Introduction

Listening comprehension constitutes the bedrock for language learning (^{Vandergrift, 2007}), and, at the same time and in comparison to other language skills, it is perceived as a difficult skill to learn (^{Graham, 2003}) and to teach (^{Cauldwell, 2013}). In the field of second language teaching, listening tends to be neglected, and learners are usually not instructed to develop or improve this skill; instead, they are evaluated on how well they understand oral speech (^{Field, 2008}; ^{Vandergrift & Goh, 2012}), a teaching approach that ^{Field (2008)} coined as the comprehension approach. Learners are expected to develop this skill through an osmosis process that only requires tremendous exposure to oral material (^{Cauldwell, 2013}; ^{Vandergrift & Goh, 2012}). Assuming that the more learners listen to verbal material (extensive listening), the better they develop decoding skills, some researchers still need to consider that learners may first need to acquire these decoding skills to benefit from extensive listening (^{Field, 2008}).

Research on second language listening has mainly centered on the role of metacognitive, cognitive, and socio-affective strategies; decoding processes; affective factors; the role of previous and linguistic knowledge; learners’ listening problems, among others (^{Brown, 2017}; ^{Goh, 2017}; ^{Vanderplank, 2014}). This research has yielded the following principles considered suitable for listening development: (a) listening skills need to be taught because they do not develop by themselves, (b) both top-down and bottom-up strategies contribute to listening comprehension, (c) metacognitive strategies aid listening comprehension, (d) focusing on chunks instead of isolated words is more effective, and (e) prediction activities must be verified (^{Graham, Santos, & Francis-Brophy, 2014}).

Nevertheless, the primary debate has focused on the priority that listening comprehension strategies should be given during instruction. In other words, if top-down strategies (such as prediction and previous knowledge activation) should be emphasized so that learners can maximize their limited resources and gain confidence while they build their linguistic knowledge and skill, or if more teaching effort should be devoted to bottom-up strategies (such as speech perception training) since class time is usually limited (^{Vanderplank, 2014}). Therefore, even though there is a considerable amount of good practice evidence-due to the controversy above and the fact that research results are inconclusive-listening teaching continues to be a problematic area (Vanderplank, 2014), which needs a more significant number of studies on how teachers deal with listening instruction (^{Brown, 2017}).

Literature Review

According to ^{Borg (2003)}, teacher cognition refers to “what teachers know, belief, and think” (p. 81), which exerts an impact on their pedagogical decisions. Nevertheless, teachers’ beliefs are not always reflected in teaching practices since there are other influencing factors: “teachers’ experiences as learners,” teacher education, classroom practice, and contextual factors, among others (^{Borg, 2003}, p. 81). Due to the strong connection between beliefs and practices, research in the area of language teacher beliefs has experienced a significant increase over the last 20 years (^{Borg & Alshumaimeri, 2017}). However, research is very scant regarding teachers’ beliefs and practices in second language listening (^{Graham, Santos, & Francis-Brophy, 2014}). It mainly suggests that teachers are less prepared to teach listening than they are to teach grammar and other language skills and that they do not consider listening as a skill that needs to be taught and developed since it is instead seen as an exercise for practice (^{Graham & Santos, 2015}; ^{Graham, Santos, & Francis-Brophy, 2014}; ^{Graham, Santos, & Vanderplank, 2011}).

Bottom-up listening strategies have been left out of listening pedagogy research (^{Vandergrift & Goh, 2012}). According to ^{Siegel and Siegel (2015)}, the listening pedagogy has focused mainly on top-down strategies and questions to verify comprehension, leaving aside bottom-up approaches, especially phoneme recognition and parsing skills. Teachers tend to predominately employ activities that verifyunderstanding of the content of oral texts (^{Siegel, 2013}), neglecting the teaching of how to listen and the process of listening (^{Goh, 2017}). Additionally, ^{Renandya and Hu (2018)} claim that, although research and pedagogical interest in listening skills have increased, teachers are generally not better able to make use of that knowledge in their teaching practice due to a lack of access to the literature (which prevents them from keeping up with the latest developments in the teaching of listening), conflicting views in the literature about the main factors affecting oral text processing and how best to teach listening (which can confuse and disorient teachers who have access to the literature), and lack of access to listening materials and the Internet.

