point and counterpoint

Misunderstanding comprehension
Michael Swan and Catherine Walter

Lessons designed to teach reading and listening typically concentrate on the use
of higher-level skills and strategies, such as predicting, scanning, inferencing,
understanding text structure, or activating background knowledge. Given that
these normal communication skills are already available to students for mother-
tongue use, they should generally be accessible in the new language without further
training, once fluent and accurate low-level decoding and parsing have been
automatized enough to free up mental space for higher-level processing. With some
exceptions, any remaining comprehension problems are likely to arise from specific
linguistic features of the input: for instance unknown vocabulary, textual density,
syntactic complexity, or difficulty in dealing with the phonetic characteristics of fast
speech. Such difficulties are best addressed not by top-down skills-and-strategies
work, which often fills valuable class time to little purpose, but by more closely
focused training based on a careful assessment of the real problems involved.

Introduction In the nature of things, language learners do not always understand

everything they read or hear. It is widely believed that this can result from
an inadequate command of reading or listening skills and/or strategies,
and that these need to be taught. It is not our purpose to question the need
for students to learn to handle written and spoken language successfully:
of course they must. Nor do we wish to deny the value of appropriately
focused instruction where it is useful. But we do think it important to
question some of the underlying assumptions associated with current
approaches to teaching reading and listening, and to look critically at the
activities which are typically based on those assumptions.

Comprehension Perhaps the simplest approach to teaching comprehension is the time-

questions honoured procedure whereby students read or listen to a text (perhaps
with some pre-teaching of difficult vocabulary, or introductory discussion
of the relevant topic), and are then required to answer questions designed
to check their understanding. Despite its antiquity, this formula remains
popular in many teaching contexts. In a recent study of listening
instruction in a Japanese university (Siegel 2014), for example, it was
found to be the most commonly used approach in that setting. It is
widespread in self-access teaching materials. An online search for ‘English
listening practice’, ‘English comprehension exercises’, or the like will

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 throw up a plethora of resources constructed on this basis; a typical
example is the ‘LearnEnglish Teens’ site (British Council n.d.).
While this activity may well encourage the kind of careful reading or listening
that is required, for example by certain examinations, it is essentially a testing
rather than teaching procedure, and has frequently been criticized for this
reason. Even as a test it has little diagnostic value. As Nation (2009: 29ff.)
points out, students’ performance on comprehension questions says little
about the reasons for their success or failure, and consequently gives no firm
basis for developing properly focused solutions to their problems.

Skills and strategies In any case, the simple text-plus-questions formula reflects a somewhat
monolithic view of reading or listening which has largely been
superseded. For several decades, it has been conventional to distinguish
different subcomponents of these skills, and to recommend that teaching
be directed accordingly. We must, we are regularly told in the teacher-
training literature and professional discussions, help our learners to
become better at such things as:
ππ predicting the likely content of what they are about to read or hear;
ππ reading or listening for gist (‘skimming’);
ππ identifying the main point(s) in a text;
ππ reading or listening for detailed comprehension;
ππ scanning for specific information; and
ππ guessing or deducing the meaning of unfamiliar words and expressions.
This style of analysis has generated a rich inventory of activities for
comprehension training. Virtually all English language courses and support
materials include texts for students to read or listen to, along with exercises
like the following which are claimed to foster skills of the kind listed above.
You will hear a poem by Philip Larkin entitled ‘Whitsun Weddings’.
What does the title tell you about the poem? (‘Predicting’)
Match pictures 1–6 to paragraphs A–F in the text. (‘Identifying main points’)
Work in groups. Read the text quickly and find the animals listed below.
(‘Scanning’)
Read the advertisements quickly. Which one is for (a) a classical music
concert; (b) a club; (c) a film; (d) a jazz festival; (e) a lecture? (‘Skimming’)
Listen to the recording. Is the speaker (a) in favour of air travel; (b) against
air travel; (c) neither for nor against air travel?
These activities are so familiar that many language teachers today no
doubt take it for granted that ‘doing a reading lesson’ or what is often called
‘doing a listening’ in this way is a normal part of the language-teaching mix.
The familiar lists of comprehension skills are often swelled by examples
of the various strategies thought to be deployed by successful readers
and listeners. The notion of ‘strategy’ is not generally well defined in
the literature (Macaro (2006) is a notable exception) and there is often
a considerable overlap between the notions of ‘strategy’ and ‘skill’, with
some activities (such as predicting, or guessing the meanings of unknown

