TEACHING RECEPTIVE SKILLS: LISTENING AND READING

TEACHING RECEPTIVE SKILLS: LISTENING AND READING Alma Delia Frías Puente Enero 2009.

Views of listening that have dominated language pedagogy over the last twenty years • “BOTTOM-UP” PROCESSING • “TOP-DOWN” PROCESSING

“BOTTOM-UP” PROCESSING • Listening is a process of decoding the sounds that one hears in a linear fashion, from the smallest meaningful units (or phonemes) to complete texts. /s/ /sh/ • PHONEMIC UNITS are decoded and linked together to form WORDS, words are linked together to form phrases, PHRASES are linked together to form UTTERANCES, and utterances are linked together to form complete MEANINGFUL TEXTS. • It assumes the listener takes in and stores messages in much the same way as a audio-recording, sequentially, one sound word, phrase, and utterance at a time.

“TOP-DOWN” PROCESSING • The listener actively constructs (or, more accurately, reconstructs) the original meaning of the speaker using incoming sounds as clues. • In this reconstruction process, the listener uses prior knowledge of the context and situation within which the listening takes place to make sense of what he or she hears. • Context of situation includes such things as knowledge of the topic at hand, the speaker or speakers and their relationship to the situation as well as to each other, and prior events.

SCHEMA THEORY • Psychologist Bartlett (1932). • The knowledge we carry around in our heads is organized into interrelated patterns. • These patterns are like stereotypical mental scripts or scenarios of situations and events, built up from numerous experiences of similar events. • During the course of our lives we build up literally hundreds of mental schemas, and they help us make sense of the many situations we find ourselves in during the day, from catching the bus to work, to taking part in a business meeting, to having a meal.

SCHEMA THEORY • It is based on the notion that past experiences lead to the creation of mental frameworks that help us make sense of new experiences.

Cross-cultural situations • When we apply the wrong or inappropriate SCHEME to a situation it can get us into trouble. - Taiwan - Business dinner - Host offering a seat - The seat that was facing the door - Seat of honor - The most important person - You should decline it - Perhaps on the fourth or fifth time that someone insists

It has been demonstrated by research that we do not store listening texts word-for-word (Bottom-up approach). • When asked to listen to a text, and then write down as much as they recall, listeners remember some bits, forget some bits, and often add in bits that were not there in the original listening.

In developing lessons, materials, courses, it is important, not only to teach bottom-up processing skills such as the ability to discriminate between minimal pairs, but it is also important to help learners use what they already know to understand what they hear. • If teachers suspect that there are gaps in their learners´ knowledge, either of content or of grammar or vocabulary, the listening itself can be preceded by schema building activities. • Now hear this!

TYPES OF LISTENING • THE TYPE OF TEXT BEING LISTENED TO • Monologues (lectures, speeches, and news broadcasts) - Planned: Media broadcasts and speeches - Unplanned: anecdotes and narratives. • Dialogues - Social / interpersonal - Transactional

LISTENING PURPOSE • Listening to a news broadcast to get - a general idea of the news - specific information - the results of an important sporting event • Listening to a sequence of instructions for operating a new piece of computer software. • Listening to a poem or short story.

THE ROLE OF THE LISTENER • Reciprocal listening: The listener is required to take part in the interaction. • Nonreciprocal listening: The listener (often to his or her frustration) has no opportunity to answer back , clarify understanding, or check that he or she comprehended correctly. • In designing listening tasks, it is important to teach learners to adopt a flexible range of listening strategies. • This can be done by holding the listening text constant and getting learners to listen to the text several times, but following different instructions each time.

LISTEN TO ME

RESEARCH INTO LISTENING • COMPREHENSIBLE INPUT Comprehension-before-production approach facilitate language acquistion in the early stages. We should stress comprehension rather than production at the beginning levels with no demand on the learners to produce the target language. Language should be associated with things that are physically present in the environment. Learners should demonstrate comprehension by listening to and carrying out instructions. In the area of listening for academic purposes, knowledge of discourse markers can facilitate comprehension. The importance of incorporating authentic data into the teaching of listening.

