Listening skill

Hale Samavati

''' Listening '''

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''' Introduction '''

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Listening to a second language (L2) has been regarded as the most widely used language skill in normal daily life (Morley 2001; Rost 2001). It involves a complex process that allows us to understand and interpret spoken messages in real time by making use of a variety of sources such as phonetic, phonological, prosodic, lexical, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic(Lynch 1998).''' '''



''' Approaches to learning and teaching listening; '''

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       -    Listening within an environmentalist approach:



Up to the end of the 1960s, the status of listening comprehension in language learning and teaching was one of neglect and, was viewed as a passive process with no role in language learning. This assumption stemmed from the environmentalist approach to language learning, which considered that learning a language was a mechanical process based on a stimulus-response pattern (see Usó-Juan and Martínez-Flor this volume). The purpose of training learners through these structured oral-aural drills was that it helped them to improve their hearing habits (Rost 2001; Flowerdew and Miller 2005).





 -           Listening within an innatist approach:



<p class="MsoNormal">By the late 1960s, the status of listening changed from being considered just a merely mechanical process of habit formation to a more dynamic and mentalistic process.

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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:36.0pt;text-indent:-18.0pt;mso-list:l0level1lfo1; tab-stops:list36.0pt;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none"> -           Listening within an interactionist approach:

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<p class="MsoNormal">By the late 1970s, the role of listening assumed greater importance due to significant shifts in a variety of research fields that shaped the interactionist approach to language learning (see Usó-Juan and Martínez-Flor this volume). The significant advances being made within the discipline of cognitive psychology played an important role in gaining a better understanding of the particular processes involved in the listening comprehension act. On the other hand, the constructivist view of listening emphasized the fact that listeners did not merely receive and process meaning, but rather constructed such meaning according to their own purposes for listening as well as their own prior knowledge.

<p class="MsoNormal">Apart from the influence of all these psycholinguistic aspects and processes involved in facilitating listening, by the 1980s and 1990s social and cultural aspects were also claimed to play an important role in the listening comprehension act. As far as the relevance of social factors, the notion of context acquired special emphasis under the discipline of sociolinguistics since, as pointed out by Carrier (1999: 65), “real-life listening does not occur in a vacuum but rather in a rich social context.”

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<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:center;mso-layout-grid-align: none;text-autospace:none">'''Teaching listening within a communicative competence framework '''

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<p class="MsoNormal">In the 1970s, Hymes (1971, 1972), introduced the term communicative competence, which incorporated not only internal aspects of the language, such as its grammar, but also the rules of language use in social context as well as the sociolinguistic norms of appropriacy.

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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:36.0pt;text-indent:-18.0pt;mso-list:l0level1lfo1; tab-stops:list36.0pt;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none"> -           Discourse competence:

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<p class="MsoNormal">Discourse competence implies an understanding of how language operates at a level above the sentence.

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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:36.0pt;text-indent:-18.0pt;mso-list:l0level1lfo1; tab-stops:list36.0pt;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none"> -           Linguistic competence:

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<p class="MsoNormal">Linguistic competence includes all the elements of the linguistic system such as aspects concerning grammar, phonology and vocabulary (Celce- Murcia and Olshtain 2000).

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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:36.0pt;text-indent:-18.0pt;mso-list:l0level1lfo1; tab-stops:list36.0pt;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none"> -           Pragmatic competence:

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<p class="MsoNormal">Pragmatic competence involves an understanding of the function or illocutionary force of a spoken utterance in a given situation, as well as the sociopragmatic factors necessary to recognize not just what that utterance

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<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:center;mso-layout-grid-align: none;text-autospace:none"> Areas of research that influence L2 listening instruction 

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<p class="MsoNormal">Four key areas in which research has provided insights into the teaching of L2 listening.

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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:36.0pt;text-indent:-18.0pt;mso-list:l0level1lfo1; tab-stops:list36.0pt;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none"> -           '''Accessibility of input '''

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<p class="MsoNormal">The learner, in order to acquire the L2, must come to understand input in personally meaningful ways, engage in interactions and tasks based on that input, and simultaneously pay attention to the form of the input and interaction that will allow for permanent development of L2 knowledge and skills.

<p class="MsoNormal">''-Relevance ''

<p class="MsoNormal">Relevance refers to the personal significance of the input. The more relevant the listening opportunities, the more motivated the learner is likely to be to continue seeking comprehensible input.

<p class="MsoNormal">''- Difficulty ''

<p class="MsoNormal">Difficulty refers to the intrinsic “cognitive load” of a listening or reading text, its linguistic and informational complexity.

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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:36.0pt;text-indent:-18.0pt;mso-list:l0level1lfo1; tab-stops:list36.0pt;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none"> -           Top down processing

<p class="MsoNormal">Top-down processing in listening refers to the use of expectations in order to infer what the speaker may have said or intended to say. Expectations come from pre-packaged patterns of background knowledge that we have stored in memory from prior experiences.''' '''

<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:36.0pt;text-indent:-18.0pt;mso-list:l0level1lfo1; tab-stops:list36.0pt;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none"> -           '''Bottom up processing '''

<p class="MsoNormal">Bottom up processing refers to a two-pass listening process: the first is to identify the overall phonological shape of the metrical unit (or phrase or pause unit) that the speaker utters and the second is for segmental decoding or breaking the metrical unit into individual words... Word recognition, segmenting the words out of the stream of speech, is the foundation of this decoding process.

