeks. They, do, however, see fellow classmates who are also learning English, and in a few
lucky cases may have access to exchange students from English-speaking countries. Further,though it is possible for instructors to help learners with cognitive skills such as sentence
parsing and stress patterns, learners also need to be exposed to much more spoken English inorder to improve automatic ear recognition of English rhythms and intonational patterns. Dueto the limited amount of time inside the classroom, students in Japan need to find sources of
spoken English outside the classroom, using their own initiative. When the time came to design

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a listening class, I theorized that I could help learners improve their listening through threemain methods based on the above skills: inside classroom strategy training, inside classroom
pair work, and outside classroom aural input gathering. These three methods were used withthe participants in this study.

3. Background of the study participants
Advanced Performance B for Listening and Speaking (APB) is a required course for all students
enrolled in the Faculty of Foreign Languages at a small four-year private university in westernJapan. All first- and second-year students are required to take at least three separate courses ofEnglish language instruction. Communicative English is a four-skills course that meets threetimes per week. Students are placed into six different proficiency levels,according to scores on
TOEIC exams taken at the end of each semester.Advanced Performance A for Reading andWriting (APA) and Advanced Performance B for Listening and Speaking (APB) meet once perweek; students are placed into these courses according to major, but are not streamed for pro
ficiency. Communicative English is taught by native speakers of English, while both APAand
APB may be taught by either native speakers of English or of Japanese.

The section of the APB course in this study was comprised of 12 second-year students who
had been accepted into the Special English course of studies, a program designed to prepare
students for a junior year study abroad in an English-speaking country such as Englandor Australia. The course met once per week for 80 minutes in a language lab, which was acomputer room of immovable desks with individual tape recorders and headphones forstudents and a CD/VCR/computer monitoring station for the instructor.
Students in the APB course had already demonstrated a certain level of listening proficiency
by virtue of being selected for the Special English program, and moreover had an average
combined TOEIC score of 608 at the beginning of the second semester of the 2004 academic
year. In addition to the APB course, students were also taking a weekly TOEFL preparation
course that used a TOEFL listening text and CD. Because the class in this study was partiallyintended to prepare students for study abroad, I thought students should be encouraged tolearn more about the process of listening by working both together in class and on their own
outside the classroom. This entailed having a goal for learning, learning how to apply strategies
to achieve their goals, and reflecting on their mistakes and their progress before setting new
goals. In other words, I theorized that becoming more autonomous and self-directed would
benefit students in APB far more than listening to a cassette and circling multiple-choiceanswers as one might normally have expected in a typical language lab situation.

Based on my knowledge and previous class experiences, I decided that the best way to
encourage students' goal-setting, strategy use, and reflection was through the use of a portfolio.
While in the classroom, students could learn about individual English sounds, stress patterns,
and intonational rhythms. However, I felt that students also needed time to test their listening
skills on authentic English listening materials not found in traditional textbooks, i.e. materials
such as music and movies that they would encounter in the real world. Students were required
to find additional sources of listening materials outside the classroom, to maintain weekly
records of goals and strategies used and vocabulary items learned, and to report and reflect on
their experiences by using an extensive listening portfolio (ELP).

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4. What is a portfolio?

Originally based on the portfolios used byartists to showcase their works to potential pa
trons, portfolios used for education purposes can be best described as a purposeful collectionof a student's work. The portfolio is often used as an intermediate stage of coursework evaluation, but it can be an alternative evaluation to final exams (Brown 8c Hudson, 1998; Mineishi,
2002) and also as a teaching tool (Apple 8c Shimo, 2005; Shimo, 2003).

