Teaching Listening and Speaking: Test 2 Listening

Processing instruction

A form of instruction in which pedagogic tasks are designed based on predictions about features of grammar that learners need to notice and acquire.

Extensive listening

A form of listening practice in which the learner listens to longer extracts and performs meaning oriented tasks.

Autonomous listening

A form of listening practice in which the learner selects own extracts and tasks, monitors own progress; decides on own patterns of interaction with others.

Formative assessment of listening

All objectives of the unit, a few at a time, learning processes. Formative assessment should provide feedback to student and teacher on progress in learning and determine the need for and/or type of remediation required. It should be continuous, as part of regular learning activities. The assessment can be done via observation, checklists and portfolios. Teachers, students or peers can do formative assessment. Adjusting teaching procedures, adapt learning activities and provide individual remediation strategies and/or targeted skill(s) are end results of this kind of assessment.

Accommodation

Accommodation features that are observed in the Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI) include: display questions, comprehension checks, clarification requests, or-questions, fronting, grammatical modifications, slowdown, over-articulation, other-expansion and lexical simplification.

Interactive approaches to teaching listening

According to the interaction hypothesis, interaction contributes directly to language acquisition in three ways: 1) through allowing the learner to provide himself or herself with comprehensible input through interaction adjustments. 2) by providing negative feedback that allows the learner to see where he or she may be producing errors 3) by presenting opportunities for pushed output, in effect forcing the learner to try out new words and structures to get his or her ideas across in a social content.

Discovery learning

a discovery learning task can range from implicit pattern detection, to the elicitation of explanations and working through manuals to conducting simulations. Discovery learning can occur whenever the student is not provided with an exact answer but rather the materials in order to find the answer themselves. Discovery learning takes place in problem solving situations where the learner draws on his own experience and prior knowledge and is a method of instruction through which students interact with their environment by exploring and manipulating objects, wrestling with questions and controversies, or performing experiments.

Bottom-Up Processing (when listening)

a form of information processing that is guided by input and the speech signal in real time, and proceeds subsequent stages.

Planned vs. unplanned speech

Planned speech is speech that has been previously prepared or thought out. It may have been edited so that it is concise and flows smoothly. An example would be an announcement over a PA system. Unplanned speech is speech that is said with little to no preparation as to what will be said. There is usually repetition of words as well as fillers such as "uh" or "umm". There may also be pauses in the speech. An example of this would be a leader speaking to an assembled group.

Pragmatic vs. literal meaning

Pragmatic meaning is a social meaning of an utterance vs the meaning of the surface structure of the text. For example, the utterance "do you have the time?' Pragmatic meaning: - "What time is it?" To which you answer "it's 5:00" Literal meaning: - "do you have the time?" to which you answer "Yes, I do"

Recasts

Recasts, which provide more appropriate or correct ways of expressing ideas, provide opportunities for learners to notice gaps between their production and that of a more skilled interlocutor.

Summative assessment of listening

Selected course/program objective, representative of the level assessed. Summative assessment should determine level for placement purposes, course pass/failure and certification. It should be periodic, at the end of a course or program. The assessment can be done via standardized tests, achievement/placement/proficiency tests. Teachers, institutions, Education jurisdictions (school board, government) do summative assessment. Award credits (promotion), certification or program evaluation are end results of this kind of assessment.

Self-assessment

Self-assessment is supposed to provide learners with input into the assessment process and thereby encourage them to become more invested in the course and the assessments used in that course. Self-assessment criteria should be based directly on course goals and objectives, as one goal of self-assessment is to raise students' awareness of the goals and objectives.Self-assessment should lead students to better understand their strengths weaknesses and to then make a plan to address those weaknesses.

Enriching speaker meaning

Speaker input must be enriched. This can be done by: Inferring the speaker's emotion(s). Elaborating on the speaker's meaning: making semantic inferences based on the concepts and pragmatic inferences based on the context-dependent conditions

Social frameworks

The underlying structure that connects and supports the various members and parts of a community or human organization. Activity roles/participant roles. Pull up what you know about that activity or instruction. For example: Having lunch with an old friend. The participant role is informal. The participants would be talking about old times and the balance of talking would be equal. It's a relatively light topic.

Politeness strategies

There are two categories of politeness strategies that a participant can use: Negative politeness. Make the demand on the listener less infringing, less direct, so that he or she can find ways to avoid loss of face, if necessary. Positive politeness. Make overt attempts to respect the listener through direct shows of generosity, modesty, agreement, and sympathy.

Compensatory strategies

Thinking strategies that enable the listener to adopt a cognitive perspective to improve comprehension and interaction. Compensatory strategies include: skipping, approximation, filtering, incompletion and substitution.

Input Flood

When countless examples of oral texts are given with exemplars of the target syntactic structure in the context of a meaning-focused task. High frequency exposure to a particular form in the instructional input might lead to better knowledge and use of that form.

Top-Down Processing (when listening)

information processing guided by higher level mental processes as we construct representations, drawing on our experiences and expectations.

Phonotactic Knowledge

knowledge of allowable sounds and sequences in a language.

Attention

the cognitive process of selectively concentrating on one aspect of the environment while ignoring other things; the allocation of processing resources; includes three stages (arousal, orientation, focus).

Consciousness

the neurological-cognitive bridge between individual and universal perception and personal experience. Just because you are conscious doesn't mean that you are paying attention. Tasks that are engaging and motivating are useful to stimulate consciousness. Make sure that tasks are the appropriate level.

Teacher modeling

teachers model the strategies or behaviours of listening/speaking. The learners observe the teacher and explain what they are doing, and why it is good or bad for listening.

