TEACHING ENGLISH IN THE ELEMENTARY GRADES

WEEK 7: Listening, Theories of Language Comprehension, Principles for Listening Comprehension in

the Classroom

OBJECTIVES:

1. Explain why listening is the most basic skill in language acquisition.

2. Give an example of an activity/ies that show the development of language learning.
3. Discuss the importance of schemata in language learning.

LANGUAGE SKILL: LISTENING

Skills and Strategies for Proficient Listening

 At the beginning stages of language study, before students have learned to read well, it is by
listening that they can have the most connection to meaning in the new language.
 Through listening, learners can build an awareness of the interworkings of language systems at
various levels and thus establish a base for more fluent productive skills.
 A regular program of listening can extend learners’ vocabulary and use of idioms and build their
appreciation.
 Successful academic study in English requires a mastery of the listening demands in the
interactive exchanges which are common to conversational lecture styles.

THEORIES OF LANGUAGE COMPREHENSION

A. Listening Is the Primary Channel for Language Input and Acquisition

Proponents of comprehension approaches recognize the primacy of listening in the processes of

comprehension, retention of information in memory, and acquisition of language competence. Learning
to speak a language is very largely a task of learning to hear it. Hence, the need for early intensive oral
practice. There is a need for:

1. an extended period of listening with delayed oral production.

2. a long preproduction phase in which students listen, follow commands demonstrate their
comprehension through nonverbal actions, is greatly helpful in language acquisition.
3. a prespeech period for listening only, to be followed by an early production phase in which
students give answers in single words or short phrases.

Reception should precede production because reception enables production.

B. Listening Comprehension Is a Multilevel, Interactive Process of Meaning Creation

At beginning proficiency levels, perceptual operations require great amounts of conscious attention.
Later, after lower level skills have been rehearsed, many times, they can be performed automatically.

There are three phases of comprehension:

 1. Perceptual processing – the listener uses his/her knowledge of the language to recognize
meaningful sound units, to determine syllable boundaries, and to identify words.
2. Parsing phase – the listener works with words and phrases he/she has decoded to form
meaningful units, which are stored in short term memory.
3. Utilization stage – the listener searches long-term memory for ideas to relate to the new
information; when a match is made between old and new information, comprehension occurs.

There is the importance of the student’s prior knowledge, schemata, in making sense of incoming
linguistic data. Schemata is a data structure for representing generic concepts stored in memory.
There are two kinds of schemata:

 Content Schemata -include cultural knowledge, topic familiarity, and previous experience with a
field.
 Formal Schemata – have to do with people’s knowledge of discourse forms, text types,
rhetorical conventions, and the structural organization of prose.

Both content and formal schemata can aid the reader in comprehending texts.

WEEK 7: Listening, Theories of Language Comprehension, Principles for Listening Comprehension in

the Classroom

ACTIVITY:

1. Why is listening the most basic skill in language acquisition?

2. Give situations in the classroom where development of language learning is obvious.
3. Explain why the schemata is important in language learning.

WEEK 8: Principles for Listening Comprehension in the Classroom, Developmental View of Listening
Skills

OBJECTIVES:

1. Elaborate each of the principles of listening comprehension.

2. Describe each of the developmental levels of listening.
3. Develop goals and corresponding exercises according to the developmental levels of listening.

PRINCIPLES FOR LISTENING COMPREHENSION IN THE CLASSROOM

1. Increase the amount of listening time in the second language class – Make listening the
primary channel for learning new material in the classroom. Input must be interesting,
comprehensible, supported by extralinguistic materials, and keyed to the language lesson.
2. Use listening before other activities – At beginning ang low-intermediate levels, have students
listen to material before they are required to speak, read, or write about it.
 3. Include both global and selective listening- Global listening encourages students to get the gist,
main idea, topic, situation, or setting. Selective listening points student’s attention to details of
form and encourages accuracy.
4. Activate top-level skills- Give advance organizers, script activators, or discussions which call up
students’ background knowledge. Encourage top-down processing at every proficiency level.
5. Work towards automaticity in processing - Include exercises which build both recognition and
retention of the material. Use familiar material in novel combinations. Encourage overlearning
through focus on selected formal features. Practice bottom-up processing at every proficiency
level.
6. Develop conscious listening strategies – raise students’ awareness of text features and of their
own comprehension processes. Encourage them to notice how their processing operations
interact with the text. Practice interactive listening, so that they can use their bottom-up and
their top-down processes to check one against the other.

DEVELOPMENTAL VIEW OF LISTENING SKILLS

A. Profile of the Beginning-Level Student in Listening

 True beginners in a second language lack adequate bottom-up processing skills because
they have not yet developed the linguistic categories against which the language must
be heard.
 They perceive the language as undifferentiated noise.
 They are not yet able to segment the speech stream into word units – to tell where one
word begins and another ends.
 They have no idea about phonological rules that change sounds in certain environments
or cause reductions of sound.
 They are not familiar with rules for word formation, inflections, or word order. Their
vocabulary store is practically nonexistent.

Bottom-Up Processing Goals and Exercise Types:

Goal: Discriminate between intonation contours in sentences.