The ELP requirements in this study were designed to roughlyconform to the concepts collection, selection, and reflection (Hamp-Lyons 8c Condon, 2000). Collection means that samples ofa student's work, rather than all the work done, are included in the portfolio. Selection encour
ages learner autonomy by allowing students to choosewhich items to include in the portfolio.
Finally, reflection involves learners actively engaging in the meta-cognitive processes of moni
toring, self-evaluation, and self-correction, as well as for feedback from both the instructor andpeers (Breen 8c Mann, 1997). Just before the midpoint of the fall 2004 semester, students were
informed of the requirements of the final ELP. Students were also reminded of the requirements just after the New Year's break, with two weeks remaining in the semester. In addition,these requirements were available in electronic format on the instructor's classroom web page
throughout the entire semester.
The ELP had four parts:a) A cassette tape consisting of two items. The first was a series of short speeches
individually recorded by students during each class meeting. The second was a shortconversation of at least 10 minutes that students recorded in pairs outside class.

b) Two short reflection essays of about 50 to 100 words each. The first reflection essay
asked students to write analyzing their speech improvement during the semester
as recorded on the cassette tape. The second essayasked students to reflect on theirlistening goals: whether or not they achieved their goals, and if not, why.

c) A weekly goals log. Studentshanded in a goals and listening log each week detailing
vocabularylearned, strategies used, and questions they had while listening to English.
d) A final reflection essay of about 250 to 300words. Students were asked to consider
their overall progress during the course, reflecting on problems in listening that they
had overcome, which strategies they used to improve their listening, problems they
stillhad, and possible ways to continue improving their listening skills.
This portfolio of listeninggoals and strategies was used as an assessment of the course
as a whole in combination with attendance and participation in class activities. However,more than using the ELP as an assessment method, I viewed the ELP as a learning strategy
unto itself: a recursive learning tool that would allow students to manage their own learning,
think about their mistakes and their successes, and reflect on the process rather than the
product of their study of English speakingand listening. Above all else, the ELP was designed
to encourage students to become more autonomous by requiring them to choose their own
extensivelistening materials and to devise their own study methods without the teacher's direct
assistance.

5. What is extensive listening?
Extensive listening was defined by Rixon (1986) as listening for pleasure without paying
attention to the specific content or language being used. As opposed to intensive listening,i.e., searching for detailed information, exact words or phrases in short, controlled listening

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passages, extensive listening gives learners more exposure to freer, more authentic forms ofnatural English as it is actually spoken. While learners may not be able to comprehend many ofthewords they hear in extensive listening (Field, 1998), extensive listening canhelp motivate
students and canalso give them more opportunities to notice pronunciation and intonational
patterns.

On hisExtensive Listening web page, Rob Waring (2003b) has defined EL as anything which
involves "massive amounts of text," which learners understand easilyand comfortably, at or
belowtheir current level of comprehension, without anyquestions or tasks. Waring's definition is based on his experience teaching and researching Extensive Reading (ER), defined asreadinglarge amounts of easy texts at the i-1 level (Day8c Bamford, 1998). In Waring's view,
the purposeof EL is not onlyto increase the amount of aural input for English learners, butalso to improve recognition of the sounds of English (i.e., pronunciation of certain sound com
binations and intonation patterns), encourage the automatic processing of "chunks" of spoken
English, and to allow students to enjoy listening to English (Waring, 2003a).While Waring lists
a variety of ELmethods (See Table 1),"listening to graded readers" forms an important part ofhis definition of extensive reading. He also notes that students often feel comfortable listening
to graded reader cassettes for books which are about two levels lower than the level of reader
they can normally read with ease.

Table 1. Types of Extensive Listening Practice (based on Waring, 2003a, 2003b)
Intermediate

Basic

Advanced

EL is not really possible

EL is possible

EL should be a major aspectof language learning

Bottom-up listening skills

Listening to graded readers

Watching movies, TV (withsubtitles if necessary)

Word building

Watching easy movies withRadio

subtitles several times

Matching sounds and spellings

Listening to easy songs

Listening to songs

Use of phonemic alphabet

Free conversation practiceLots of natural conversation

Controlled conversation

Listening to simplified lecpracticetures

However, there are problems with relying on graded readers as a source of extensive
listening. First, cassette tapes that accompany readers generally feature a single voice that reads
the text of the graded reader in flawless English of only one or two accents at best. Contrary to
the recorded, commercially-produced voice of the cassette, real spoken English comes in several
forms, including television and radio news broadcasts, college lectures, and daily conversation.
Even when there is only one person speaking, such as in a formal speech or college lecture,
English speakers use hesitation devices, using non-words such as "um" and "er,"as well as
repetition and rephrasing of key phrases. English speakers often stop mid-thought or midsentence, combine words using elision, and use slang, colloquial phrases, and pronunciationthat often differ widely according to the individual. Because of the complicated nature of