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 words) commonly showing up under both headings. ‘Cognitive strategies’
feature largely in the taxonomies (some very complex) found in the
literature; speakers at the 50th Annual International IATEFL Conference
in Birmingham recommended training readers and listeners in:
ππ activating schemata and real-world knowledge;
ππ activating common sense;
ππ identifying key vocabulary;
ππ inferencing;
ππ paying attention to the structure of texts;
ππ listening or reading several times, moving from a focus on gist to a
closer attention to detail; and
ππ paying attention to speakers’ facial expressions and body language.
Other conference speakers dealt with ‘socio-affective strategies’ (for
instance asking speakers for clarification, asking friends for help in
understanding, managing frustration) and with ‘metacognitive strategies’
(for instance keeping listening logs, or more generally planning,
monitoring, and evaluating one’s use of strategies).

Are these activities However, while training in particular skills or strategies like those listed
effective? above may be useful for some learners in certain well-defined contexts, it
does not seem to be the case that this approach helps language students in
general with their understanding of written or spoken language. It is open
to two major criticisms.
First of all, the underlying assumption is simply implausible. Most
foreign-language learners have already developed a reasonable command
of the various skills and strategies under discussion, by virtue of being
competent communicators in their mother tongue. There is no reason
at all to think that these mother-tongue communication skills are not in
principle accessible in foreign-language use without additional training.
Why should a reader who understands the title of a foreign-language
article not be able to predict its likely content; or why should one need
to learn all over again, in a new language, how to read carefully, to
scan text for specific information, or to listen for gist? Nor is it likely
that people have to be taught, for any language not their own, how to
activate background knowledge, ask for clarification, pay attention to
body language, or ask friends for help. Many of the readers of this article
have no doubt had occasional difficulty in understanding what they were
reading or hearing in a foreign language. It is unlikely that they have
attributed their problems to defective comprehension skills or strategies,
exclaiming for instance ‘I wish I was better at scanning!’ or ‘If only
I had been taught to activate real-world knowledge!’. But if the skills-
and-strategies framework fails to mesh with the real-world experience of
language teachers, among others, why should it be relevant to language
students? Students are not in general less capable than their teachers of
predicting, spotting main points, and the rest. If they cannot understand
what they are reading or hearing, the reasons must surely lie elsewhere.
A second problem with the skills-and-strategies approach is that there is
little evidence to support it. Strategy-oriented training has been found to
improve reading performance, but only in certain limited contexts, for

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 example second as opposed to foreign languages and post-secondary as
opposed to secondary institutions (Plonsky 2011). Where small effects
have been found for the understanding of speech (for example Graham
and Macaro 2008), the training has included basic decoding (identifying
individual words), rather than only the kinds of strategies under
discussion.
To a great extent, therefore, the current orthodoxy regarding ‘teaching
listening’ and ‘teaching reading’ operates in an evidence-poor zone.
In so far as research evidence does exist, it tends in fact to undermine
the orthodoxy. For instance, the belief, still held by many teachers and
materials writers, that comprehension can be improved by training in
guessing the meaning of unknown words, has little evidential basis.
Bensoussan and Laufer (1984) found that when contextual clues were
available, learners were only able to guess 41 per cent of correct word
meanings in written texts. In another area: it turns out to be dangerous to
insist that students activate prior knowledge of a topic in the absence of
appropriate lexical and grammatical knowledge, because they may then
tend to over-extend their prior knowledge, inventing facts that they do not
hear (Jensen and Hansen 1995).