TASK DIFFICULTY • TASK DIFFICULTY An important consideration for pedagogy concerns task difficulty. Grammatical complexity is not the sole factor to determine the order of tasks. 1. The organization of information 2. Whether the text describes a “static” or “dynamic” relationship (geometric figure / accident) 3. The explicitness and sufficiency of the information and the type of referring expressions used 4. The familiarity of the topic

Factors internal to the learner, such as attentiveness, motivation, interest in and knowledge of the topic. • Support: How much support is provided in terms of pictures, diagrams, or other visual aids? • How complex is the grammar ad vocabulary? • What background knowledge is assumed?

LISTENING AND GENERAL LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT • At the elementary level, nurture listening comprehension and communication at the same time. • Appropriate listening materials which are calibrated to the interests and abilities of the students are needed for systematic growth in listening skills. (Ross 1992)

THE ROLE OF THE LEARNER IN THE LISTENING PROCESS • LEARNER ROLES • Listening and reading are often characterized as “passive” or “receptive” skills. • The image conjured up by these terms is of learner-as-sponge, passively absorbing the language models provided by textbooks and tapes. • Listening, that is, making sense of what we hear, is a constructive process in which the learner is an active participant. • In order to comprehend, listeners need to reconstruct the original intention of the speaker by making use of both bottom-up and top-down processing strategies, and by drawing on what they already know to amke use of new knowledge.

PERSONALIZING LISTENING • A challenge for the teacher is to give the student some degree of control over the content, and to personalize content so they are able to bring something of themselves to the task. • THE HEART OF THE MATTER • A learner-centered dimension: • It is the learner who does the work, not the teacher. • Students are actively involved in structuring and restructuring their understanding of the language and building their skills in using the language. • Get learners involved in the process underlying their learning and in making active contributions to the learning.

Give learners a degree of choices. • Give learners opportunities to bring their own background knowledge and experience into the classroom. • Encourage learners to develop a reflective attitude to learning and to develop skills in self-monitoring and self-assessment.

AUTHENTIC DATA • In many language classrooms, learners listen to and read material created specifically for language learning. Such material provides security and comfort. • Nonauthentic listening texts differ in certain ways from authentic texts. • There are few of the overlaps, hesitations, and false starts, repetition, requests for clarification, and there is very little negotiation of meaning. • Students will be given practice in listening to extracts from radio and television, public broadcasting announcements, conversations and discussions, telephone conversations, answering machine messages, voice mail, etc.

TASK TYPES • The role of the learner: reciprocal vs. nonreciprocal listening • Types of listening strategies: - listening for gist - listening for specific information - making inferences • Focus on linguistic skills: activating and extending knowledge vs. content of phonology, gramar, and discourse.

RECIPROCAL VS. NONRECIPROCAL • Reciprocal listening involves dialogues in which the role of an individual alternates between listener and speaker. • Nonreciprocal listening involves listening to monologues or conversations, but learners do not take part in the conversation themselves. Try to use authentic materials: store announcements, announcements on public transportation. • Not surprisingly, the second type is the most usual type in the listening class. • Stimulate the interactive nature of listening. • Try to involve learners in the content of the language. • Learners listen to one side of a conversation, and react to written responses to generate a level of involvement. LISTEN IN

LISTENING STRATEGIES • Develop awareness of the process underlying their own learning so that, eventually, they will be able to take greater and greater responsibility for that learning. • Become more effective language learners. • Reflect upon the process underlying their own learning. • Key strategies: selective listening, listening for different purposes, predicting, progressive structuring, inferencing, and personalizing. • Inferential comprehension tasks force the learner to process the material more deeply. They require the learners to do more work than tasks that only require literal comprehension.

FOCUS ON LINGUISTIC SKILLS • Tasks that focus on aspects of the linguistic system, pronunciation, grammar, and discourse. • Tasks that focus on the processing of content. • Focus on pronunciation: - Segmental tasks – discrete sounds - Suprasegmental tasks – stress, rhythm, and intonation (They signal aspects of meaning). SOUNDS GREAT

TEACHING RECEPTIVE SKILLS: LISTENING AND READING