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authentic spoken English, listening tograded readers oncassette may nothelp learners tounderstand theflow of English conversation, including turn-taking andintonational cues orother discourse markers.

Second, if the university or university instructor buys only onetape per class, students have
few opportunities to listen to the cassette outside the classroom. Even if the university has
the facilities to dub multiple copies ofa cassette, copying a commercially-produced tape is, ofcourse, against international copyright laws. Further, if instructors provide copies of the cas
sette for all students, students are not encouraged to searchfor their own materials. This seems

to reinforce the reliance on the English listening classroom, despite the relatively small amountof timespentin class as opposed to in the real world, and may discourage students from finding sources of aural English in the realworld. Once class ends,students may not feel the needto continue listening to English outside the classroom. In addition, use of the cassette solely
during class time ensures that allstudents in class must listen at the same rate of English speech
one time only. Zhao (1997) discovered that student listening comprehension and motivation
improves as students were allowed control over the rate of speed of the listening material. If
students were additionally allowed to listen multiple times to materials of their choosing, thismight also prove beneficial.

Finally, listening to graded readers on cassette tapes is extremelytime-consuming, whileat the same time a somewhat boring method of listening to English. Extensive reading using
graded readers may take years to improve students' reading comprehension and vocabularylevels; extensive listening done in the same manner may likewise take years, especially if stu
dents only listen to the cassettes in the listening lab. Only the most highly motivated students
could possibly continue to listen to graded readers for one or two years, and even the mostserious of students might find it difficult to enjoy a listening class after a matter of weeks. WhileI agree that listening to "massive amounts" of graded reader cassettes could be beneficial as amethod of consolidating previous language learning, I believed that to help students come togrips with authentic, spoken English, another more autonomous method of EL that allowed for
self-access to authentic materials had to be considered (Tomlinson, 1998).

6. Classroom procedure

Instruction for the class in this study comprised techniques for use by the students as a wholeinside the classroom and by each individual student outside the classroom (See Table 2). Insideclassroom techniques included information about the sounds of English, such as individualphoneme and minimal pairs pronunciation practice, as well as information and practice using
suprasegmentals (word stress, sentence stress, and intonational patterns). Using passages fromthe class textbook, Let's Talk 2 (Jones, 2003), each week students received examples and instruction in two strategies. (For more about strategies, refer to Cohen, 1998; O'Malley 8c Chamot,
1990; and Oxford, 1990.)

I also gave short "mini-lectures" of about five to 10 minutes; students practiced taking notes,
then compared their answers in pairs and groups. Finally,students recorded a short speechfrom their homework by speaking onto individual cassette tapes. Each week for homework,
students wrote about 250 to 300 words in their notebooks, then brought their speeches to classthe following week and recorded themselves using the built-in cassette recorder desks in thelanguage lab. After recording their speeches, students first listened to their own cassettes, thenexchanged cassettes with a partner and listened to their classmate's cassette. Finally, students
offered both praise and advice to their partners about English enunciation and intonation.