^{Graham, Santos, and Francis-Brophy (2014)} designed a questionnaire to determine secondary teachers’ stated beliefs about listening instruction, their stated classroom listening practices, and the extent to which these beliefs and practices were related to the literature about L2 listening. The results indicate that these teachers believe that effective listening is tantamount to task completion and that factors such as the text, the national curriculum, and educational standards influence their teaching practices.

The knowledge of the relationship between teachers’ beliefs about listening in a second language and their pedagogical practices can serve as a foundation for teaching practice improvement (^{Graham & Santos, 2015}), especially when comparing teachers’ practical knowledge with theoretical knowledge (^{Graham, Santos, & Francis-Brophy, 2014}). Accordingly, a thorough understanding of how teachers approach listening instruction is paramount to identifying how listening is operationalized in second language classes since the scarce existing studies are based on anecdotic evidence; thus, empirical evidence is crucial (^{Graham, Santos, & Vanderplank, 2011}). As an attempt to contribute with empirical evidence from a Latin American context to a scarcely researched area, this study addresses the following research questions:

Method

An explanatory, sequential, mixed-method design (^{Creswell & Plano-Clark, 2011}) was used for the study. Quantitative data were collected utilizing a questionnaire and, to get a deeper understanding of these data, qualitative data were gathered through class observations. As survey research highly depends on participants’ self-report on their knowledge, attitudes, and behavior (what they report feeling or believing instead of what they really feel or believe, which can make them sometimes choose answers more acceptable or desirable; ^{Mertens, 2015}), class observations were included to collect direct information and not only self-reported accounts (^{Dörnyei, 2007}).

The researcher assumed the role of a non-participatory observer and used an observation scheme for the structured observations; nevertheless, extra notes were taken so as not to miss essential details. Structured observations can reduce the complexity of a situation when focusing only on predetermined categories (^{Dörnyei, 2007}).

For analyzing data from the open-ended items of the questionnaire, a textual transcription of all the answers was prepared and read several times to identify emerging categories, which were ordered and counted every time each category was mentioned. This categorization was done three times at a five-day interval, after which the categories obtained in the three analyses were compared and adjusted.

Results

Discussion

The findings reveal that the instructional practices reported by the teachers emphasize task completion rather than listening development and are oriented towards the product of listening since they mentioned procedures aimed primarily at obtaining the correct answer (which were verified in the class observations). To this end, the teachers ensure students know exactly what they are expected to do; teach or review vocabulary; ask students to focus on specific ideas, general ideas, and sometimes keywords; play the audio, and check answers. When teachers report performing procedures that involve strategy instruction-such as making students focus on specific information or stimulating prediction (which are the most mentioned procedures)-they refer to asking students to do such activities instead of teaching them how to develop such strategies. The only instructional activities that could be observed were usually vocabulary teaching (to make it easier for students to obtain the correct answer) and, rarely, pronunciation teaching. Vocabulary teaching focused on the meaning of words, and only Teacher 7 emphasized vocabulary recognition in connected speech and some pronunciation rules. These results constitute empirical evidence of what ^{Cauldwell (2013)} claimed about teaching listening being synonymous with doing comprehension exercises focused on evaluating students. They also evidence learners’ evaluation of their understanding or lack of understanding instead of being trained to develop listening skills (^{Field, 2008}; ^{Vandergrift & Goh, 2012}). Likewise, the results are similar to those of ^{Graham, Santos, and Francis-Brophy (2014)} in England with high school teachers, which adds to the evidence that the comprehension approach is the most widely used pedagogy for teaching listening (^{Field, 2008}). Moreover, the fact that most teachers indicate working on listening (making students do listening exercises) twice a week or less without emphasizing listening teaching corroborates what ^{Vandergrift and Goh (2012)} have said regarding the development of listening in second language teaching not receiving the necessary attention.

