TEACHING RECEPTIVE LANGUAGE SKILLS

WHY? WHAT? HOW?

Associate Professor Titela Vilceanu, PhD

Approaches, methods and techniques of teaching L skills

1. Behaviorism – Audiolingualism
L is a “taken for granted” passive process, a mechanical process based on the
stimulus (hearing spoken chunks of language) - response pattern (identification and
organization of these into sentences, i.e recognition and discrimination of sounds and
words, recognition of intonation patterns, rhythm, rather than understanding of
meaningful language stretches). The techniques used mainly consist in repeating,
imitating and memorizing of prefabricated language, while totally disregarding cognitive
processes.
2. Cognitivism – Total Physical Response, The Natural Approach
L is considered a more dynamical process of cognitive nature. Therefore the
development of L skills focus on comprehension (as a cognitive process) premised by the
idea that understanding language facilitates learning (rather than acquisition). In point of
techniques, learners are exposed to large amounts of listening material while asked to
decode meaning and perform simple selection tasks (Audiolingualism); listening is
immediately followed by production (The Natural Approach).
3. The Interactionist Approach (The Socio-Cultural Turn): CLT, The Post-
Communicative Turn
The interactive, social and contextualized perspective of language learning
focuses on connected speech (discourse) rather than on isolated pieces. There is also a
shift from centering on formal aspects of language to content and meaning, to
communicative intent (purposeful listening). Information processing while listening
(sequential order of input, perception, recognition, and understanding stages) is coupled
with a constructivist stance: listeners actively construct meaning according to their own
purposes for listening as well as their own prior knowledge and experience. Prior

1
knowledge is identified to schemata, further subdivided into content schemata (topic
familiarity, cultural knowledge and previous experience with a particular field) and
formal schemata (knowledge about text types - stylistic conventions as well as the
structural organization/variety of formats).
The socio-cultural context has gained ever increased importance in language
learning as the process does not take place in a social vacuum. Admittedly, special
attention is paid to the effects that status relationship between participants had on
language behaviour (level of formality). In fact, it is pointed out that listeners engaged in
face-to- face interaction must pay attention to this variable in order to determine which
type of verbal behavior should be appropriate when delivering a response. Non-verbal
language is equally part of the social context in which listening occurs: body postures,
body movements, facial expressions, facial gestures, eye contact the use of space by the
communicators) as well as non-verbal paralinguistic elements: tone, pitch of voice, etc.
Consequently, an understanding of all these aspects would provide important
clues for interpreting what is being listened to and, in turn, facilitate the whole process of
listening comprehension. Besides, there is the question of the cultural load (intercultural
pragmatics) – different interpretation of non-verbal language, formulation of different
speech acts and politeness issues, such as the directness-indirectness continuum.
To sum up, listening is considered as a primary vehicle for language learning, achieving a
status of significant and central importance in both language learning and language
teaching fields.
Listening skills and intercultural communicative competence
Activity
Select a representative scene from a film, brought in by the learners, which shows
a given cultural topic. Prepare a series of questions divided into three phases (i.e., pre-
listening, while-listening and post-listening) with the aim of activating, developing and
reflecting on their cultural knowledge of such a topic while practising their listening
skills.
Visual listening
Pre-listening phase

2
- Do you think the topic of (…) is representative of the target culture and of your own
culture? Why or why not?
- Which ideas come to your mind when thinking about such a topic?
While-listening phase
- Can you identify elements such as pauses, changes of intonation, tone of voice or
periods of silence that involve cultural meaning?
- Which is the setting of the scene? Does it involve particular implications for the
development of the situation?
- What is the participants’ relationship in terms of social status and power? Does such a
relationship affect their communicative interaction? Would such interaction be different
in your own culture?
- Which non-verbal means of communication can be identified (i.e., body movement,
facial expression, eye contact, etc.)? Are they different in your own culture?
Post-listening phase
Reflect on the scene you have just watched and in small groups discuss the
cultural differences that would arise if the same situation were to take place in your own
culture.

(Source: Uso´-Juan, Martınez-Flor, Current Trends in the Development and Teaching of

the Four Language Skills, 2006: 41-42)

3
Controlling factors in teaching L skills (principles)

1. Accessibility of input: listening provides primary exposure to L2, fostering

language acquisition/learning. The quality of the input is determined by relevance
(fitness of purpose) translated into sustainable effort to understand, roughly-tuned
informational complexity (measurable in point of length, speed, familiarity, information
density, and text organization); authenticity of listening materials.
2. Fostering top down processing (deductive reasoning): activating background
knowledge and expectations (schemata) in detecting the speakers’ intended meaning1.
3. Fostering bottom up processing (inductive reasoning): phonetic feature
detection, metrical segmentation of the L input into words and word recognition in
meaning decoding/construction.
4. Listener status: listener’s active engagement in the process engenders successful
development of the L skills while experiencing lower uncertainty and anxiety and higher
self-confidence and tolerance of ambiguity.

1
Nation and Waring (1997) claim that a recognition vocabulary of 3000 word families is necessary for
comprehension of everyday conversations, if we assume that a listener needs to be familiar with – and able
to recognize about 90% of content words to understand a conversation satisfactorily.