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Table 2. Comparing Instruction Techniques
Inside the classroom

Outside the classroom

Mini-lectures of 5 to 10 minutes;

Students choose listening materials (movies,

Students take notes and compare in pairs
and groups

TV programs, music, conversation or test
CDs' etc-)

Individual speech recording

Students write a shortspeech on a topic of
their choosing

Pairand group workfor discussion of text
and/or newspaper article passages

Maintain a record of their weekly goals forlistening, speaking, and vocabulary

Repetition of minimal pairs (2 different
sounds per week)

Maintain a record of which strategies theyusedSuprasegmentals (intonation and rhythm)
instruction

Analyze their mistakes in listening or
speaking

Strategy instruction (2 per week)

Learn at least six new words throughlistening and create new sentences

Outside the classroom students did extensive listening and used a weekly listening log basedon goal-setting and strategy instruction ideas in Nunan (1996) and Nunan, Lai, and Keobke(1999). Each week, students wrote their respective listening, speaking, and vocabulary goals ithe listening log, and then thought of strategies that they could use to achieve those goals. After
listening to English movies, CDs, TV programs, or Internet listening files of their own choos
ing, students wrote at least six new words they had learned through extensive listening, andmade new sentences using them. The sheet encouraged students to make notes on words they
thought they had heard, sounds that they had trouble understanding or saying, and any ques
tions about specific difficulties they had in their English extensive listening (see MAYA! website
for Appendix 3A). By asking students to find sources of aural input outside the language labclassroom, I hypothesized that students would become more autonomous and would be able toapply themselves more rigorously toward achieving their learning goals.

7. Student reaction to self-selected extensive listening materials
As a qualitatively conducted research study, I had no particular research questions in mind at
the beginning. The essays for the ELP were already a requirement for the ELP, which were used
to assess the students' progress in improving their listening skills.As I was considering how tocompile data for this study, I was going to originally take data only from the student reflection
essays in the ELP. However, since the ELP was designed in order to encourage students to set
their own goals, use strategies to achieve these goals, and to become more autonomous in theirlanguage learning, I decided to conduct more in-depth interviews at the end of the semester,
after the students had already handed in their essays. The interviews asked specific questions
about goal-setting and strategy use, essentiallyasking students to verify in spoken words what
they had written in their essays and weeklylogs.

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Reflection essays

Most students reported in theirELP reflection essays that, prior to the fall 2004 semester, they
had rarely or never thought about their strategy usage. However, even after the strategy training
in class, each studentwrote that he or she used onlytwo or three strategies while listening
to English. The most commonly used strategy was shadowing, a variation of repetition inwhich the student repeats ("shadows") whathe or she hears simultaneously with the listening(Murphey, 2001; Shimo, 2005). Two students mentioned note-taking of unknown words, andtwo mentioned literally copying down everything they heard (dictation). One student, Yuri,
commentedthat she listenedto musicand tried to figure out the words before checking her
comprehension by looking at the lyrics in the album liner notes.
The most frequently used listening material was movies, with eight of the 12 students com
menting on their use of subtitles. Others (5) mentioned use of TV programs such as BBC or
CNN news, and a few (3) discussed their use of commercial text book or English magazine
CDs. Students noted that it made them more comfortable to watch their favorite movies or tolisten to their favorite music, because they did not become tired or find their motivation lag
ging:
I can choose my favourite movies to have enthusiasm. If I chose my favourites, I canlisten to English words or phrases cheerfully and carefully. I have more interest to knowwhat people say when I watch my favourite movies. (Maki)
I watch [movies] without subtitles and then I write some unknown words. Next, I use
subtitles and check these words. Movies are quite difficult to understand. However,animation movies are easier than common movies. So I watched Toy Story many times.
(Yuri)

According to my experience, I can hear my favorite tape again and again. But if it is not
my favorite one, it is subject to give up. Therefore I think the best kind of material iswhich you can continue to listen to, not which various kinds of tapes. (Yoshihito)
Three students in particular who had watched news programs noted that although listening
to Englishnewswas extremelydifficult at first, they discovered strategies to help them better
comprehend not only the overallmeaning of the program, but also the individual words.
Interestingly,each student chose a different technique. Eri wrote that she woke up at 6 a.m.
each day in order to watch BBC and ABC news on television, but experienced difficulty
understanding the speakers. She decided that by simply leaving the TV on in the background,
she could gradually accustom herself to the sound and rhythm of English:
Through this strategy, I realized that it is important to watch the programs not so
seriously at first, because in my case,the content and speaking speed were too difficultand fast to understand and catch, so I just turn on the TV and listened their voice, thenI could understand what they are talking about in the program gradually.
Kimiko, on the other hand, realized that she had difficulty understanding the news in English because of a lack of background knowledge, or schema, about the issues themselves andalso problems with her pronunciation. Her strategies for solving these difficulties were very dif
ferent from Eri:

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after I checkthe news in Japanese. It makes me easy to graspthe meaning of news in

English.. .The correct pronunciation is"assid rain," so whenever I was listening to news
about acid rain, I didn't understand. Of course, I know what "acid rain" is already, but I

completelymisunderstood becauseof [my] wrong pronunciation.

Lastly, Azzurri wrote that she listened to the CD which accompanied a magazine called
English Journal, especially issues containing interviews withwell-known British actors andactresses. This was due to her desire to learn British English and to travel to the U.K. forsightseeing or study abroad. She noted that even afterlistening and doing dictations, she still
couldn't understand what the actors were saying, because their pronunciation, "was very
different pronunciations from English I used to hear." Although she persisted in listening to themagazine's CD and taking dictation repeatedly, Azzurri also adopted a new strategy:
Also, I especiallymade a massive effort to speak British English. I did shadow following
the speaker said. By doing that, I felt my pronunciation is getting better.. .Last semester,I always tried to talk with English without mistakes. That's why I couldn't really talk toanyone.. .Lately while I am talking to my friends, I sometimes say words in English. Be
sides, I get to have fun and be excited to learn English.
Azzurri was not the only student to connect speaking outside class with listening outsideclass.Although nearly every student listed understanding "natural" or "fast" English
conversation as one of their goals, only two students specifically wrote that they had madefriends with international exchange students on campus. Yuri wrote that she and her foreign
friends taught each other phrases in their respective native tongues, frequently code-switching
during conversations. Sakura also wrote that she began to speak and to exchange emails withforeign friends on a daily basis. "Before that, I could not be used to talking because I sometimes
felt hesitation if I made mistakes,"she wrote in her reflection essay, noting that through suchexchanges with international students she learned useful phrases used in daily conversation,
which she believed helped her to improve her listening.
Interview results

The interviews were meant as a confirmation of the content of the reflection essays thatstudents had written as part of the ELP, rather than as an assessment of English speaking ability.
I originally intended to interview learners for about 15 minutes in a semi-structured interview
style about their language learning goals, strategies, and beliefs concerning the roles of teachersand students. Since these were students that I had personally taught, many learners wanted
to share personal experiences unrelated to extensivelistening, with the result that several
interviews become almost one hour long. Therefore, although all interviews were recorded intheir entirety, only information that directly related to their goals, strategies, and beliefs about
learning was transcribed.
In the interviews, learners revealed that they had approached their language goals quite seri
ously and felt that they had benefited from the goal-setting part of extensive listening:"Without some goals and purpose, I can't study. If I attain the goals, it's a kind of reward
for me." (Kimiko)"If I make goals, I can working hard to that goal." (Maki)"If I have no goal, maybe I don't know what I should do, but I have a goal, even in the

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class, I cancome up withthe idea for the goal, so I did." (Kenichi)• "If I didn't set anygoals, I think I would be confused what I should do." (Takeo)• "IfI had a goal or target, I can study hard to achieve the goal. So, it's a good thing to havea goal." (Takayuki)

