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Why is Listening Comprehension Important?
It may seem painfully obvious that listening is important for learning any language, even for Chinese as a Second Language (CSL) learners. However, many educators and parents may not understand the connection between listening comprehension and reading comprehension. In fact, adults take for granted that they were not always the readers, and were once the ones read to. Consider an example below, which showcases how much of early literacy is listening-dependent.
Source: Rick Stevens.
But why is this skill important in the first place? Listening begins quite literally from the first day we are born. Newborns use listening to hone in on important stimuli (such as their mothers) and ignore unimportant stimuli (such as strangers). This attention to stimuli later generalizes to reading. Parents often read to their children from an early age to guide their reading, and so the connection between listening and reading is established very quickly. Listening while reading enables children to pick out words and sentences in a story. It also allows them to form a mental map which can be used later to "fill in gaps" of understanding. Even adults in the modern age have increasingly relied on listening to text via audio books and podcasts. Without this skill, children rely on decoding text they may not understand.
Listening comprehension and vocabulary are heavily related to each other, which in a synchronous way combine to boost reading ability. Recall the last time you read a word in an article only to find later that the "p" in "cupboard" isn't pronounced literally, and that the word "epitome" doesn't rhyme with "Rome." How about the word "adumbrate?" If we don't know how to say this word, how can we find out? We can simply listen to the video below, and thereafter our pronunciation when reading the word in isolation should improve.
Source: Julien Miquel.
The Simple View of Reading (SVR)
Some important theories of reading have long established this connection. Quite likely the most cited framework of reading which is related to this concept is the Simple View of Reading (SVR). It's namesake comes from a simple formula. Those who came up with this theory posited that reading comprehension is equal to linguistic comprehension times decoding. It is formulaicly represented as:
Linguistic Comprehension x Decoding = Reading Comprehension
We will discuss what these terms mean exactly in a bit, but if a student lacks ability in one of these skills (which can be represented with a zero), their consequent reading comprehension reduces to zero.
Professor Catherine McBride from Purdue University explaining the Simple View of Reading.
An example of a reading fluency test. Notice in the video that the student is instructed to complete the reading within one minute.
Components of SVR
What do each of these terms mean exactly? Reading comprehension is an ability to read passages of sentences. Notice that this is a more broad version of reading than simply reading words or characters. Decoding is usually comprised of two components: accuracy and fluency. Accuracy is how correct one is when reading out a word. For example, reading the word "fluff" as "Shawn's inability to write" is not the correct pronunciation (though may be technically correct in my case). Instead, the word should sound roughly like "fluhf." Fluency is how quickly one can read. Generally speaking, if you are able to read quickly, your reading comprehension skills are more likely to be better overall. Finally, linguistic comprehension is simply oral language comprehension. This can be defined as vocabulary, grammar ability, or a number of other spoken-language components. However, this is also often simply defined as listening comprehension.
The Simple View of Reading in Chinese
Despite decades of validating research, the SVR framework has not been without criticisms. Indeed many student skills predict reading success and these are generally left out of the SVR model. This is both a strength and limitation of SVR, in that it's application is parsimonious but it skips over other important aspects of literacy. However, what has historically been more concerning about SVR is how universal it is across languages.
As I explained in another article, Chinese has some unique features that make it an outlier among other writing systems. For example, Chinese does not use an alphabet and consequently does not have letters that represent direct sound mappings to words. Instead, children learn the sounds of logographic characters either implicitly via repeated exposure or explicitly by reading phonetic radicals in characters as clues to character sounds. For example, take a look at the characters below.
吧把爸
Notice a pattern? Each of these characters has the radical 巴, which makes the sounds "ba" in spoken Mandarin. However, this is not consistent. For example, some characters have slight associations like 爬, which sounds like "pa", and some characters have no correspondence whatsoever, like the character 色 which sounds like "se." This alone wouldn't be an issue if there were few phonetic radicals, but Chinese has around 800 phonetic radicals, and it is unlikely that early readers acquire all of these in one sitting. Additionally, each character represents a singular syllable, whereas alphabetic letters represent single phonemes with each letter. With these different sound rules present, does Chinese differ from other languages in terms of listening-reading development?
To answer this question in the Chinese context, a team of researchers got together and compiled over 200 studies and applied an advanced regression model technique called MASEM to find out which predictors best defined literacy outcomes. The results showed that these skills were indeed important for Chinese, but a number of other important metalinguistic skills were important for predicting linguistic comprehension and decoding ability, indicating that reading-specific skills in Chinese were also important for establishing this relationship between language comprehension and decoding.
This seems to again emphasize that listening comprehension is important in Chinese, but how may it be different than languages that have alphabetic scripts? Does it pose challenges for second language learning that other languages do not?
