Anda di halaman 1dari 7

Spoken Language

(Research) highlighted the fundamental intricacy of the processes involved. In order to make sense of spoken messages, listeners may need to integrate information from a range of sources: phonetic, phonological, prosodic, lexical, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic. The fact that we achieve all this in real time as the message unfolds makes listening "complex, dynamic, and fragile" (Celce-Murcia 1995:366). Lynchi, 1998, p. 3). The emphasis in EFL listening materials in recent years has been on developing top-down listening processes. There are good reasons for this given that learners need to be able to listen effectively even when faced with unfamiliar vocabulary or structures. However, if the learner understands very few words from the incoming signal, even knowledge about the context may not be sufficient for her to understand what is happening, and she can easily get lost. Of course, low-level learners may simply not have enough vocabulary or knowledge of the language yet, but most teachers will be familiar with the situation in which higher-level students fail to recognise known words in the stream of fast connected speech. Bottom-up listening activities can help learners to understand enough linguistic elements of what they hear to then be able to use their top-down skills to fill in the gaps. As you design listening tasks, keep in mind that complete recall of all the information in an aural text is an unrealistic expectation to which even native speakers are not usually held. Listening exercises that are meant to train should be success-oriented and build up students' confidence in their listening ability. In reality, fluent listening normally depends on the use of both processes operating simultaneously. Think about talking to your friends (in your first language) in a noisy bar. It is likely that you guess the content of large sections of the conversation, based on your knowledge of the topic and what has already been said. In this way, you rely more on topdown processing to make up for unreliability in the sound signal, which forms an obstacle to bottom-up processing. Similarly, second-language listeners often revert to their knowledge of the topic and situation when faced with unfamiliar vocabulary or structures, so using top-down processing to compensate for difficulties in bottom-up processing. On the other hand, if a listener is unable to understand anything of what she hears, she will not

even be able to establish the topic of conversation, so top-down processing will also be very limited. Construct the listening activity around a contextualized task. Contextualized listening activities approximate real-life tasks and give the listener an idea of the type of information to expect and what to do with it in advance of the actual listening. A beginning level task would be locating places on a map (one way) or exchanging name and address information (two way). At an intermediate level students could follow directions for assembling something (one way) or work in pairs to create a story to tell to the rest of the class (two way). Activities to help students develop their top-down processing skills 1. Predicting the content of a listening activity beforehand, maybe using information about the topic or situation, pictures, or key words. This way you encourage them to use their knowledge of the topic to help them understand the content. This is an essential skill given that, in a real-life listening situation, even advanced learners are likely to come across some unknown vocabulary. By using their knowledge of context and co-text, they should either be able to guess the meaning of the unknown word, or understand the general idea without getting distracted by it. 2. Putting a series of pictures or sequence of events in order, 3. Listening to conversations and identifying where they take place, 3. Reading information about a topic then listening to find whether or not the same points are mentioned, 4. Inferring the relationships between the people involved.

The Top Down Skills Top down processing refers to the attribution of meaning, drawn from one's own world knowledge, to language input. It involves "the listener's ability to bring prior information to bear on the task of understanding the "heard" language". (Morley 2001) A List of Top Down Skills (This list has been compiled from a number of sources: Peterson (1991), and Brown (2001). They are listed in a rough order of conceptual difficulty):

discriminating between emotions getting the gist recognizing the topic

using discourse structure to enhance listening strategies identifying the speaker evaluating themes finding the main idea finding supporting details making inferences understanding organizing principals of extended speech

Bottom-up activities The following procedure for developing bottom-up listening skills draws on dictogloss, and is designed to help learners recognise the divisions between words, an important bottom-up listening skill. The teacher reads out a number of sentences, and asks learners to write down how many words there would be in the written form. While the task might sound easy, for learners the weak forms in normal connected speech can make it problematic, so it is very important for the teacher to say the sentences in a very natural way, rather than dictating them word-by-word. Learners can be asked to compare their answers in pairs, before listening again to check. While listening a third time, they could write what they hear, before reconstructing the complete sentences in pairs or groups. By comparing their version with the correct sentences, learners will become more aware of the sounds of normal spoken English, and how this is different from the written or carefully spoken form. This will help them to develop the skill of recognising known words and identifying word divisions in fast connected speech.
Conclusion

Successful listening depends on the ability to combine these two types of processing. Activities which work on each strategy separately should help students to combine topdown and bottom-up processes to become more effective listeners in real-life situations or longer classroom listenings. * (INFORMATION THEORY) Script concept In recent years, the fields of cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence, and linguistics have combined efforts in developing theories of comprehension based on learners' ability to draw on their existing world knowledge. This work has led to the idea of scripts as an .(essential framework for comprehension (Long1, 1989, p. 32
1

Long, D. R. (1989). Second Language Listening Comprehension: A Schema-Theoretic Perspective. The

Modern Language Journal, 73 (1) 32-40.

