Should I learn the vocabulary before listening? What actually helps, according to 160 students

The problem

Before pressing play, you do your homework: you look up the vocabulary, write down ten words, revise them. Then you listen, and it’s as blurry as before. The words on your list go past unrecognised, or you catch them and lose everything else. You decide you were still missing some, and that next time the list needs to be longer.

The list isn’t too short: it’s simply the wrong tool.

What the research found

Anna Chang and John Read put the question directly to 160 Taiwanese students in a compulsory English listening course (Chang & Read, 2006). They compared four ways of preparing for a listening task: reading the questions in advance, hearing the recording twice, being given information about the topic, or learning the vocabulary of the text just beforehand. Each group received a single kind of help, then took the same comprehension test.

The ranking is clear. The most effective help was information about the topic: knowing what it’s going to be about, and in what situation. Just behind came hearing the recording twice. And right at the bottom, whatever the students’ level, came learning vocabulary before listening. The authors describe it as the least useful form of support in their study.

Why does a word list help so little? Because a word learned on its own, in writing, five minutes earlier, has no sound shape in your head yet. Your ear doesn’t recognise it in the stream, and the time spent hunting for it makes you miss what follows. Context works differently: it doesn’t give you the words, it gives you expectations. If you know two neighbours are stuck in a lift, you can guess there’ll be talk of time, buttons and calling someone, and your brain recognises faster what it was already expecting.

Carol Herron had shown this back in the 1990s with students of French in the United States (Herron, 1994). Before a video, one group received a few sentences summarising the main scenes, what researchers call an “advance organizer”. Those students understood the video better than those who watched it cold. A few sentences, not a list.

Do this today

Before your next listen, replace the word list with a single line, written down or said aloud: who is talking, where they are, what’s happening. If you don’t know, read the title and description, or look at the picture, and guess. Then listen with nothing else. You’ll find your ear catches more when it knows what to expect, even without knowing the words.

How our lessons use it

The video « L’ascenseur », on the HumanFrench YouTube channel, suits this reflex well: the title already gives you the place, so you only have to guess who and what. Listen once without reading, try to answer the questions, then listen again. Its shadowing version takes the same story with pauses to repeat each sentence, and the vocabulary settles there, inside the story, not on a list. And « Je m’appelle Nadia » does the same on the reading side. Go and listen to « L’ascenseur ».

The honest limit

Chang and Read’s study is about Taiwanese students of English, in a test situation, with one session per kind of help. It compares help given just before listening; it says nothing about vocabulary learned weeks earlier, which obviously does help. Students’ proficiency level altered some of the effects. And Herron’s study dates from 1994, with small groups: a pointer, not definitive proof.

Your questions