Exercise: Listen to sentences with either rising or falling intonation and mark them with appropriate
punctuation for statements (.), questions (?), surprise (??), or excitement (!).

Goal: Discriminate between phonemes.

Exercise: Listen to three words and determine which word is different from the other two.

Top-Down Processing Goals and Exercise Types:

Goal: Discriminate between emotional reactions.
Exercise: Listen a statement about a vacation and decide whether or not the speaker enjoyed the
vacation.

Goal: Get the gist or main idea of a passage.

Exercise: Listen to a dialogue and decide what type of weather is being described. Find the picture that
shows the weather.

B. Profile of the Intermediate-Level Learner

 Intermediate -level learners continue to use listening as an important source of

language input to increase their vocabulary and structural understanding.
 Although they have internalized the phonemic system of the language fairly well, they
may have little understanding of the complexities of phonological rules that govern fast
speech: reductions, elisions, assimilation and so forth.
 Intermediate -level learners have moved beyond the limits of words and short phrases,
their memory can retain longer phrases and sentences.
 They can listen to short conversations or narratives that are one or two paragraphs in
length.

Bottom-Up Processing Goals and Exercise Types:

Goal: differentiate between content and function words by stress pattern.

Exercise: Read a series of sentences and predict which words will be stressed (content word) and which
will be reduced (function words).

Goal: Find the stressed syllable.

Exercise: Listen to a list of multisyllable words. Check whether the tress is on the first, second or third
syllable.

Top-Down Processing Goals and Exercise Types:

Goal: Listen to identify the speaker or the topic.

Exercise: Listen to four short conversations with people making small talk and match each to a picture of
the speakers and the setting.

Goal: Make inferences.

Exercise: Listen to a woman and a man ordering dinner in a restaurant. Based on the food choices they
make, tell which person is more conscious of health concerns.
WEEK 8: Principles for Listening Comprehension in the Classroom, Developmental View of Listening
Skills

ACTIVITY:

1. Choose the best three principles for listening comprehension and discuss your understanding of
them.
2. Give a brief description of each of the developmental levels of listening.
3. Develop two goals ( one for bottom-up and one for top-down) and give one corresponding
exercise type for each goal, for both the beginning and intermediate levels of learners.

WEEK 9: Developmental view of Listening Skills, Speaking, Four Dimensions of Language Competence

OBJECTIVES:

1. Compare the profile of the advance learner to those of the two lower levels of learners.
2. Enumerate the dimensions of speaking competencies and identify the areas that they develop in
the learner.
3. Develop three goals for the advance learner and give appropriate exercises to wards their
achievement.

C. Profile of the Advanced Learner

 Advanced students are no longer simply learning to learn the language.

 They are listening in the language to learn about the content of other areas.
 They can listen to longer texts such as radio and television programs and academic
lectures.
 Their vocabulary includes topics in current events, history and culture, they can deal
with a certain degree of abstraction.
 Many advanced learners are more skilled at reading than they are at listening.

Bottom-Up Processing Goals and Exercise Types:

Goal: Use features of sentence stress and intonation to identify important information for note taking.

Exercise: Listen to a number of sentences and extract the content words, which are read with greater
stress. Write the content words as notes.

Goal: Become aware of organizational cues in a lecture text.

Exercise: Look at a lecture transcript and circle all the cue words used to enumerate the main points.

Top-Down Processing Goals and Exercise Types:

Goal: Use knowledge of the topic to predict the content of the text.
Exercise: Before listening to a conversation about food, write a description about the way that food is
prepared and eaten in your culture.

Goal: Recognize point of view.

Exercise: Take notes on a debate about whether or not it is ethical to keep dolphins in captivity.

LANGUAGE SKILL: SPEAKING

For most people, the ability to speak a language is synonymous with knowing that language since speech
is the most basic means of human communication.

The ability to communicate in a language comprises four dimensions:

1. Grammatical Competence – include rules of phonology, orthography, vocabulary, word

formation and sentence formation.
2. Sociolinguistic Competence - - include rules for the expression and understanding of
appropriate social meanings and grammatical forms in different contexts.
3. Discourse Competence – rules of both cohesion- how sentence elements are tied together via
reference, repetition, synonymy, etc. and coherence, how texts are constructed.
4. Strategic Competence – a collection of compensatory strategies that help with a variety of
communication difficulties.

WEEK 9: Developmental view of Listening Skills, Speaking

ACTI VITY:

1. Differentiate the three types of learners. Enumerate distinct characteristics.

2. What are the four dimensions of speaking competencies? Identify the areas they
develop/activate in the learners.
3. Identify two goals for the advanced learner and a corresponding exercise type for each goal.

WEEK 10: Major types of Speaking Activities in an Oral Skills Classroom

OBJECTIVES:

1. Generate topics for the major types of speaking activities.

2. Identify characteristics of learners who are ready for each of the major speaking activities.
3. Arrange the speaking activities according to developmental acquisition of skills.

