TEACHING LISTENING

The nature of listening comprehension

Distinction between Reciprocal Listening and Non-reciprocal Listening:

● Reciprocal listening: when the listener has the opportunity to interact

with the speaker and negotiate the content of the interaction

● Non-reciprocal listening: the transfer of the info is in one direction only

→ from the speaker to the listener.

The listener must integrate the following skills:

1. identify spoken signals from the sounds

2. grasp the syntax of the utterance

3. formulate an appropriate response

4. having an appropriate purpose for listening

5. have appropriate social, cultural and background kn and skills

● Listening tasks:

1. Bottom-up: work on the incoming message itself, decoding sounds,

words, clauses and sentences.

2. Top-down: involve background kn to assist in comprehending the

message.

3. Functional dimension: interactional (maintenance of social

relationships) and transactional (transfer of info).
Successful listening involves skills in:
● Dividing the stream of speech into meaningful words and phrases;
● Recognizing word classes;
● Relating the incoming message to the background knowledge;
● Interpreting rhythm, stress and intonation to identify the focus of the
information and emotional tone;
● Extracting essential information without necessarily understanding every
word.

The listener as an active model builder

In order to listen successfully the listener has to construct their own 'coherent
interpretation' of any spoken message. The listener has this ‘mental model’ that
refers to this ‘coherent interpretation’. The mental model that the listener builds is
the result of combining the new information (what we have just heard) with our
background knowledge and experience. The role of this background knowledge is
central to the way we understand language, both in listening or reading. The term
(background knowledge) covers a range of types of knowledge, in which we may
employ in order to comprehend what someone has said or written.

● Listening is active. We have to listen and interpret what we hear according

to our purpose in listening and our background knowledge. We then store
the meaning of the message (not the grammar)

Potential problems in listening

● Difficulty in recognising speech and non-speech sounds

● The listener may pay attention to what s/he listens to and recognise the
words but s/he might not comprehend the message → the listener as a tape
recorder (alternative: the listener as an active model builder→ listener’s
coherent representation of what s/he has listened to)

❖ Speech perception (hearing) and speech interpretation (understanding)

 ❖ We may resort to sources of information to comprehend: 1 systemic
or linguistic knowledge ((kn of the lge system)) and 2 schematic or
non-linguistic information (background and procedural kn) (mental
structures of relevant individual kn and experience that allows us to
incorporate what we learn → mental scripts)

● Listening and speaking are taken as separated skills and the L is not
allowed to interact with the input to check comprehension

● Background problems: gaps in knowledge of L2 culture or in

background knowledge the speaker thinks s/he shares with the
listener (but in fact they don’t) So gaps in our knowledge of the L2,
culture, of the associations and references available to native users,
can present obstacles to comprehension.

● Language problems: difficult input that contains complex syntactic

structure

● Listening problems: identifying the topic of the conversation, so

they can make a response → development of conversation skills
(asking the other person, repetition, clarification)