On the otherhand, a few students said that they hadn'treached their goal, and as a result
felt thattheir original goal had been unrealistic. Eri commented, "Sometimes, the goal willchange," and thoughtthat some students felt the goal theyoriginally set had been"too difficult"to achieve. Although shewas eventually successful at listening to TVnews programs, Kimiko
noted that her originalgoalof listening to CNN was "vague" and said she had trouble because
the speed of the broadcasters' speech was too fast. Many of the malestudents originally set thegoal of being able to understand English language movies without reading subtitles; however,as Ochada noted, it was unrealistic to be ableto understand allthe dialog. As a result, manychanged the goal to "I want to understand the content of the whole movie without subtitles."One male student in particular,Yuji, lamented his inability to reach his goal,which was tofinish a Japanese book designed to improve English listening ability, "by just listen over andover again." He claimed that his English would have improved had he continued, but the bookproved too difficult and in the end he simply "gaveup."
Confirming what they had written in their reflection essays, all students in the study pro
fessed to having used a minimal number of strategies. However, the kind of strategies used andthe ability to change the strategy if it seemed ineffective seemed more important factors than
the number of strategies used. Students who seemed unable to reach their goals (Yuji, Takeo,
Yoshihito, and Eri) had relied on strategies such as dictation and dictionary look-up, and preferred to work alone both inside and outside the classroom. They also tried to simply listen to
English, whether on CD, in TV shows or in movies, for a certain amount of time each day. For
example,Yuji's strategy was to listen to English"every day for 60 minutes without thinking." As
he had previously written in his essay, Takeo insisted in the interview that it was "impossible"
to learn English outside the classroom,"cause everybody speaks Japanese." Yoshihito's sole goal
was to have a higher score on the listening section than his classmates. He said that the previous

semester his goal had been to get a higher score than Kimiko; having failed to achieve that, hethen changed his rival to Takeo, but in the end his use of movie script books didn't help him to
overcome his classmate's test score for listening.

Surprisingly, although only two students had written in their reflection essays about theconnection between speaking and listening, the students who reported in interviews to havereached their goals all shared the same strategy: that of speakingwith friends in Englishoutside
the classroom. Other strategies varied from shadowing to summarizing to transferring skills
from other classes. Kimiko claimed to have combined several strategies: first she took noteson what she heard in CNN or BBC news, next she looked up the words and tried to memorize
their meanings, and finally she used them in conversation with friends on campus. Ochada said
he tried to talk in English with Yujiand Takayuki on their way home from campus (Yuji and
Takayuki did not mention speaking in English with classmates, so perhaps it was always a one
sided conversation!). One student, Kenichi, related meeting a Chinese tourist and giving him
directions in English to nearby restaurants. He claimed to actively seek out foreign tourists near
the JR train station so that he could practice speaking and listening to "real" English.
When asked about the roles of teachers and students both inside and outside the classroom,

10 of the 12 students came down firmly on the side of learner autonomy. They expressed a desire to choose listening materials both inside and outside class, to be able to speak to classmatesin pairs and groups in the class, and to be required to maintain records of their learning and

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write reports outside the class. Teachers, they agreed, should be guides; teachers should give
students techniques and strategies for learning, butstudents should be allowed to discover theirown path to success:• "I want you to show us something for listening. Give me some options. I want to choose.
I want to have more opportunity for speaking English." (Sakura)• "I thinkit might bebetter to spend more time in speaking withclassmates, and the topic

is anything, sowe can choose anything. Maybe a group oftwo or three anddecide thetopic, andwe discuss about the topic. And [the teacher] can go around each groups and
•

•
•

•

listen the discussion and giveus some opinion." (Ochada)"[The teacher should create activities] such as games,interviews together...Students
should listening and speaking out loud to eachother,because if we teach each other we
can learn something different our views." (Yoshihito)"I think teachers should let students speak about their thinking... I want to listening to
my friends' English and teacher's English." (Maki)"[The teacher] should teach us how to improve our English.. .introduce us someeffective strategies and tell us that episode which you actually experienced. Students
should trust teacher and try to use strategies with friends." (Kimiko)"Teacher gives students a big theme and at first students think about the big theme. I
think there are students.. .students have each opinion and talk more deeply with eachother." (Eri)•"Classmates help each other. If there is a problem, teacher advises to students. Teachersand students try to think the best way to study, together. Teacher should tell the hint.
They don't have to tell the way to study, just hint. Later, students think whether its work."(Takayuki)