Syntactic Parsing

occurs at the sentence level and the discourse level and results in a form of comprehension that permits listeners to predict incoming parts of an utterance and to make logical inferences regarding the utterance. Students won't use the grammar to help them.

Zone of proximal development (in regard to the acquisition of listening skills)

Development depends on social and oral interaction during which learners are supported by and collaborate with more skilled persons. individual discovery is powerful, but less effective than the development that can be achieved through scaffolded learning.

Ways to adjust difficulty of listening texts

Do a pre-listening warm-up activity to remind them of the content and vocabulary they will need (schema activation) Have learners do a task in pairs as they listen. Do a micro-task before the main task. Brainstorm words likely to be in the listening text. Give a list of events or items that will be mentioned in the listening text. Give a list of events or items that will be mentioned in the listening text. As students listen, pause the recording to give them time to think and process what they hear. Give students a copy of the script and have them read it. Then ask them to put the script away and listen to the text. After they listen, give them a copy of the script. Have students choose their own style of review. Those who found it very difficult follow your prompts. Those who found it of average difficulty look at their books. Those who found it easy close their eyes.

Comprehension strategies

Experience - text - relationship method emphasizes typing learners own experiences with text cues to arrive at meaning. K - W - L sequence (What you know, What you want to know, What you Learned from a listening or reading) focuses listeners and readers on the process of learning from text. Reciprocal teaching approach prompts teacher and students to query each other around the four specific strategies: predicting, questioning, clarifying, summarizing. Q&R method (Question - Answer relationships) teaches learners to look for specific links concerning how the information is presented.

Inference

Filling in missing parts of a text or adding reading processes to make sense of a text. Connecting ideas and filling in the blanks. Dexis: anchoring language to the real world (time, objects, persons, and status) Intention: The purpose of communication (locutions, illocutions, and perlocutions) Conversational maxims: an agreement to cooperate (quantity, quality, relevance, and manner)

Models of English for assessment purposes

General language ability and listening ability. Listening ability is a sub-set of general language ability. Any assessment of listening ability will also be assessing general language ability. Phonological knowledge consists of knowledge of phonemes, allophonic variation, prosody, intonation, and stress. It also includes the application of this knowledge to recognize words in the stream of speech. Lexical knowledge encompasses knowing the means of words and their relationships to other words and collocations. Syntactic knowledge is based on ability to parse speech at sentence and discourse levels. Pragmatic knowledge includes recognition of social dimensions in speech. General knowledge includes knowledge about the world, including the ways that people communicate.

Hearing vs. Listening

Hearing is the physical process that allows for reception and conversion of sound waves to electrochemical impulses. Listening is the intentional process of trying to make sense of input, usually input that has an oral component.

Metacognitive strategies

In descriptions of learning strategies, metacognitive strategies refer to enhancing awareness of language use conditions and processes. Learners think consciously about how they process the language. The advantage of awareness is that it allows us to identify problem areas, better plan a course of action, develop learning strategies, and assess (lack of) progress on their learning goals. Teachers can ask students to identify weaknesses, make a plan for addressing the weaknesses, assess the success of that plan, and when a degree of success is achieved return to the beginning of the cycle. Teachers can teach and model strategies and then require learners to use the strategies repeatedly until the strategy is automatized.

Selective listening

In language teaching, selective listening refers to listening with a planned purpose in mind, often to gather specific information to perform a task. In its vernacular use, selective listening is used to refer to 'attending to only what you want to hear' and 'turning out everything else.'

Integrative tests

Integrative tests require test takers to integrate/synthesize various types of information when responding. They are better aligned with much classroom teaching than discrete-point tests. Potentially more authentic than discrete-point tests. They are flexible in that they can be used to assess both bottom-up and top-down skills.

Intensive listening

Intensive listening refers to listening to a text closely, with the intention to decode the input for purposes of analysis. Some types of intensive listening are fast-speed listening, pause and paraphrase, listening close, error identification, jigsaw dictation, group dictation, communicative dictation and listening games.

Interactive listening

Interactive listening refers to a type of conversational interaction in which the listener takes a leading role in understanding, through providing feedback, asking questions and supporting the speaker.

Background knowledge/Schemata

Modules of knowledge. Adults have hundreds of thousands of schemata that are highly interrelated. New schemata can be created and existing schemata can be updated at any time. One key to successful listening is the activation of appropriate schemata. Acceptable understanding: A reasonable match of the speaker and listener's schemata. Misunderstanding: Significant mismatches between the speaker and listener's schemata. Non-understanding: The listener is unable to activate any appropriate schemata.

Council of Europe scales of listening proficiency

Proficient user C1. Can understand with ease virtually everything heard or read. Can summarize information from different spoken and written sources. Can express themselves spontaneously. C2. Can understand a wide range of demanding, longer texts, and recognize implicit meaning. Can express him/herself fluently and spontaneously. Independent user B2. Can understand the main ideas of complex text on both concrete and abstract topics, including technical discussions in his/her field of specialization. Can interact with a degree of fluency. B1. Can understand the main points of clear standard input on familiar matters regularly encountered in work, school, leisure, etc. Can deal with most situations likely to arise whilst traveling in an area where the language is spoken. Basic user A2. Can understand sentences and frequently used expressions related to areas of most immediate relevance (e.g. very basic personal and family information, shopping, local geography, employment). Can communicate in simple and routine tasks. A1. Can understand sentences and frequently used expressions related to areas of most immediate relevance. Can communicate in simple and routine tasks requiring a simple and direct exchange.

Authenticity

language that can be processed in ways that are similar to how native speakers typically process language, that is, the language is comprehensible and can be processed without undue effort and stress. In this definition, simplified input is required for a long period of time. This definition is compatible with L1 acquisition. Processing language described in the first definition will occur eventually if this second definition is applied over several years.