Source: Peng et al., 2021
Listening-Reading Pathways of Learning for CSL Students
Much less has been said about how CSL readers acquire literacy, and even less so in the case of the SVR model. This is problematic for a few reasons. For starters, Chinese has a lot of homophones (words that sound like each other). This makes listening quite a challenge if one does not have native speaker ability, given there is no context for much of what is spoken. Additionally, some aspects of listening like lexical tone are unique to Chinese and require many more hours of mastery for non-native speakers. Given this is the case, what does listening and reading look like for second language readers and specifically CSL readers? A MASEM very similar to the one described earlier was conducted on several studies of second language. It was again shown that the components necessary for reading included listening comprehension and decoding. However, some important factors like age (child vs adolescents/adults) and L2 ability (basic or beyond basic) moderated this relationship to a degree in some of the models crafted by the researchers.
Source: Lee et al., 2022
For CSL learners, a couple pivotal studies looked at early CSL literacy and how strongly listening comprehension was associated with reading comprehension. One study conducted by Yu Ka Wong of The Chinese University of Hong Kong seemed to confirm this relationship, as shown in the path diagram below. However, these are children from Grades 4 and Grades 5, so this seems to mostly reflect later primary school learning and may not be indicative of the earlier literacy acquisition.
Source: Wong, 2017.
Interestingly, another study conducted by the same researcher seemed to indicate that reading acts as a sort of intermediary between listening comprehension and writing ability. That is to say that listening comprehension predicted reading ability, reading ability predicted writing ability, and writing ability was partially predicted by the listening comprehension that preceded reading. While these studies are somewhat limited and only begin to scratch the surface of CSL listening-reading pathways to learning, it is at least a starting place for further research in this area, and at least some indication that it is important to focus on as a parent or educator.
Source: Wong & Zhou, 2021.
Resources for Improving Listening in Chinese
If listening comprehension is so important for later reading success, what can be done to improve listening comprehension? Unfortunately, there has not been a lot of research conducted on what interventions can improve listening comprehension among CSL learners. However, I do have some personal resources from learning Chinese ages ago that I find are good at teaching listening and reading simultaneously and may potentially be included in an intervention study of mine in the future.
For beginners, I think the Yoyo Chinese course and their videos on YouTube are excellent for this. They usually have some target dialogue that is simple but varied slightly from person to person so you get repeated exposure to how many different people talk in real life. As an example, I found the videos they recorded in Dongbei were particularly difficult but useful for getting used to 兒化音 in Chinese, and this is a good skillset to have if you are moving across different regions of China. These videos also include a subtitled portion so you can learn how to read the dialogue in both pinyin and hanzi.
Counting (Yoyo Chinese)
Greetings (Yoyo Chinese)
If you are looking for something more intermediate or advanced, I highly recommend the Mandarin Corner series on YouTube. Their channel has some fairly long dialogues with a lot of topic-specific vocab for building listening comprehension. Like Yoyo Chinese, they provide the requisite reading material so you can learn how to read what you hear.
Source: Mandarin Corner.
References
Gough, P. B., & Tunmer, W. E. (1986). Decoding, reading, and reading disability. Remedial and Special Education, 7(1), 6–10. https://doi.org/10.1177/074193258600700104
Hogan, T. P., Adlof, S. M., & Alonzo, C. N. (2014). On the importance of listening comprehension. International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 16(3), 199–207. https://doi.org/10.3109/17549507.2014.904441
Høien‐Tengesdal, I. (2010). Is the simple view of reading too simple? Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research, 54(5), 451–469. https://doi.org/10.1080/00313831.2010.508914
Lee, H., Jung, G., & Lee, J. H. (2022). Simple view of second language reading: A meta-analytic structural equation modeling approach. Scientific Studies of Reading. https://doi.org/10.1080/10888438.2022.2087526
McBride, C. A. (2016). Is Chinese special? Four aspects of Chinese literacy acquisition that might distinguish learning Chinese from learning alphabetic orthographies. Educational Psychology Review, 28, 523–549. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-015-9318-2
Peng, P., Lee, K., Luo, J., Li, S., Joshi, R. M., & Tao, S. (2021). Simple view of reading in Chinese: A one-stage meta-analytic structural equation modeling. Review of Educational Research, 91(1), 3–33. https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654320964198
Snow, C. E. (2018). Simple and not-so-simple views of reading. Remedial and Special Education, 39(5), 313–316. https://doi.org/10.1177/0741932518770288
Wong, Y. K. (2017). Relationships between reading comprehension and its components in young Chinese-as-a-second-language learners. Reading and Writing, 30, 969–988. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-016-9708-y
Wong, Y. K., & Zhou, Y. (2021). Effects of metalinguistic awareness on Chinese as a second language spelling through the mediation of reading and copying. Reading and Writing, 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-021-10167-0
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