Two students, Yuji and Takeo, continued to focus on native speakers as the final arbiters ofEnglish and seemed unable or unaware of their ability to be autonomous. They both talked
about the necessity of listening only to native speakers,and both said students should "study
hard" while the teacher should be "nice" and also"teach kindly and seriously." Their strong
attachment to the valued belief in the roles of teachers and learners (Wenden, 1991,p.54) seems
to have prevented both Yuji and Takeo from increasing their autonomy. In Nunan's terms, bothstudents remained at the "Level 1" or possibly "Level 2" stage of learner autonomy (Nunan,
1997, p.195).Yuji and Takeo were aware of the goals of the class and had attempted to set goals
on their own, but they were unable to shake their language beliefs.While claiming that students
should study hard, Yujisaid that as for himself, "I tried to study as hard as possible, but actually
I just followed [the teacher's instructions]. I definitely need [to] practice."
8. Final reflections

Looking back over the results of the interviews and the reflection essays, I believe we can detectsome definite patterns: students who set clear goals for their English listening chose strategies
that worked, were able to alter their strategies when they didn't work, and willfully sought out
opportunities outside the classroom for active engagement in English conversation.
So, what does this have to do with extensive listening? The 12 students in this study weretaking several other courses, and they were exposed to spoken English by at least three different
native speakers of English as well as two different native speakers of Japanese who used English
in the classroom. However, not all students were equally successful at improving their English

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Developing a u t o n o m o u s habits...

listening: onlythose students who responded to the challenge of autonomous study reported
having reached their listening goals. Moreover, they were able to combine independent study(independent not necessarily meaning "autonomous," cf. Little, 2001) with cooperative, social
studying (cf."critical collaborative autonomy,"Murphey, 2001b).
Recall a main contention of Rost (1994): "[T]he most successful learners will often be those

who develop the social strategy of making friends who will provide them with the right kindof language input" (p.136). Based on the self-reports in writing and in interviews, students inthis study who actively sought English conversation partners, whether native speaker of Eng
lish, Japanese, or even Chinese, were successful at improving their English listening skills. Thisfinding supports what Little (2000) called "the power of distributed cognition," in which eachlearner interacts with other learners, and, "interweave with each other in a mutually supportiveway" (Little, 2000, p.22). Although students may not have had access to L2 native speakers all
the time, by conversing with "near-peers" (Dornyei 8c Murphey, 2003), students were able toimprove their English speaking and listening through the interactive process of language ne
gotiation (Pica, 1987). Working together both inside and outside the classroom with the helpof peers was an important part of language development and improvement for students in thisstudy.
Shortly after the interviews for this study were completed, six of the 12 students in the study
headed overseas for study abroad programs in February 2005. Three joined ESL programs in
the U.K., one for half a year and two for a full year. Three more entered universities in Australia,
two of whom joined the regular university program. The remaining six students went to Aus
tralia for a six-week stay with a larger group of students from the regular university Commu
nicative English program. Of those six students, one enjoyed his stay so much that he changed
his mind about study abroad (he had originally decided against it) and successfully applied fora year-long university study in Brisbane, Australia, for the 2006 academic year. Six of the sevenstudents from this study who managed to join a study abroad program (Eri, Kimiko, Maki,
Sakura, Azzurri, and Takayuki) had had strong preferences for working both autonomously
and sociallyinside and outside the classroom.At the end of his interview, Takayuki perhaps
best summed up these learners' beliefs: "Nobody tells us the answer,so we try to search thegoal. Sometimes difficult, but trying to achieve is a very good thing."
Notes:

1 Allnames of learners in this paper are pseudonyms. Allparticipants granted the researcher
the right to quote their reflection essays and to use their comments in the interviews.
2 In addition to downloadable BBC and CNN news broadcasts, there are now (as of June
2006) a number of podcasts designed for EFL/ESL students available on the internet.

English conversation iPod or mp3 player programsare also now on salein computer stores.
At the time the students in this study were engaged in Extensive Listening (fall 2004),
podcasts werejust beginning to appear. None of the students reported the use of portable
mp3 players for English listening.

