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Teaching listening comprehension

Lecture 7

1. Auding as one of the types of speech activities.

2. Difficulties of comprehension.

3. Teaching listening comprehension.

Few would dispute the claim that comprehension is necessary for language acquisition. In order to communicate effectively, learners must understand what is being said.

Historically, listening and reading skills have received less attention in language teaching than have the productive skills of speaking and writing. Due to a lack of knowledge about receptive skills, teachers often bailed to devote attention to developing listening and reading abilities, they assumed that comprehension would occur on its own. More recently it has been admitted that it is not enough merely to expose learners to oral or written input, it is necessary to teach comprehension, because listening and reading are active processes that require interplay between various types of knowledge.

Listening and reading are described as communicative competence.

Listeners and readers use four types of competences as they attempt to comprehend oral or a written knowledge:

1. grammatical competence: knowledge of morphology, syntax, vocabulary;

2. sociolinguistic competence: knowing what is expected socially and culturally by native speakers of the target language;

3. discourse competence: the ability to use pronouns, conjunction, and phrases to link meanings across sentences, as well as the ability to recognize how coherence is used to maintain the unity of the message( understand it as a whole);

4. strategic competence: the ability to use a number of guessing strategies to compensate for missing knowledge.

Listeners and readers perform a variety of tasks in the comprehension process; they analyze, summarize, compare, generalize, etc. Some tasks or subskills reflect top-down processing, in which meaning is derived through the use of contextual clues and activation of personal background knowledge.

These subskills include identifying kea ideas and guessing meaning.

Goodman states that “efficient comprehension does not result from precise perception and identification of all elements, but from skill in selecting the fewest, most productive cues necessary to produce guesses which are right”.

Other tasks or subskills reflect bottom-up processing, in which meaning is understood from analysis of language parts. Simply put the listener (or reader) combines sounds or letters to form words, then combines words to form phrases, clauses, and sentences of the text.

Bottom-up subskills include discriminating between different sounds or letters, recognizing word-order patterns, sentence structures and translating individual words.

Top-down skills are more useful in second- language learning, as reading is not based on oral language use, as is the case in the native language.

Bottom-up processing can be used effectively in learning to read the native language, since oral language is already firmly in place. Therefore, in L1, orality leads to literacy, while in L2, literacy leads to and improves orality.

However, the current view of listening and reading skills is that they involve both bottom-up and top-down processing. Listening can be understood as a highly complex, interactive operation in which bottom-up processing is mixed up with top-down processing, the latter involving guessing. Evidence suggests that good listeners and readers use two kinds of skills:

1. lower-level “identification” skills, through which they recognize words and structures necessary for decoding;

2. higher-level “ interpretive” skills, through which they reconstruct meaning of whole parts of the text.

Both of these skills blend into one as the listener (reader) attaches meaning to a text and makes it a part of what he or she knows.

The research has documented a number of factors that affect comprehension of a text, be it oral or written.

1. The first factor is the importance of context and background knowledge in understanding input. This linking of new and existing knowledge helps the listeners make a sense of the text more quickly. The key role of context has been verified by many studies by listening and reading. These experiments have shown that listeners provided with prior contextual assistance, such as pictures, scripts, comprehend more accurately than they do in the absence of such support. The use of contextual and background information aids understanding.

2. A second factor is the degree to which the listener (or reader) uses strategies, such as guessing in context. Many studies support the claim that learners who interact with the text through predicting, skimming, scanning, and using background knowledge and comprehend much better than learners who fail to use these strategies.

3. A third factor that affects comprehension is the purpose for listening (or reading) or the nature of the task. The type of task determing the kind of strategy required. For example, a person listening to today’s weather report might choose to attend only to temperature and disregard other details.

4. A fourth factor relates to the length of the text presented for comprehension. At junior stages of teaching students are given shorter, edited text to listen (or read). Students, who listen to shorter texts, are more likely to use word-for-word processing strategies. Some evidence suggests that longer texts may be easier for students to comprehend because they are more interesting, though they require more top-down processing.

5. A fifth factor is the type of text presented. Traditionally, the difficulty of texts has been judged on basis of the simplicity of grammatical structures and the familiarity of the vocabulary. However, studies have shown that exposure to texts with unfamiliar grammar and vocabulary does not significantly affect comprehension. Other factors, such as the quality of the text itself in terms of factual consistency and coherence, as well as the background knowledge and motivation of learners, may be more important considerations for teachers when selecting texts.

6. A sixth factor involves the treatment of new vocabulary. The use of vocabulary lists with definitions does little to help the students build vocabulary or comprehend more effectively. It will be more effective to present new words in terms of their thematic and discourse relationship to the text instead of giving dictionary definitions. Students should be encouraged to learn the same words.

