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Retaining - Retaining Requires The Listener To Remember What The Speaker Has Said
Retaining - Retaining Requires The Listener To Remember What The Speaker Has Said
MA TEFL
Semester: Autumn, 2015
Assignment No. 1
Q1.
What are the components of listening? Differentiate between discrete and global
listening skills with examples. Also discuss that why and how listening, which
has its unique significance in terms of natural sequence of development of
language skills, is neglected in our language classrooms.
Answer:
These are discrete listening exercises aimed at improving specific skills or answering
predetermined questions.
How do we go about teaching global listening? : Because the journey to developing
fluency in listening is long and requires many hours of practice, the listening activities
should be enjoyable and fun to do. The fun factor is of utmost importance here. One of
the reasons professional athletes are willing to spend hundreds, or even thousands, of
hours of practice is because they enjoy what they are doing. Teacher read-aloud can be a
great source of listening activities in the classroom. The key is to do this regularly so that
the impacts of frequent listening can contribute significantly to the students’ listening
fluency development. Here are some teacher read-aloud activities:
This can be a lot of fun to do and provides a lot of listening practice in the
listening classroom. However the listening material should be such that the chance of the
students getting the drawing right the first time round is minimized. A good listening
material for this activity should encourage the students to listen attentively. Global
listening several times without them global listening is bored.
Speed proficiency:
It can enhance learners’ ability to deal with normal speech rate, which for many
beginning L2 learners is perceived to be too fast. Beginning students often complain
about the difficulty of understanding spoken language, not because the content is
difficult or the language is too hard, but because it is too fast.
Recognition skill:
It can improve their word recognition skill. Students report that they can often
recognize words in writing, but not in speech. Again, lower proficiency students seem to
have problems recognizing words in speech and frequent listening practice seems to
facilitate the development of automaticity in sound-script relationships. It can enhance
their bottom-up listening skills, in particular the skills of recognizing word boundaries.
In speech, words often take on different forms from when they are said in isolation.
Speech phenomena such as assimilation (e.g., in class – ing class), contractions (e.g.,
going to–gonna), re-syllabification (e.g., bend it–ben dit) are common in speech and
known to cause listening problems to lower proficiency learners.
Discrete listening –:
Discrete listening requires students to perceive phonemes, words, intonation, discourse
markers, and other components of a larger stretch of language (Brown 2004).
Discrete listening activities focus specifically on the components of language such as
phonemes, words, intonation, discourse markers, and others.
Annotation:
Dictation is a great way to provide an discrete listening assessment. It can be altered or a
different passage may be chosen to focus on a variety of language skills. Also, the
variability aids to authenticity. To provide a more authentic dictation, the teacher may
choose to read a common song, or news article that would be very authentic. Similarly, it
is a practical efficient way to assess the students as you could start each day with a
dictation of a news article, or poem of the day and students would be active listeners as
you read the piece. In doing it that way, it becomes a more informal assessment as part of
a daily routine. These could be kept for the year in a journal and reviewed at random by
the teacher. It would not provide wash back unless the teacher talked about errors made
or tricky words/phrases within the passage. More specific sentences could be used for
really focusing on a lesson, such as names or addresses and how to write them. This
provides a lot of opportunity to cater the assessment to the intended material.
What to dictate?
Choosing the right level of listening is clearly critical. Dictating a leader from
"The Times" to a group of intermediate students would be a rather fruitless exercise. Do
not underestimate the difficulty of accurately reproducing a text from dictation. As for
the material list, the range is limitless, from written for GLOBAL LISTENING to
authentic: texts (from course books, newspaper articles, user guides...), songs, poetry,
short compiled lists (numbers, names, appointments...), cornflakes packets etc
Procedure
There is no fixed rule on the procedure to adopt and it can be modified according
to level of listening, class size, and actual subject matter. As a guide, a common
procedure for texts is: Read the whole text once at slightly reduced speed. Read the text
again clearly and phrase by phrase (saying each phrase twice and ending with "comma",
"full stop" etc as appropriate). Allow students reasonable time to finish one phrase before
starting another. Allow time for students to review what they have written and to try to
apply grammar to correct any logical errors. Read the whole text again. Allow some
more time for student review and fine-tuning. Allowing thinking time for some-
correction is particularly valuable. Often students will think they have heard one thing
but their knowledge of grammar can lead them you must have said another thing.
