A tentative approach to analysing listening strategies in CALL

While listening to an oral message individually, L2 learners may easily stop and/or go back to poorly understood previous pieces of information. Several experiments have been carried out in which L2 learners (L1: French) were listening on a computer to an MP3 track in German while a video of the screen was recording the movements of the mouse and its time-course. This new method permitted an accurate analysis of the subjects’ self-controlled cognitive information input/intake strategies, that is to say the self-regulating process during the listening. The data, the time-courses of the mouse were then analysed, from both a linguistic and a psycholinguistic point of view, enabling us, on the one hand, to define a typology of learning strategies. We recognised four listening types. As opposed to lesser-skilled learners, better-skilled learners deal with the listening task globally. On the other hand, tracking the movements of the mouse while a learner individually listens to an oral text on a computer also has a methodological interest and permitted as well to verify some precise research hypotheses about the links between linguistics features, self-regulation strategies and comprehension.