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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:36.0pt;text-indent:-18.0pt;mso-list:l0level1lfo1; tab-stops:list36.0pt;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none"> -           '''Listener status '''

<p class="MsoNormal"> The listener’s perceived status influences comprehension, participation, and value of input for language acquisition. Engagement by the L2 user –assumption of an “active listening” role –promotes acquisition of listening skills and strategies.

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<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:center;mso-layout-grid-align: none;text-autospace:none">''' Marrying top and bottom '''

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<p class="MsoNormal">The conventional way of describing the use made of the internal and external resources available to listener is to group them into bottom-up and top-down processes. A key issue for the teaching and testing of L2 listening skills is the relationship between top and bottom.

<p class="MsoNormal">Bottom-up processing seemed therefore to be more important than top-down (non-linguistic) processing in discriminating between candidates’ listening performance.

<p class="MsoNormal">If it is true that bottom-up processing is more important than top-down at limited levels of L2 listening proficiency, one pedagogic implication might be that learners should be helped to rely less on contextual and topical guessing, by directing their attention to practice in rapid and accurate linguistic decoding. Efficient listening involves the integration of whatever top and bottom information the listener is able to exploit – incoming auditory and visual information, as well as information drawn from internal memory and previous experience.

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<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:center;mso-layout-grid-align: none;text-autospace:none">''' Learning how to listen using learning strategies '''

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<p class="MsoNormal">Much of what is traditionally mis-named teaching listening should in fact be called testing listening. The distinction that is being made is that when you teach, by definition, you teach the learner of anything how to do something.

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<p class="MsoNormal">What should the learners be listening to''' ? '''

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<p class="MsoNormal">The material that the learners should be listening to should be spoken English. Learners have to be given training in how to go about this challenging task. This should take the form of “training exercises” i.e., listening tasks with varying degrees of “scaffolding”), in which a particular dimension of the listening task is first taught, and then very deliberately practiced – and practiced more than is possible with authentic material. 

<p class="MsoNormal">To avoid boring the students, the highly relevant material needs to be peppered with other, different types of material in order to break the tedium and at the same time to expose the students to other types of language, which enhances motivation –something that should be consciously and deliberately worked at all the time.

<p class="MsoNormal">A final factor that needs to be taken into account in materials selection is the level of difficulty of the material in relation to the proficiency level of the students. Subjecting students to material that is too difficult can be a humiliating and demotivating experience, and subjecting them to material that is too easy can be equally demotivating.

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<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:center;mso-layout-grid-align: none;text-autospace:none">''' Teaching listening '''

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<p class="MsoNormal">four skills, listening is the one that has historically four skills, listening is the one that has historically been the most neglected and misrepresented in second language (L2) classrooms, and hence, has been the skill which has been the least well taught.

<p class="MsoNormal">Listening gained a new importance in language classrooms in the 1980s, largely as a result of Krashen’s (1982) work on language acquisition through comprehensible input, and Asher’s (1988) methodological innovations which were based on the idea that students would benefit from a “silent period” in which they would not be required to produce language, but just listen to it. In this scenario, the teaching of listening seems to become a means to an end rather than an end in itself. Some of these developments are outlined below.

<p class="MsoNormal">The belief that learners should become active participants in their own learning, rather than passive receivers of what is taught.

<p class="MsoNormal">A complexification of the notion of authenticity. The original definition of authenticity centered on text authenticity.

<p class="MsoNormal">A move away from traditional presentation-practice-production (P-P-P) approaches to teaching towards task-based learning, which typically involves students in using and extending their available language resources to do a communicative task with a real outcome and then reflecting on the language they needed to perform it. There are a number of problems with teaching listening in traditional model. The class is teacher

<p class="MsoNormal">Center and, students are passive.

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<p class="MsoNormal">'''Some ways of improving the teaching of listening '''

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<p class="MsoNormal">- Choose what they listen to

<p class="MsoNormal">- Make their own listening texts

<p class="MsoNormal">- Control the equipment (being in charge of replaying difficult parts of the listening text, for example)

<p class="MsoNormal">- Give the instructions

<p class="MsoNormal">- Design their own listening tasks

<p class="MsoNormal">- Reflect on their problems in listening

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<p class="MsoNormal">'''Listening activities which would improve the methodology for teaching listening '''

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<p class="MsoNormal">Out of the room

<p class="MsoNormal">A tour around our town

<p class="MsoNormal">Serial story

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<p class="MsoNormal">''' Goals for teaching and learning listening skills and strategies '''

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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:36.0pt;text-indent:-18.0pt;mso-list:l0level1lfo1; tab-stops:list36.0pt;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none"> -           Understanding short utterances on a literal semantic level.

<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:36.0pt;text-indent:-18.0pt;mso-list:l0level1lfo1; tab-stops:list36.0pt;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none"> -           Understanding longer or interactive discourse.''' '''

<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:36.0pt;text-indent:-18.0pt;mso-list:l0level1lfo1; tab-stops:list36.0pt;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none"> -           Understanding the function/illocutionary force of an utterance.''' '''

<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:36.0pt;text-indent:-18.0pt;mso-list:l0level1lfo1; tab-stops:list36.0pt;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none"> -           Interpreting utterances in terms of the context/situation.''' '''

<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:36.0pt;text-indent:-18.0pt;mso-list:l0level1lfo1; tab-stops:list36.0pt;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none"> -           Resolving comprehension problems by seeking help from the speaker.''' '''

<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:36.0pt;text-indent:-18.0pt;mso-list:l0level1lfo1; tab-stops:list36.0pt;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none"> -           Remembering input, monitoring and evaluating how well one understands.''' '''

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<p class="MsoNormal"> Reference

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<p class="MsoNormal">Current; Trends in the Development and Teaching of the Four Language Skills, P51.C86 2006