In-class vocabulary practice should provide opportunities for students to find additional words that relate to the same semantic category, teach students to identify affixes, suffixes or parts of speech.

Implications for teaching listening (reading).

Research points to the following implication for teaching the receptive skills:

1. Students’ comprehension may increase if they are trained to use strategies such as activation of background knowledge and guessing.

2. Students need pre-reading and pre- listening activities that prepare them for the comprehension task;

3. Text appropriateness should be judged on the basis of text quality, interest level and learners’ need.

4. Authentic materials provide an affective means for presenting real language, integrating culture and heightening comprehension;

5. Vocabulary must be connected to text structure, students’ interest and background knowledge in order to aid retention and recall.

6. Students should be taught to interact with the text through the use of both bottom-up and top-down processes;

7. Comprehension assessment should engage the learner in activities, through which he or she interacts with the text.

Exercises for teaching listening comprehension:

Exercises for developing habits of listening comprehension:

a) exercises aimed at overcoming phonetic difficulties of reception

Examples:

1. Listen to following words and raise your hand when you hear a word with the sound…

2. Listen to the sentences and raise your hand when you hear an interrogative (affirmative, negative) sentences;

3. Listen to the sentence and say how many words it contains;

4. Divide the word you heard into separate sounds and name them;

5. State the number of vowels and consonants in the words you hear;

6. State the numbers of words in the sentence you hear.

Exercises to teach pupils to overcome grammatical difficulties:

1. Listen to the sentence and name the subject;

2. Listen to the sentence and say in which the action is used in the past (present, future);

3. Listen to the sentence and say how many members of the sentence it contains;

4. Repeat the sentence after the speaker ( the sentence is gradually extended);

5. Listen to the sentence and say in what they differ;

6. Listen to the sentence several times and write down the new words that appear each time;

7. Listen to the sentence and guess the meaning of the new words.

Exercises aimed at overcoming lexical difficulties.

1. Listen to the sentence and try to understand the meaning without paying attention to the new words;

2. Listen to the homonyms in sentences and guess their meaning;

3. Listen to the synonyms in sentences and give their meaning;

4. Listen to the sentences with polysemantic words and find the shades of their meaning;

5. Mark the words on the list that are used in the sentences you hear;

6. Write down the figures you hear etc.

Exercises in listening to connected speech.

1. Divide the passage into sentences;

2. Say what is missing in the passage you hear;

3. Listen to a number of sentences two times and say what is missing when you hear it a second time;

4. Listen to the sentences written on the card and point out the difference in their sequence;

5. Look at the list of names and mark those you hear in the text;

6. Write down the names you hear in the text;

7. Write down the traits of character you hear in the text;

8. Listen to the passage and write down the key words;

9. Listen to the text again, and then retell it using the key words you wrote down.

Exercises to teaching anticipation.

1. Listen to the sentence and make up your own connected with it in meaning;

2. Listen to the text and say what it is about;

3. Listen to the passage and choose those sentences that contain the main idea;

4. Look at the outline of the text and give the title;

5. Look at the key words and guess the theme of the text;

6. Listen to the beginning of the text and try to make an outline of what will follow;

7. Listen to a fragment of the text and find its place in the typed variant;

8. Look at the sentences and place them in their logical sequence.

Exercises in developing students’ auditive memory, attention, imagination and logical thinking.

1. Listen to two logically connected utterances and repeat them;

2. Listen to the speech patterns and show the pictures, illustrating their meaning;

3. Listen to the sentences and do the actions mentioned in them;

4. Listen to the sentences and arrange them in their logical order;

5. Learn the dialogue by heart repeating it after the speaker;

6. Compare the sentences on the card and those pronounced by the speaker.

State their lexical and grammatical differences.

Speech exercises.

1. Listen to the texts different in meaning, pronounced with normal tempo illustrated with pictures first, then without any pictures and answer the questions.

2. Listen to the beginning of the story and try to guess what will follow.

3. Look at the picture, listen to the beginning of the story and try to guess what will follow.

4. Listen to the story and retell the part given in the description of this picture.

5. Listen to the story and answer the questions.

6. Listen to two stories and say what they have in common and in what they differ.

7. Listen to the text and give it a title.

8. Listen to the text and give its meaning in two - four sentences.

9. Listen to the dialogue and give its main idea.

10. Tell about… after listening to the text.

Working with a text for listening comprehension.

The work in a linguaphone classroom makes it possible to use different approaches and individual tasks. The teacher can give different individual tasks based on the audio text writing them on separate cards. Each task will contain an instruction, a program of doing it and some props. All the students are divided into several groups and each group is allotted the same time to do the task.

The whole work with the audio text in the phono classroom will go through three stages:

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