Teaching and Assessing Listening - Week 1 - Neurological Processing

Introduction: Hello and welcome to Week 1 of the course Teaching and Assessing Listening for the master's in English teaching at ULACIT term IIICO 2022. In today's class we will review the syllabus and go over important dates, assignments, and content to be covered in the course. In addition, we will begin exploring the topic of listening by suggesting our own definitions, distinguishing listening from hearing, and review the underlying physiological and neurological mechanisms involved in processing auditory input.  

Today's Goals:

• Compare definitions of listening and distinguish it from the process of hearing.
• Explain the physiological and neurological mechanisms of hearing.
• Explore the role of consciousness and attention in the listening process.

Guiding Questions: 

• What is the difference between hearing and listening?
• What physiological and neurological processes are involved in listening?
• What are some of the defining features of consciousness and attention with regard to listening?

Warm Up: A World of Sound

Tell your partners and teachers some specific sounds that come to your mind based on the following prompts:

• Sounds that relax you...
• Sounds that annoy you...
• Sounds that startle you...
• Sounds that you hear at home...
• Sounds that you hear at work... 

Topic 1: Beginning Ideas about Listening

Discuss the following questions with your partners.

• What makes listening challenging to learn and teach?
• What difficulties have you had as a second language listener?
• How is listening different from reading, the other receptive skill?
• Nation and Newtion (2009) tell us that listening has been "the least understood and most overlooked of the four skills (listening, speaking, reading, writing)until very recently." Why do you think that is?
• Challenging aspects of language learning sometimes get a "hands off" approach from teachers. "It will work itself out", they say. Are they right?

Topic 1:  Defining Listening

First things first, what exactly is listening? Click your group link below and follow the instructions. 

• Group 1: CLICK HERE
• Group 2: CLICK HERE
• Group 3: CLICK HERE

Topic 2: Physiological and Neurological Processes

What's the difference between listening and hearing? What is the process by which sounds are received and processed by the brain? Click the group link below to explore this topic with your teacher.

• Group Link: CLICK HERE

Topic 3: Properties of Consciousness and Attention

Attention is is what differentiates listening from hearing. Let's explore some psychological processes involved in attention.

• Quote: "As we map out the processes that underlie listening, we realize that a complex neural architecture underlies our ability to perceive and understand the language. The most general assumption of this kind of neurological map is that knowledge derives from perceptual, behavioral, and affective experiences of the world. We internalize these experiences in multi-modal ways: how they feel, how they look, how they sound, and what language is associated with them. We are then able to deconstruct these multi-modal experiences into structural, functional, and verbal models so that we can utilize these learned experiences more efficiently (Rost, 2016, p. 8)."

• Because attention is a critical component of listening, we can say that listening is informed by both the external world and our internal reality. Consciousness is "the bridge between these two sources of knowledge (p. 8)." Consciousness involves two cognitive processes:

• Identification: "The brain identifies an outside object of revent as consisting of independent properties."
• Agency: "The brain sets up the listener as the central agent who willingly and purposefully witnesses this object or event.

• "Consciousness is experienced as a continuous force that links contact with the internal and external environments and allows the experiencer to make sense of these encounters and to direct them (p.9)."

Importance of Consciousness in Describing Listening

Properties of Consciousness: Click the group link below to explore some additional assumptions about the nature of consciousness.

• Group Link: CLICK HERE

• "Our consciousness can interact with only one source of information at a time, although we can readly and rapidly switch back and forth between different sources, and even bundle disparate sources into a single focus of attention. Whenever multiple stources, or streams, of information are present, selective attention must be used in order to allow our working memory to function coherently. Selective attention involves a descision, a commitment of our limited capacity process to one stram of information or one bundled set of features (p. 12)."

Cocktail Party Effect: Let's study the limited capacity of consciousness with the following experiment. 

• 1st Play: Try to pay attention to both speakers and grasp as much of the two information streams as possible. 
• What did you notice?

• 2nd Play: Use your selective attention to commit to only one information stream. 
• What happened this time?

Topic 5: Retelling through Keywords

You have just been exposed to a large amount of theory and new vocabulary. It can be a lot to process at once. Click on your group document and work with your partners to match keywords from today's lesson with their definitions or examples. Then discuss the questions.

• Group 1: CLICK HERE
• Group 2: CLICK HERE
• Group 3: CLICK HERE

References:

Rost, M. (2026). Teaching and Researching Listening (3rd ed.). Routledge.