Examples:
The following is an excellent example of a discrete listening test online. The test-
taker must listen to the recording and read along, filling in any blanks by selecting the
word choice that matches with the words heard in the recording.
Example 1: Discrete listening Cloze Test (make sure to press the play button on the
silver bar at the top of the web page).
This next example requires students to listen to a very short dialogue while
reading the corresponding fill-in-the-blank script. The test-taker must listen carefully in
order to fill in the words that are left blank.
Example 2: Discrete listening Short Dialogue Discrete listening is a skill which I believe
to be overlooked in many contexts. Historically, one could argue that there was too much
discrete listening, at the expense of general comprehension. However, nowadays course
books and teachers may have shifted too far in the other direction with the focus mainly
on understanding gist. Of course, there is a time and a place for both types of listening,
but some students would arguably benefit from more opportunities to practice and
develop more discrete listening.
…………….
The whole purpose of English instruction in high school is to build communicators. Yet,
over the years, I’ve noticed that an integral skill in communication – listening – is sorely
neglected. Then we wonder why our children don’t know how to take notes, why they
only hear half of our instructions, or why they struggle in their relationships with friends
and family. How do listening skills make us successful in college and in the workforce?
Good listening helps us:
better understand instructions and assignments
uncover the deeper meaning of events and ideas
collaborate with others
resolve problems
Some might think that listening is a natural skill that just needs to be practiced, but
listening does not come naturally to all people. Think about it. When children learn to
write, the first skill they must acquire is how to hold a pencil. Then they must learn how
to read and spell. Then slowly, with much practice, they master the skills of writing
mechanics, usage, punctuation and grammar. So you see, there are many sub-skills that
are necessary before a child can put words to paper. Effective listening also requires a set
of sub-skills and parents are the best ones to encourage mastery of these skills. There are
a number of particular ‘features’ of listening that make it a tricky skill:
Firstly, it takes place in ‘real’ time. This is one of the arguments for repeating recordings
a number of times. However, this does not accurately reflect either real life listening or
the way in which listening (even classroom listening) is processed. Listening naturally
includes redundancy (when information is repeated either with the same words and
expressions or in a slightly
different format), yet we often fail to exploit this fact when teaching the skill in class.
Secondly, unless students are aware of the purpose of the redundancy it can often cause
problems in itself. Students need to be made aware of the fact that redundancy occurs in
natural speech, and why it occurs. Then they can use it to help them.
Thirdly, background noises, speed of speech, the fact that there are often several people
speaking at the same time, or overlap (where someone cuts into another person) will all
cause problems. Students need to face these problems and talk about them in order to
find ways of dealing with them whenever they occur.
Finally, what often makes the task of listening particularly tricky is the view of many
students and teachers that it is a passive skill. There appears to be this idea that you can
just let the monologue or dialogue ‘flow’ over you and take in what you hear. However,
in many cases in real life listening is not passive; it involves the listener in a meaningful
engagement, often with the speaker, and is a co-constructed activity. Unfortunately, most
classroom listening activities are not like this and thus do not really prepare our students
for ‘real’ listening.
…………………………………………………………………………………………
Q2.
Reader Response Theory, which gained prominence in the late 1960s, focuses on the
reader as an active agent who is constantly engaged in the process of meaning
making and decoding the text to such an extent that he/she has been labeled a the
co-author of the text. In the light of this statement, elaborate the idea that reading
which is generally regarded as receptive skill is in fact a productive one.
Answer:
Reading skills can change your life. Without any qualification, reading has
changed my life for the better. I’ve learned skills, enjoyed many incredible stories and
learned about the world. I’ve learned about history, explored the rich depths of science
fiction, and discovered other countries, learned business ideas and much more.
Like any skill, you can become more effective with practice and an introduction
to the key techniques. In this article, I will mainly focus on reading traditional books,
which remain deeply valuable despite advances in digital technology. That said, many of
these ideas can be adapted to digital reading. These ideas will help you learn and
remember more from the books you read.
“Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.”- Joseph Addison