Decoding and It is not surprising that training in cognitive, metacognitive, and socio-
interpreting affective strategies does not improve understanding when learners do
not know, or cannot recognize, the words they are reading or hearing and
how they are put together. Nonetheless, even when learners are reading
or listening to a text in which they can be assumed to know the words and
the grammar, they often seem to have difficulty in grasping the overall
meaning. How can this be accounted for most realistically?
Walter (2007) studied young French people at two different stages in
their learning of English. Both groups of learners were familiar with all
the words and grammar in the texts used for the study. Their task was
to detect contradictions in the story lines of the texts, either in L1 French
or in L2 English (all stories were represented in both languages across
groups). Both groups did well in their task in L1. However, only the upper-
intermediate group did well in L2, even though the lower-intermediate
group understood each individual sentence. The lower-intermediate
participants could not access, while reading an L2 text, their ability to
build a mental representation of that text, and therefore could not detect
when a new fact contradicted what had gone before. There was evidence
that this was linked to fluency: the lower-intermediate group were
decoding the words and parsing the structure of the sentences accurately,
but were not doing so fluently enough to have enough mental capacity
available to construct a coherent mental representation of the whole.
The upper-intermediate participants, with two more years of practice in
decoding and parsing behind them, had automatized these processes, and
therefore were far better able to access the same interpreting skills that
they deployed in relation to the L1 texts.

Extensive reading So, as fluency is essential, is practice all that is necessary for learners
and listening to understand what they read and hear, given adequate lexical and
grammatical knowledge? Renandya and Farrell (2011) argue that ‘reading

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 is best learned through reading’ and suggest that the equivalent may be
equally true of understanding spoken language. However, of the many
relevant studies carried out since the 1990s, most have not shown an
advantage for extensive reading in the classroom over other alternatives
for the improvement of reading comprehension (Yamashita 2008 being
an exception). This is in contrast to the clear and consistent effects on
attitudes towards language learning and towards reading that are fostered
by extensive reading programmes. It may simply be that more exposure to
both extensive reading and extensive listening is needed than is feasible
in most in-class situations. If motivation exists or can be fostered, the
classroom may then best serve as an introduction to out-of-class work,
which may supply the volume of reading and listening practice that
will effectively permit fluency development. Extensive reading material
(including literature written for language learners at all levels) is now
available in profusion. Similar materials for listening practice (such as free
podcasts, including many series for language learners at different levels)
are also readily available to anyone with an internet connection.
However, practice, in combination with basic language knowledge, is
clearly not always enough. Some learners still have difficulty in decoding
or parsing much of what they read or hear even after substantial language
study and long-term exposure. If lack of ‘top-down’ interpreting skills is
not the reason, what is it that causes their problems?

Reading and In the world outside the language classroom, skills vary a good deal in
listening as skills: the kinds of demands they make on the learner. With more complex
the need for focus skills, training and practice may need to include a focus on specific
difficulties. Someone learning a stringed instrument such as the violin
may, for instance, have to spend a good deal of time practising separately
certain types of bowing, or difficult kinds of fingering, before these more
demanding elements become automatized enough to be integrated into
continuous performance. What is easy or hard also depends somewhat
on the learner’s previous experience. A violinist may well be able to adapt
to the viola with relatively little difficulty. On the other hand, while a
clarinettist learning the viola will benefit considerably from their prior
knowledge of how music works, a good deal more focused practice will
be needed on the particular challenges presented by this very different
instrument.
A second-language learner is in some ways in a similar position to a
musician who is learning a new instrument. Rather than assuming that
the learner needs, as it were, to learn about music all over again, it makes
more sense to establish what their actual problems are. What difficulties
(if any) does the new instrument present that may require special focus if
the learner is to achieve accurate and fluent decoding, so that they can use
the comprehension skills that they already possess?

