Listening

The most frequently used language skill in everyday life

We listen to twice as much as language as we speak.

Four times as much as we read.

Listening Process

Top down level____ Bottom up level

Interact to make discourse comprehensible

Schematic

knowledge

Content schemata

Formal schemata

“Top down listening processes”

Contextual knowledge

Pragmatic Knowledge

Sociocultural knowledge

Listening situation:

Participants, setting, topic and purpose

“Bottom up listening processes”

Involves prior knowledge

of the language system

Phonological system-Grammar-Vocabulary-

Top down - Bottom up -----> Discourse

Relevant Background

Listening strategies + Metacognition “Compensatory strategies”

Listening strategies:

* Extract important speech details

* Identify the gist of a segment

* Prediction

How to teach them...

* Value of using strategies

* Pre listening activities

* Make clear: what why

* Practice

* Real data, focusing on content and meaning

* Use what has been comprehended

* Allow for self evaluation

Metacognitition

Strategy that involves planning, regulating, monitoring and management.

Provides an overview of the listening process.

Relevant factors

Related to the listener:

* Language experience

* Level of proficiency

* Variety of listening experiences

* Listener prior knowledge (memory, attention, interpretation, prediction)

Related to the situation:

* External to the listener (acoustic background noise, room temperature, distraction)

* Internal to the listener (interest, attention)

Communication strategies

For instance: a radio programme that implies the use of both processing skills

Listening experience placed along a continuum from nonreciprocal to reciprocal

For instance: face to face conversation

Task flexibility: situation + task demand

Mishearings:

Mishearings commited by native speakers.

Analysis of this erros by Garnes and Bond

Four microprocesing strategies:

1. Attending to stress and intonation.

2. Attending to stresed vowels.

3. Segmenting the speech stream into words that correspond to the stressed vowels their adjacent.

4. Seeking a phrase compatible with the metrical template identified in the first strategy and the words identified in the third.

This model is a bottom up model.

When the listener is undergoing the four steps,

he or she is attending to CONTEXT and calling up all relevant content and formal schemata.

Verbs are commonly misheard and…

-Personal names.

-Idioms.

-Proper names.

“uh” heard as “a”

“huh” heard as “up?”

“hmm” heard as “him”

Three progressive stages:

- An initial orientation period.

- A search for a main idea.

- New incoming information is matched against the perceived main idea.

Teaching listening from a discourse perspective.

Teaching bottom-up strategies:

An effective listener… realised that the final unstressed syllable means “them” and not “him”:

“I´m lookin´fer Joe ´n´ Barney. Have ya seen ´m?

A listener trained to attend to the discourse context will understand:

Whaddaya think I should take? (What do you do?)

Whaddaya gonna do….? (In the context of going to do)

Can and Can't differences:

Can and Can´t spoken in isolation.

Can and Can´t in context.

FIFty-one versus SYXty-one

Fifty-ONE versus Fifty-TWO

Marsha is feeling BETer.

Marsha is feeling BETer?

*Topic Establishment

Examples:

1) Religion

2) Social Structure

3) Economic Factors

Teaching Top-Down Integrated Strategies

The L2 listener who has comprehended the opening statement is in a much better position to take notes on the lecture.

The L2 listener who has missed the opening information is affected.

Geddes and Sturtridge

¨Jigsaw¨

=

Opportunities

Teaching use of the telephone

Voice Mail

Answering Machines

Nonreciprocal Telephone Listening

If you want to know the locations of Weight Watcher meeting places in your area, punch in your zip code now.

If you want to know meeting times before 3 p.m., press ¨one¨.

If you want to know meeting times after 3 p.m., press ¨two¨ .

If you want to know all the weekly meeting times at this location, press ¨three¨.

Telephone Use: Everyday Conversation

Learners need opportunities to:

* Listen to

*Interpret

*Sum up

The General Conversational Structure

of an Informal Telephone Conversation in North American English is as follows:

*Opening Segment

*The ¨How-are-you¨ segment

*Topic Establishment

* Preclosing

* Closing

Listening to Speech Activities

Olshtain and Cohen

* ¨Apologies¨

*Speech Act Set

Olshtain and Cohen report five strategies that have been observed cross-culturally in apologies:

General Strategies minimally necessary for an apology:

1- Explicit expression: Excuse me/I´m sorry/ I apologize

2- Admission of responsibility: It´s my fault/ I didn't mean to do it.

Situation-specific strategies; optional ways to elaborate an apology:

3- An excuse/explanation: The bus was late

4- An offer to make amends: I'll buy another vase

5- A promise of nonrecurrence: It won't happen again

Pedagogical strategies and priorities

exercises activities for l2 learners . short segments from radio or tv new broadcast it gives students an opportunity to experience multiple listenings and to carry out a variety of tasks.

*extract topic/ gist (first listening)

*get details of the news item (second litening)

*evaluate emotional impact of news item (third listening)

It can also be useful for learners to look at a faithful transcript of a lecture or a conversation with all the pauses false starts incomplete sentences and so forth represented.it helps learners see the discourse function of items such as the following:

Cue words and discourse markers that signal what the main points and minor points are

lexical and structural cues including lexical routines and chunks that signal new term and or a definition or some other notional construct

key texts segments that serve as higher order organizers

Listening

Irusta.Licciardi.Tovagliari.Gonzalez

Top down - Bottom up - Discourse