MAJOR TYPES OF SPEAKING ACTIVITIES IN AN ORAL SKILLS CLASSROOM

A. DISCUSSIONS
 These are probably the most commonly used activity in the oral skills class.
  Typically, the students are introduced to a topic via a reading, a listening passage, or a
videotape and are then asked to get into pairs or groups to discuss a related topic in
order to come up with a solution, a response, or the like.
 Teachers must take care in planning and setting up a discussion activity.
 First, planned grouping or pairing of students may be necessary to ensure a successful
discussion outcome.
 Second, students need to be reminded that each person should have a specific
responsibility in the discussion, whether it be to keep time, take notes, or report results;
these decisions can, and should be made by the group members.
 Finally, students need to be clear about what they are to discuss, why they are
discussing it, and what outcome is expected.
B. SPEECHES
 Another common activity in the oral skills class is the prepared speech.
 Topics for speeches will vary depending on the level of the student and the focus of the
class, but in any case, students should be given leeway in determining the content of
their talks.
 An example is asking students to “tell us about an unforgettable experience you had”;
this allows them to talk about something that is personally meaningful while at the
same time encourages narration and description.
 A second type of speech is the impromptu speech. This activity gives students more
actual practice with speaking the language, but it also forces them to think, and speak,
on their feet without the benefit of notes or memorization. A variation on this activity
can be part of a lesson on using hesitation markers such as um, eh, well, sort of, and
like.

C. ROLE PLAYS
 Role plays can be performed from prepared scripts, created from a set of prompts and
expressions, or written using and consolidating knowledge gained from instruction.
 This is particularly suitable for practicing the sociocultural variations in speech acts, such
as complimenting, complaining, and the like.

D. CONVERSATIONS
 One of the more recent trends in oral skills pedagogy is the emphasis on having students
analyze and evaluate the language that they or others produce.
 It is not adequate to have students produce lots of language; they must become aware
of the many features of language in order to become competent speakers and
interlocutors in English.
 One speaking activity which is particularly suited to this kind of analysis is conversation,
the most fundamental form of communication.
WEEK 10: Major types of speaking Activities in an Oral Skills Classroom

ATIVITY:

1. Give at least two topics/lessons to be tackled in carrying out each of the speaking activities.
2. What should be the skills needed for a student to be ready for a speaking activity.
3. Arrange all the speaking activities given according to the developmental readiness and ability of
learners.

WEEK 11: The Sound System of English, Features of the Sound System

OBJECTIVES:

1. Explain why the sound system of the English language is a basic requirement in the teaching of
the language.
2. Formulate appropriate exercises to develop learners into mastery of the features of the
language sound system.
3. Express views on the importance of students’ mastery of the features of the sound system.

TEACHING PRONUNCIATION

THE SOUND SYSTEM OF ENGLISH:

Traditionally, the sound system of the English language has been taught in a building block fashion:

Sounds------- syllables--------phrases and thought groups----------extended discourse

A newer approach recognizes that all features of the sound system work in tandem.

FEATURES OF THE SOUND SYSTEM:

1. Thought Groups – We use pauses to divide our speech into manageable chunks called thought
groups. Just as punctuation helps the reader process written discourse, pausing helps the
listener to process the stream of speech more easily.
Thought groups usually represent a meaningful grammatical unit.
Ex. Right: I was speaking to him / on the phone yesterday.
Wrong: I was speaking to / him on the / phone yesterday.

Pausing in different places can cause a change in meaning:

Ex. 1. Alfred said / the boss is stupid. 2. Alfred / said the boss / is stupid.

2. Prominence – within each thought group, there is generally one prominent element, a syllable
that is emphasized, usually by lengthening it and moving the pitch up or down.
 Ex. I was SPEAKing to him / on the PHONE yesterday.

The prominent element depends on context. Keep the following phrase in your mind “I am
reading.” Now, answer the following questions:

What are you doing? I am READing.

Who’s reading? I am reading
Why aren’t you reading? I AM reading.
3. Intonation – it refers to the pitch pattern of a statement.

There are two intonation patterns: 231 (statements) and the 233 (questions) .
4. Rhythm - Longer and shorter syllables occur in speech. This is the alternating of longer
(stressed) and shorter (unstressed) syllables.
In general, content words are stressed; whereas, function words are not.
5. Reduced Speech – It is de-emphasizing of syllables, by weakening or shortening them. Two types
of reduction are: loss of full vowel quality and loss of a sound.
6. Linking – The boundaries between words seem to disappear.
Ex. 1. Find out – fine doubt, 2. Don’t you - don-chew 3. Live in - livin
7. Vowels and Consonants
8. Word Stress – multi-syllabic words have more than one stressed syllable but only one of those
syllables receives primary stress. Ex. com mu ni CA tion

WEEK 11: The Sound System of English, Features of the Sound System

Activity:

1. Give four reasons why the sound system of the language is an essential knowledge in language
acquisition.
2. Formulate three goals and one exercise type for each of these goals. (See examples given in this
lecture guide)
3. Make a paragraph explaining why mastery of the sound system of the language facilitate a more
effective language acquisition.

WEEK 12: MIDTERM EXAMINATION

PREPARED BY: MRS. REMEDIOS T. NG