Because research in cognitive psychology and L1 reading has substantiated the major role played by the learner's background knowledge in the comprehension process, enormous .(.potential exists for transfer of such theory to L2 listening (ibid A lot of the information that we comprehend does not come in the linguistic part we process. (We need to make inferences in comprehending spoken discourse to fill the gaps in the message.) This background information is called 'script'. It is "one of the obstacles to comprehension when we listen to a message in a foreign language" Rivers, 1981, p. 163) In natural conversation part of the script is what we know about the speaker and the situation and what we are absorbing from non-verbal behavior. With foreign language listening experience on tape or cassette, we often know nothing of the speaker; the situation and its antecedents are not clearly specified; and we cannot see the non-verbal behaviour of the speaker. The comprehension of the utterance is thus made very difficult for the student. To supply students with background knowledge for listening material, we should give them, before they begin listening, explanations as to who is speaking to whom, the nature of their relationship, and their expectations in the situation. LISTENING AND READING Listening differs greatly with reading as reading materials are printed and permanent enough where the learners are required to interact with the next sentence using the knowledge of the previous one while listening involves continuous material presentation where they have to respond to the immediate expression. From the viewpoint of "product" or "process", listening is more a process than a product which instantly shapes the understanding and utterances of the learners.

Assuming that listening develops naturally, teachers tend not to emphasize the listening objectives. Another reason that listening is not emphasized may be that not having experienced much instruction on effective listening themselves, teachers are not certain how best to teach it. Teachers are not apt to get much training on teaching listening.

Listening as an active process requires the same skills of prediction, hypothesizing, checking, revising, and generalizing that writing and reading

demand; and they present specific exercises to make students active listeners to the same "inner voice" one hears when writing.
CONCLUSION The entire ITE textbook package is well conceived and it contains a wide variety of useful supplementary materials. The series is also very attractive and organized in a clear, logical, and coherent manner. In addition, EF2 reflects a multi-skills syllabus, and it manages to integrate the four language skills without neglecting other important aspects of ELT such as vocabulary development. Despite its strengths, EF2 had some shortcomings. Many of the activities, for instance, were repetitive, failed to encourage truly meaningful practice, promote realistic discourse, lead to the internalization of language. The researcher concluded that the listening activities in ITE are well designed and well written which provides a great deal of support for learning. The book offers a good balance of work on accuracy and fluency while the overall emphasis is clearly on oral communication. The primary disadvantages lie in the methodology, which is somewhat restrictive and rests on some arguably shaky theoretical foundations. The researcher finally concludes that the books shortcomings are outweighed by its strengths and these can be overcome through supplementary materials. Such materials do not provide the learners with enough knowledge that they need to achieve their vocational or academic goals. He, furthermore, found out that the books do not build up the candidates motivation since they are not visually attractive enough, which is a major shortcoming of the IELTS books. However, in terms of vocabulary explanation, the writer concludes that the new words are not contextualized, which makes it difficult for the learners to understand the meanings. The present study was an attempt to evaluate the suitability of New Interchange Series from the Iranian EFL teachers perception. One strong point is audio tape. However, as discussed above, no single textbook can meet the needs of a large and different group of language learners. Quotes

Speaking & Listening

Conversation is lower in lexical density and lesser variation (iiThornbury, & Slade, 2006, p. 45). In the conversation, there were 205 running words or tokens (205 words altogether) and 111 different words or types (type-token ratio is 0.54) Issues Simplification The process of simplifying texts is considered with caution. Testing or teaching comprehension It was traditionally thought that L2 learners would understand the spoken language by being exposed to it. Accordingly, teaching listening comprehension took the form of exposing the students to a taped spoken material followed by comprehension questions that tests, rather than teaches, whether or not students understood the listening text (Browniii, 1990). Students, therefore, are not receiving any help Nature of listening comprehension The traditional view of comprehension proposes that the speaker has an idea in their minds and encode this idea into words. Listeners, on the other hand, hear those words and understand them. In so doing, they have the same idea that the speaker originally had (Brown, 1990, p.8). Brown (1990) gave a 20-minute lecture to experienced teachers of English and asked them to take detailed notes of this lecture. When she compared their notes she found out significant differences between them. It was obvious, she asserts, that different individuals paid attention to different points that meshed with their own previous experiences and interests in different ways (p.9). Evaluation In the first part of this paper, we looked at the listening process and in this part we are going to see how we can apply those insights to the teaching of listening. Real listening is an active process that has three basic steps: hearing, understanding, and judging.

Lynch, T. (1998). Theoretical perspectives on listening. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 18, 3-19. Thornbury, S. & Slade, D. (2006). Conversation: From description to pedagogy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. iii Brown, J. (1990). Listening to spoken English. London: Longman.
ii

Anda mungkin juga menyukai