Focus on reading It is clear that learners need to have an adequate knowledge of the words
problems and structures in the texts they are reading or listening to: a basic form–
meaning link needs to be established. However, beyond that, for some
readers, specific linguistic elements may cause problems for accurate and
fluent word recognition. Here are some examples:

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 ππ An unfamiliar script can impede decoding. In particular, learners
whose language is written in a different script and from right to left can
take a long time to become skilled in fluent recognition of English word
shapes, and this may affect their ability to automatize the processing
of written text, even when they have achieved a good knowledge of the
language. Early focused training in, for instance, distinguishing easily
confusable letter shapes can help a good deal, and is indeed often given.
ππ More advanced learners (and less experienced native-speaking readers)
can find fluent parsing held up by particular grammatical features.
Formal written English often contains complex nominalizations and
embeddings, so that sentences like the following may be hard for some
readers to navigate, especially if their mother tongues do not contain
similar structures:
Many of the gold and silver objects excavated from the 3000-year-old royal
tombs resemble items of jewellery still made today by craftsmen trained in the
traditional skills.
A relatively small amount of focused teaching and practice, designed to
familiarize learners with especially challenging structures of this kind,
may well pay substantial dividends. For examples of such work, see
Swan and Walter (2011: 270–4).
ππ At the level of text organization, high-level learners may need special
help to identify and focus on the functions of certain discourse markers,
for instance without focused training they may not easily pick up the
concessive function of certainly, or catch the common ironic implication
of no doubt (ibid.: 265–6):
Certainly, several women loved him, and he was married twice. All the same,
those closest to him felt …
The government, no doubt for excellent reasons, has reduced unemployment
benefit once again …

Focus on ‘listening’ Language learners do not of course need to be taught to listen, everyone
problems can listen. Granted, some people are temperamentally better listeners
than others in any language, but it is not the job of language teachers to
give personality training. Learners’ so-called listening problems are most
often to do with basic decoding: with knowing just what it is that they are
listening to. It is here that the mismatch with standard ‘listening lessons’
(which are often nothing more than reading lessons delivered differently),
or with conventional strategies training, is most striking, for example:
I’ve hardly had the chance to use the strategies I’ve been taught because
I have great difficulty in recognizing the words in the sentences.
I always try to catch the words when I listen, but it is so hard for me.
The strategies may be good, but they are not so useful for me. I mean it
doesn’t really help me when I listen. (Student’s feedback translated from
Mandarin by Zhang (2005), cited in Renandya and Farrell op.cit.: 57)
There are two typical problems in this area. One is to do with speed: the
words go by too fast for the learner to process them in the way that he
or she might well be able to do if they were written down. The other is

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 to do with the shapes of the words. Neighbouring sounds affect each
other, and this assimilation can both take words and expressions a very
long way away from their familiar citation forms, and blur perception of
the boundaries between them (which in any case are not marked by any
equivalent of the spaces that separate words in writing). Languages like
English, where some syllables carry much heavier stress than others, have
a very high incidence of phonetic change, with unstressed syllables being
so reduced that they may become unrecognizable, or simply disappear:
I am going to > I’m gonna > Inggonna > Ungna
aɪ æm gəɪŋ tu: > aɪm gənə > aɪŋgənə > ʌŋnə

‘What do you sup’pose was the ‘reason for the con’fusion?

‘wɒtʃə’spəʊzwzðə’ri:znfðəkn’fju:ʒn
The differences between a learner’s first language and English may play
an important role in their difficulties. To return to the earlier analogy, is
the student of the viola a violinist, a clarinettist, or a drummer? English
stress patterns may not cause much trouble to a German- or Swedish-
speaking listener; in the ears of a Japanese- or Thai-speaker, they may
effectively transform the incoming message into auditory soup. Someone
whose language has equipped them to distinguish five vowel phonemes
(as with Spanish) may not easily hear the differences between say, ‘cat’,
‘cut’, ‘cart’, ‘cot’, and ‘caught’. For a Mandarin-speaker whose mother
tongue has few consonants in final position and no final consonant
clusters, groups of words like ‘what’, ‘what’s’, ‘wash’, ‘washed’, ‘watch’,
and ‘watched’ may all sound virtually the same.
It is likely that learners can be divided very roughly into two groups. For
some, as with reading, improved processing may simply be a matter of
time, and progressive practice in extensive listening may be all that these
learners need. For others, especially those for whom cross-linguistic
phonetic differences are substantial, focused attention to specifics of the
kind instanced above is likely to be helpful or even essential. Half a century
ago, awareness of this issue was widespread (see, for instance, Lado 1957:
11), and learners were commonly given ‘ear-training’ to help them decode
the stream of speech, with frequent focus on the difficulties of speakers
of one or other language. It is good to see a growing revival of interest in
this kind of listening training, with work like that of Field (2008) receiving
increased attention. Field recommends a variety of exercises focusing on
decoding at the phoneme, syllable, and word level; for a battery of such
exercises integrated with grammar training, see Swan and Walter (op.cit.).

