Understanding the Listening Process and Skills
What is Listening?
Let’s look at listening as an interactive process!
Process of Listening
According to Clark & Clark (1977):
- Hearer processes the “raw/pure speech” (the actual phrases, clauses, etc.).
- Hearer determines the type of speech (conversation, speech, etc.).
- Hearer infers the objectives of the speaker (to persuade, request, etc.).
- Hearer recalls schemata (own background knowledge).
- Hearer assigns literal meaning to utterance.
- Hearer assigns intended meaning to utterance.
- Hearer determines
Decoding Oral Speech: Content, Process & Strategies
Content Involved in Listening Comprehension
We can distinguish three types of content involved in this ability:
Procedures
- Recognize
- Select
- Interpret
- Infer
- Anticipate
- Retain
Concepts
- Text: adequacy, consistency, cohesion, grammar, style, and presentation.
Attitudes
- Oral Culture
- Receptor Role
- Dialogue and Conversation
- Parliaments (Turn-taking/Discourse Structures)
The procedures are the different communication strategies used to decode spoken messages. The concepts are the same as those of other skills, i.e., the
Read MoreKey Linguistic Concepts
Aspects of Language Analysis
1. Communicative Functions of Language
- Representative or Referential: Information on events and concepts.
- Emotive: Shows the feeling or emotion of the speaker.
- Conative: Aims to change the reader’s attitude or activity.
- Metalinguistic: Clarifies or defines the meaning of words or expressions.
- Poetic: Focuses the reader’s attention on the form and sound of words, rather than content.
- Phatic: Ensures the communication channel is open and the partner is present.
2. Text Types
- Narrative:
Key Concepts in Child Language Acquisition
Language Acquisition Device (LAD)
Proposed by Chomsky (1959), the Language Acquisition Device (LAD) refers to an innate grammatical structure believed to underlie all human languages. It enables children, once they acquire a sufficient vocabulary, to combine words into novel yet grammatically consistent utterances and to understand the meaning of language quickly. Children are not explicitly taught language rules; instead, this ability develops naturally with mere exposure to a language environment.
Read MoreBehaviorism vs. Innatism: Language Acquisition Theories
Behaviorism and Innatism in Language Acquisition
Behaviorism
Behaviorism is a psychological theory of learning that was very influential in the 1940s and 1950s, especially in the United States. Traditional behaviorists believed that language learning is the result of imitation, practice, feedback on success, and habit formation. Children imitate the sounds and patterns they hear around them and receive positive reinforcement for doing so. Thus encouraged by their environment, they continue to imitate
Read MoreUnderstanding Interlanguage: Development and Error Analysis
- Interlanguage: A system with a structurally intermediate status between the native language (NL) and the target language (TL).
It falls between the TL and the NL and is based on the learner’s best attempt to provide order and structure to the linguistic stimuli surrounding them.
- Learners succeed in establishing closer approximations to the system used by native speakers through a process of trial and error.
Brown, Douglas B. 1994
Interlanguage Defined
Interlanguage: Systematic knowledge of an L2 which