The fact that teachers consider top-down strategies (such as the use of context and co-text) essential for understanding and give very little importance to bottom-up strategies confirms ^{Field’s (2008)} assertion that the emphasis on understanding has led to the belief that the use of context is a central element for listening comprehension. Therefore, teachers do not focus on teaching speech perception based on the assumption that subject knowledge will facilitate understanding and help solve ambiguity problems. Nevertheless, ^{Vandergrift and Goh (2012)} asserted that many learners’ comprehension problems stem from decoding issues. The findings also confirm ^{Graham, Santos, and Francis-Brophy’s (2014)} and ^{Siegel’s (2013)} claims that teachers rarely incorporate activities that favor the development of bottom-up skills since they think effective listening means completing listening tasks with the correct answers.

Also, the teachers reported that the most crucial purpose of listening activities is to increase practice opportunities, which is in line with the most used pedagogy nowadays (comprehension approach) that emphasizes listening to a series of audios (one after the other) to increase the number of listening experiences, which is believed help learners improve their listening competence (^{Field, 2008}). This is learning by osmosis, which assumes that learners will acquire decoding skills similar to native speakers only by listening as much as possible (^{Cauldwell, 2013}). However, as ^{Field (2008)} argued, learners who do not understand a significant amount of input tend to stop doing listening activities or use context-based compensatory strategies to guess the meaning, which can trigger demotivation to engage in listening activities and the reinforcement of inefficient strategies to deal with such activities. As observed in the classes, many students did not understand the audios, yet the teachers did not try to improve their ability to perceive speech after providing the correct answers. Therefore, the after-listening phase received the least attention. Once the answers were checked, the teachers moved on to another activity to develop a different language skill (usually speaking), underusing valuable listening material that could have been exploited to develop decoding skills (^{Cauldwell, 2013}). It is worth wondering how much the students benefited from such listening activity or whether it only made them aware of their limitations in understanding speech. Similarly, as ^{Cauldwell (2013)} contends, teachers generally use listening activities not to develop this skill but for other purposes; for example, most teacher participants used listening activities to develop speaking or introduce a topic.

For the participating teachers, it is clear that textbooks guide teaching (only three teachers said they use them rarely) and can be responsible for teachers using the comprehension approach since the books focus primarily on understanding general ideas and details and pre-listening activities but lack addressing the development of the listening skill. In addition, the tests included in the textbooks (which only present one or two listening questions that test the understanding of general ideas and specific details) can also influence the use of the comprehension approach because, as ^{Field (2008)} points out, one of the advantages of this approach is that it prepares students to pass international exams that consist mainly of comprehension questions. Thus, the results also align with ^{Graham, Santos, and Francis-Brophy (2014)} in that teaching reflects the demands of institutional contexts. The teacher participants indicated that the central negative aspect of textbooks is the modified speech that does not represent actual discourse; nevertheless, it was noted that, for many students, this modified speech is tough to understand. Hence, it seems that the teachers are aware of the need to practice using real audio, and probably when they do not use the textbook, they may look for this type of material; however, if this material is underused, students would not benefit from that effort.

Similar to the findings in ^{Graham, Santos, and Francis-Brophy (2014)}, the teachers did not demonstrate having theoretical or methodological knowledge that guides their instructional practice. Justifications for performing the reported teaching procedures are practical in nature, and many represent the procedure’s objective.

Conclusion

This study provided empirical evidence of university EFL teachers’ stated beliefs and pedagogical practices about teaching listening. For them, teaching listening means doing comprehension activities whose primary purpose is to select the correct answers. This creates a class environment where only two or three students participate by providing those answers. After this, even though teachers acknowledge learners’ lack of understanding, they move on to another activity to develop a different skill without providing any help for listening comprehension improvement, that is, assisting students to go beyond answering predetermined questions-a limited aspect of comprehension-to grasping the meanings behind the verbal message-in-depth comprehension. Teachers, who lack a solid theoretical underpinning that guides their practices, usually rely on textbooks that adhere to the comprehension approach (^{Field, 2008}). They do not encourage working with sound substance to foster decoding skill development. Accordingly, teacher training on effective listening practices is crucial to embrace research-based pedagogical strategies that harness learners’ listening process development. Such training can take place in workshops or any continuous teacher education programs. The effect of such training, as well as the effect of decoding-based instruction on learner listening skill development, can be worth exploring in further research.