TEACHING LISTENING STRATEGIES
Nowadays, it is common to see a listening type of exam given in academic institutions. It shows that the institution recognizes listening skills as a central part of language proficiency. Currently, listening is perceived to be an interpretative process. It highlights the listener’s role as an active participant.
The two processes involved in comprehending spoken communication are the “bottom-up” processing and the “top-down” processing.
In bottom-up processing, understanding starts when data is received and analyzed, and the meaning interpreted. Analyzing incoming data involves sounds, clauses, texts, words, and sentences coming from the source. Understanding spoken discourse is similar to a decoding process.
Data is examined for words that are familiar to the listener while grammar serves as the tool that connects the parts of a sentence. The listener’s language competence serves the foundation for this type of processing. On the other hand, the speaker helps the listener to process the data through pauses, inflections and intonations.
In bottom-up processing, listeners are required to enhance their knowledge of vocabularies and sentence structure to enable them to interpret the data more accurately. The following can help the listener improve his listening skills: retain data input while the vocabulary or sentence is being decoded; identify the word, clauses, key words, key transitions, grammatical relationship and emphasis or accent and intonation.
Teachers can also help develop listening skills by ensuring that their students can recognize pronoun referents, distinguish time reference, identify statements if positive or negative, establish the order words were uttered, and distinguish sequence markets, key words and modal verbs.
As bottom-up processing starts from vocabularies and ends with interpretation of meaning, top-down processing on the other hand necessitates prior knowledge of the topic or relationship structures.
As a case in point, if listeners hear the word tsunami, it creates a series of questions that requires answers like “where did it happen? how tall was it? what were the damages?” The questions serve as directions towards comprehending succeeding communication on the subject and helps listeners to concentrate their listening skills on the answers.
As is, there is no need to supply lots of data to the listener as the listener requires only minimal data to understand the discourse as the listener has already previous knowledge about concepts, events, things, and people.
Incomprehensibility occurs if the listener, for one reason or another, cannot utilize a top-down processing form of communication as bottom-up per se oftentimes are deficient when utilized as the core in understanding spoken language.
To develop top-down processing in students, teachers need to ensure that their students can form the schema; conclude the setting, the participant’s role and goals, affects and effects, and the unspecified details and/or situation; and foresee questions about the situation or subject.
To further improve the listening skills of students using the top-down processing, these activities are recommended: 1) create a series of questions that students look forward to hear on a certain subject, then listen to the answers; 2) create a catalog of things that students have prior knowledge on a chosen topic and things that they would like to know more about the topic, then listen to the answers and compare the two categories; 3) students to read a part in a dialogue, foretell the other part, then listen and match the two answers; 4) students to read a record of focal points that was taken during a dialogue, then listen to hear the focal points mentioned; 5) students listen to a portion of a story, provide the ending of the story, then listen and compare the endings given to the story; and 6) students read newspaper headlines, foretells what will happen, then listen to the news item and compare the two versions.
Current teaching approaches involve pre-listening, while-listening, and post-listening sequence. The pre-listening stage entails previous knowledge, foretelling, and having another look at key vocabularies. The while-listening stage concentrates more on understanding that requires gist and selective listening, sequencing, and others. The post-listening stage usually necessitates students to give their views and opinions on a topic. It is also a stage wherein the students with the help of a teacher evaluate a text concentrating on parts that students cannot understand. This involves helping the student to identify features of the unknown text as reduced words, blends, ellipsis and other features that students cannot recognize.
Article: Teaching Listening and Speaking, from Theory to Practice by Jack C. Richards, Cambridge University Press (www.cambridge.org)
Credit:ivythesis.typepad.com
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