Lizeth Peralta
Teaching Listening
Most
of the classrooms, the teacher makes students practice more the listening skill
than the speaking skill because first they have to listen any conversation or
an issue so they would understand it and then they would have the idea about it
and speak it. Listening comprehension has not always drawn the attention of
educators to the extent that is now has. Maybe most of the people have a
natural tendency to look at speaking as the major index of language
proficiency.
Listening comprehension in pedagogical research
The
first theory about this topic is the Total Physical response, written by James
Asher, that explains about comprehending is very important for students to
increase their language level of listening before they say something about it,
while the second theory, the Natural Approach, that recommended the “the silent
period” that refers that students have to listen the class without they’re
forced to speak before they’re ready to do it. The input is when the teacher is
explaining something while the student is getting the attention of the teacher
that is called comprehension input and the intake is when students understood
something that the teacher has explained.
An interactive model of listening comprehension
The
first step of listening comprehension is the psychomotor process of receiving
sound waves through the ear and transmitting nerve impulses to the brain. There
are eight processes that the hearer has to have about listening:
1. The
hearer processes what we call “raw speech” and holds an “image” of it in short
term memory.
2. The
hearer determines the type of speech event being processed and then
appropriately “colors” the interpretation of the perceived message.
3. The
hearer infers the objectives of the speaker through consideration of the type
of speech event, the context, and the content.
4. The
hearer recalls background information relevant to the particular context and
subject matter.
5. The
hearer assigns a literal meaning to the utterance. This process involves a set
of semantic interpretations of the surface strings that the ear has perceived.
6. The
hearer assigns an intended meaning to the utterance. The person on the bus
intended to find out what time of day it was, even though the literal meaning
didn’t directly convey that message.
7. The
hearer determines whether information should be retained in short-term or
long-term memory.
8. The
hearer deletes the form in which the message was originally received. The
words, phrases, and sentences are quickly forgotten – “pruned” – in 99 percent
of speech acts.
Types of spoken language
Monologues
are when one student uses spoken language for any length of time, as in speech,
lectures, readings, news broadcasts, and the like, the hearer must process long
stretches of speech without interruption and they could be planned or unplanned
while dialogues involve two or more speakers and can be subdivided into those
exchanges that promote social relationships and those for which the purpose is
to convey propositional or factual information and they could be interpersonal
or transactional.
What makes listening difficult?
In
this topic there are eight characteristics of spoken language that are adapted
from several sources.
1. Clustering: In written
language we are conditioned to attend to the sentence as the basic unit of
organization; we break down speech into smaller group words. Clauses are common
constituents, but phrases within clauses are even more easily retained for
comprehension.
2. Redundancy: Learners can
train themselves to profit from such redundancy by first becoming aware that
not every new sentence or phrase will necessary contain new information and by
looking for the signals of redundancy.
3. Reduced forms: Reduction can
be phonological, morphological, syntactic, or pragmatic; these reductions pose
significant difficulties, especially for classroom learners who may have
initially been exposed to the full forms of the English language.
4. Performance variables: Native
listeners are conditioned from very young ages to weed out such performance
variables, whereas they can easily interfere with comprehension in second
language learners. Learners have to train themselves to listen for meaning in
the midst of distracting performance.
5. Colloquial language: Idioms,
slang, reduced forms, and shared cultural knowledge are all manifested at some
point in conversations. Colloquialisms appear in both monologues and dialogues.
6. Rate of delivery: Jack Richards
points out that the number and length of pauses used by a speaker are more
crucial to comprehension than sheer speed. Learners will nevertheless
eventually need to be able to comprehend language delivered at varying rates of
speed and, at times, delivered with few pauses.
7. Stress, rhythm, and intonation:
Because English is a stress-timed language, English speech can be very
difficult for some learners as syllables come spilling out between stress
points. Also, intonation patterns are very significant not just for
interpreting straightforward elements such as questions, statements, and
emphasis but for understanding more subtle messages like sarcasm, endearment,
insult, solicitation, praise, etc.
8. Interaction: Conversation
is especially subject to all the rules of interaction: negotiation, clarification;
attending signals; turn-taking; and topic nomination, maintenance, and
termination.
Types of classroom listening performance
These
types of performance are embedded in a broader technique or task, and sometimes
they are themselves the sum total of the activity of a technique.
1. Reactive: While this
kind of listening performance requires little meaningful processing, it
nevertheless may be a legitimate, even though a minor, aspect of an
interactive, communicative classroom. This role of the listener as merely a
“tape recorder” is very limited because the listener is not generating meaning.
2. Intensive: There are
some examples of intensive listening performance that include this: students
listen for cues in certain choral or individual drills; the teacher repeats a
word of sentence several times to imprint in the student’s mind and the teacher
asks students to listen to a sentence or a longer stretch of discourse and to
notice a specified element, such as intonation, stress, a contraction, a grammatical
structure, etc.
3. Responsive: The student’s
task in such listening is to process the teacher talk immediately and to
fashion an appropriate reply. Examples include: asking questions, giving
commands, seeking clarification, and checking comprehension.
4. Selective: Selective listening differs from intensive
listening in that the discourse is in relatively long lengths like speeches,
media broadcasts, stories, and anecdotes.
5. Extensive: Extensive
performance could range from listening to lengthy lectures, to listening to a
conversation and deriving a comprehensive messages or purpose. Extensive
listening may require the student to invoke other interactive skills for full
comprehension.
6. Interactive: There is
listening performance that can include all five of the above types as learners
actively participate in discussions, debates, conversations, role plays, and
other pair and group work.
Bibliography:
Class
of Teaching Listening