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Critical Reader Response i

Turid Trebbi

The author of this chapter presents an approach to self-directed language learning which relates to a specific cultural context in a very interesting way. The action oriented notion of selfdirected learning is the counterpart of the theoretical concept of languagelearner autonomy(Holec, 1981). Learner autonomy and self-directed learning are two sides of the same coin, theformer being a theoretical concept offering a definition that we can agree on regardless of dif
ferences in cultural contexts, whereas the latter is highly context sensitive. Learner autonomy
refers to a mental state which is the capacity to take charge of one's own learning and self-di
rected learning is learner autonomy put into practice in ways that are relying on different cul
ture dependent conditions.

The focal point of the chapter is awareness-raising regarding listening comprehension
through learning to learn activities supported by ongoing listening experience. A noticeablefeature is the organisation of this work in both inside classroom teacher driven and outsideclassroom student driven activities. It seems that there is no problem having the students ac
cept this shared management, presumably because in a traditional setting students also workon their own when doing homework. At least in Norway, homework is less teacher dependent
than classroom work. Are outside classroom activities probably a good starting point for devel
oping learner autonomy? Here it seems to offer a plausible solution to the identified problemof limited exposure to the target language in the Japanese context. However, this solution could
also stem from a certain disbelief in the feasibility of an alternative classroom developed as aresource center as described by Trebbi (Trebbi, 1995). In my experience in a Norwegian context,
this alternative classroom is apt to solve the dilemma of different listening interests, abilities,
and listening rates.
The author puts emphasis on the importance of the teacher role. The teacher creates what I
would label an open learning situation or aframe within which the learners have the possibility
to create their own learning space (ibid.). To enable the learners to benefit from this openness,learning to learn activities aiming at consciousness-raising have to be provided by the teacher.
In Apple's example, the open learning situation is framed by a double initiative; both the port
folio, which serves the purpose of maintaining a record of learning processes, and the teacher'steaching of listening strategies.
However, the question is if we can actually teach strategies in a learner autonomy scheme.
What I find interesting here is that most of the students seem to take teaching as informationthat can be used to search for their own material, explore and develop their own listening strat

egies. Instead of traditional teaching beingseen as "transmission of knowledge," we seemto
have teaching seen as supporting students' own knowledge building. Presumablythe successfully designed combination of teacher instructions and the use of a portfolio leads to this positive effectand thus supports self-direction, or as the author puts it:" (The students) discover
their own path to success."

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Critical Reader Response 2

Yoko Wakui

In recentyears, there has been growing interestin the academic world in listening and anincreasing number of teachers and researchers have sought useful ways to improve students'
listening ability. In this respect, Apple's paper should significantly contribute to teachers andresearchers. Also, manyEnglish teachers face the difficulty in adjusting to the huge gap among
students' levels in class. His study, however, should helpsolve this problem if weare struggling
with it. Lastly, I would like to express my appreciation for being given a chance to read thisarticle as an inside response reader.

Nowadays, the importance of listening ability has been emphasized and entrance exams
for colleges and universities in Japan often incorporate listening tests. Besides, I believe that
listening ability is no less important than reading, writing, or speaking, because it would never
be possible to communicate orally if you did not understand what information others aretrying to convey.

Matthew's approach is quite unique in that he let his students record their own voices andexchange their tapes with other students. His students may have been excited to listen to theirpeers' voices. The students seem to have been motivated to do so and listened eagerly to theirpeers' voices. It may be because they were involved in the activity personally. I do not thinkthey can be passive at all at that moment. He carried out extensive research into the students'
reflections, which were insightful indeed, which proved how effective this approach could be.
"The new brain theories suggest that our complex of intelligence is developed through social
interaction with others" (O'Keefe, 1999, p.9).

One of the biggest problems in class is the level difference. If students were assigned to do
the same-level training, it is possible that teachers will face problems. His paper, however, showsthat individual work was assigned to each student. Each one chose his/her favorite materials
to listen to, tried to find his/her own strategies, and filled in an extensive weekly listening goalsetting sheet. Students are expected to learn by themselves and to realize that it is they whoshould study with the support from the teacher. I agree with him without a doubt.

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