Teaching by Principles: Chapter 16 Teaching Listening

Teaching by Principles: Chapter 16 Teaching Listening

LISTENING COMPREHENSION IN PEDAGOGICAL RESEARCH

-TPR: the prominence to comprehension

- Natural approach: “silent period”

- Comprehensive input: aural reception of language that is just a little beyond the learner’s present ability

- Intake: the input which actually stored in a learner’s competence

- You can be “exposed” to great quantities of input, but what counts is the linguistic information that you ultimately glean from that exposure through conscious and subconscious attention, through cognitive strategies of retention, through feedback, and through interaction.   

- The conversion of input into intake is absolutely crucial in considering the role of listening in language learning.

- Rubin’s (1994) five contextual characteristic in processing aural language:

˙text

˙interlocutor

˙task

˙listener: proficiency, memory, attention, affect, age, gender, background schemata, learning disabilities in the L1

˙process

-Listening, especially for academic and professional contexts, is a highly refined skill that requires a learner’s attention to a battery of strategies for extracting meaning from texts. 

AN INTERACTIVE MODEL OF LISTENING COMPREHENSION

-         Eight processes: most of them occur if not simultaneously, then in extremely rapid succession (P249)

TYPES OF SPOKEN LANGUAGE

-Types of oral language: figure 16.1

-Monologues:

˙One speaker uses spoken language for any length of time, as in speeches, lectures, readings, news broadcasts, and the like.

˙The hearer must process long stretches of speech without interruption – the stream of speech will go on whether or not the hearer comprehends.

˙Planned monologues (speeches and other prewritten material) usually manifest little redundancy and are therefore relatively difficult to comprehend.

˙Unplanned monologues (impromptu lectures and long “stories” in conversations) exhibit more redundancy, which makes for ease in comprehension, but the presence of more performance variable and other hesitations can either help or hinder comprehension.

-Dialogues

˙Interpersonal dialogues: dialogues that promote social relationships

˙Transactional dialogues: the purpose is to convey propositional or factual information

˙Participants may have a good deal of shared knowledge (background information, schemata)

˙The familiarity of the interlocutors will produce conversations with more assumptions, implications, and other meanings hidden between the lines, otherwise misunderstandings can easily follow.

˙Participant/ “eavesdropper”

WHAT MAKES LISTENING DIFFICULT

1. Clustering (Chunking)

-Speech is broken down into smaller groups of words.

- In teaching listening comprehension, you need to help students to pick out manageable clusters if words.

2. Redundancy

-Rephrasing, repetitions, elaborations, insertions

-Redundancy helps the hearer to process meaning by offering more time and extra information.

-Learners can train themselves to profit from such redundancy by first becoming aware that not every new sentence or phrase will necessarily contain new information and by looking for the signals of redundancy.

3. Reduced forms

-Phonological: “Djeetyet?” for “Did you eat yet?”

-Morphological: contractions like “I’ll”

-Syntactic: elliptical forms like “When will you be back?” “Tomorrow, maybe.”

-Pragmatic: “Mom! Phone!”

4. Performance variables

- Hesitations, false starts, pauses, corrections

-Learners have to train themselves to listen for meaning in the midst of distracting performance variables.

-Dialect differences: “I don’t get nor respect.”

5. Colloquial language

-Idioms, slang, reduced forms, shared cultural knowledge

6. Rate of delivery

-Number and length of pauses

-Varying rates of speed

-Few pauses

7. Stress, rhythm, and intonation

-Prosodic features of the English language

-Stressed-time/ syllable-timed language

-Intonation patterns: questions, statements, emphasis, sarcasm, endearment, insult, solicitation, praise

8. Interaction

-Negotiation, clarification, attending signals, turn-taking, topic nomination, maintenance, termination

-Learn to listen is also to learn to respond and to continue a chain of listening and responding

-Students need to know understand that good listeners (in conversation) are good responders.

-Students need to know how to negotiate meaning (to give feedback, to ask for clarification, to maintain a topic) so that the process of comprehending can be complete rather than being aborted by insufficient interaction.

MICROSKILLS OF LISTENING COMPREHENSION: Table 16.1

TYPES OF CLASSROOM LISTENING PERFORMANCE

1. Reactive

-Learners simply listen to the surface structure of an utterance for the sole purpose of repeating it back to you.

-Brief choral or individual drills that focus on pronunciation

2. Intensive

-Techniques whose only purpose is to focus on components (phonemes, words, intonation, discourse, markers, etc.) of discourse

-Students single out certain elements of spoken language

-Bottom-up skills

-Students listen for cues in certain choral or individual drills.

-The teacher repeats a word or sentence several times to “imprint” it in the students’ mind.

-The teacher asks students to listen to a sentence or a longer stretch if discourse and to notice a specified element, such as intonation, stress, a contraction, a grammatical structure, etc.

3. Responsive

-Short stretches of teacher language designed to elicit immediate responses

-Asking questions: “How are you today?” “What did you do last night?”

-Giving commands: “Take a sheet of paper and a pencil.”

-Seeking clarification: “What was that word you said?”

-Checking comprehension: “So, how many people were in the elevator when the power went out?”

4. Selective

-Scan the material selectively for certain information in longer stretches of discourse

-Find important information in a field of potentially distracting information

-Speeches, media broadcasts, stories and anecdotes, conversations in which learners are “eavesdroppers.”

-Techniques

˙Listen for people’s names; dates; certain facts or events; location, situation, context, etc.; main ideas and/or conclusion

5. Extensive

-Top-down, global understanding of spoken language

-Listening to lengthy lectures; listening to a conversation and deriving a comprehensive message or purpose

-Students invoke other interactive skills (e.g., note-taking and/or discussion) for full comprehension.

6. Interactive

-Discussion, debates, conversations, role-plays, pair and group work

-Listening performance must be intricately integrated with speaking (and perhaps other) skills in the authentic give and take of communicative interchange.

PRINCIPLES FOR DESIGNING LISTENING TECHNIQUES
-Don’t overlook the importance of techniques that specifically develop listening comprehension competence.

-Use techniques that are intrinsically motivating.

˙Appeal to listeners’ personal interests and goals

˙Background information (schemata) and cultural backgrounds

-Utilize authentic language and contexts

-Carefully consider the form of listeners’ responses.

˙Doing, choosing, transferring, answering, condensing, extending, duplicating, modeling, conversing

-Encourage the development of listening strategies

˙Key words

˙Nonverbal cues to meaning

˙Predicting a speaker’s purpose

˙Association information with one’s existing cognitive structure

˙Guessing at meanings

˙Seeking clarification

˙Listening for the general gist

˙Various test-taking strategies for listening comprehension

-Include both bottom-up and top-down listening techniques

˙Bottom-up processing proceeds from sounds to words to grammatical relationships to lexical meanings, etc., to a final “message”.

˙Top-down techniques are more concerned with the activation of schemata, with deriving meaning, with global understanding, and with the interpretation of a text.