Going beyond While most language students are happy if they can begin to command,
mother-tongue skills in their new language, the communication skills they have in their first
language, this is not enough for all learners. Some need to master tasks
in their new language for which their mother-tongue reading or listening
experience has not prepared them. Examination candidates can find
themselves in this position. Students using English for academic purposes
(EAP) are often required to read foreign-language articles and books, and
to attend lectures, whose overall density and structure is more complex

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 than anything they have previously encountered. Such students, unlike
the general run of learners, may well benefit from focused training in
such skills as note-taking, paying attention to structural signals, and other
relevant cognitive and metacognitive strategies; and many EAP specialists
provide excellent tuition in these areas. However, for these learners too,
decoding and parsing instruction is likely to be worthwhile.

Conclusion: a Teachers of receptive skills have a threefold concern:

position statement
ππ to identify which of their learners have real problems with
understanding written or spoken texts;
ππ to establish exactly what is causing these problems; and
ππ to provide whatever help is needed for the learners in question to
overcome them.
Where learners have real difficulties with reading or understanding speech,
and where these do not simply arise from inadequate language or subject
knowledge, the default assumption should be that they are caused
primarily by problems with accuracy and/or fluency in decoding and
parsing. Assessment, whether formal or as a part of the kinds of reading
and listening activities normally carried on in the classroom, should
therefore focus on establishing the exact nature of these problems, and
teaching (where necessary) should focus on remedying them. An approach
of this kind, in receptive language skills as elsewhere, provides the best
chance of fostering accurate and fluent performance in a way that uses
classroom time efficiently.
Blanket training in skills and strategies of the kind we have examined
does not address the concerns listed above. With lower-level students, the
approach purports to teach interpreting (‘What does the writer or speaker
mean by saying this?’) where problems, if they exist, are more probably
to do with efficient decoding and parsing (‘What is the writer or speaker
actually saying?’). At higher levels, when basic decoding and parsing are
sufficiently automatized, the approach purports to teach interpreting to
learners who in general can already do this with both first- and second-
language texts. In the one case, the approach offers the wrong solution to a
real problem; in the other, it offers a solution to a non-existent problem.
If, as seems to be the case, the whole massive and time-consuming
apparatus of training in skills and strategies has little or no value in helping
most learners to improve their L2 comprehension, how has it come to hold
a central position in our standard language teaching practice? Perhaps
because of a dynamic that is common in education. Teaching activities
can easily start out as plausible solutions to perceived problems, but can
then take on a life of their own which may continue long after their initial
rationale has lost credibility. They are so familiar that they become their
own justification, with little or no critical examination of their effectiveness,
if any, beyond the classroom. They are there because they are there:
language teachers do them because that is what language teachers do. So
learners read or listen to texts, and then do exercises whose main function
may simply be to train the learners to do more exercises of the same kind.
The dynamic is frequently reinforced by washback from testing: because

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 comprehension questions of varying levels of sophistication are used
in examinations, such questions are often used to prepare examination
candidates, though of course repeated testing teaches very little.
Our view echoes that of Nation (op.cit.: 26), who says that the teacher
should always ask: ‘How does today’s teaching make tomorrow’s text
easier to read?’. We do not think that the approach to teaching we have
criticized here begins to meet this crucial criterion.
Final version received June 2016

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Plonsky, L. 2011. ‘The effectiveness of second and materials developer. She has recently retired
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Journal 65/1: 52–9. She has taught English and Applied Linguistics
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examinations of practice’. ELT Journal 68/1: 22–30. teachers in many countries. In addition to her
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