Listening+Theory

Listening Chapter 4: Using Technology to Teach Oral Communication Skills, pages 81 to 96: Developing Listening Skills 1. The acquisition/learning hypothesis states that language skills can be developed through two means: (a) Acquisition, the process used by children to acquire their native language.

(b) Learning, the conscious and explicit knowing about the language.

2. How does technology provide comprehensible input? Technology provides students with incentives to communicate orally as they work collaboratively on tasks and communicative projects. It provides exposure to large amounts of comprehensible speech and access to low-anxiety learning environments. Computers allow teachers to add multi sensory elements, text, sound, pictures, video, and animation, which provide meaningful contexts to facilitate comprehension. Software programs for beginning-level students let them connect words and sentences to pictures or animations in context of a particular setting to assist in comprehension. Computer programs are also helpful in demonstrating more complex vocabulary and concepts.

3. In what ways can technology assist in creating a non threatening language learning environment?

Technology can aid teachers in creating a supportive, non threatening learning environment in which second language learners feel secure enough to practice the target language and to make and correct their own errors without embarrassment or anxiety. The computer can be programmed to present material at different difficulty levels with adjustments in speed of delivery according to individual learner needs. The untiring, nonjudgmental nature of the computer gives students the autonomy to review any part of the lesson as many times as they wish and received immediate feedback and additional assistance as needed. By reducing stress and anxiety, learners are able to negotiate meaning and convert the raw message they hear into comprehensible input.

4. What kinds of processing strategies are involved in listening? Describe each one and give examples: Bottom-up processing: the focus is placed on individual components of oral discourse. Comprehension is viewed as a process of decoding messages proceeding from phonemes to words, to phrases and clauses and other grammatical elements, to sentences. Bottom-up activities might ask a student to identify sounds or parts of a sentence according to their function as subject, verb, object, and so on, or to distinguish between positive and negative sentences or statements and questions.

Top-down processing: takes into account the macro-features of discourse such as the speaker’s purpose and the discourse topic. Comprehension is seen as a process of activating the listener’s background information and schemata for a global understanding of the message. If, for instance, a friend tells you “I forget to buy candles at the grocery store,” your prior knowledge will determine the kind of candle you assign to that statement. If you already know that today is the birthday of your friend’s daughter, you will probably assume your friend needs to buy small birthday candles. If, however, you only know that you had a power outage last night and the weather report predicted more storms, the candles you would envision would be quite different

5. How does technology assist students in demonstrating their background and linguistic knowledge? Computers allow students to demonstrate their knowledge and competencies in a variety of ways. For instance, in Mrs. Temores’s sheltered sixth-grade social sciences class, students were to work in groups to research and do a timeline on the life of great American inventors. One group that had selected Albert Einstein was working with the New Dynamic English program, which featured a listening unit on Einstein. As the students listened to a short narration about Einstein’s life, pictures would appear on the screen to visually represent what was being said about different events in his life. With the help of these picture cues and guided questions, the students were able to place the major events of Einstein’s life in the correct order on a timeline.

6. How can technology assist students in: 1. **Interactional communication**. The Learning Oral English Online website, created by Rong-Chang Li, is an online conversational book designed for intermediate-level ELLs. This website offers interactional speaking practice through dialogs centered on topics such as making friends, going to a party, and dating. In these exercises, students can elect to listen to the entire dialog or access individual sentences. Brief introductions to the dialogs and explanatory notes on slang and idioms used in the dialogs are provided. Students also practice different aspects of social conversation. For example, in “Making Friends,” students are guided to recognized three parts of casual conversations: the greeting, small talk, and leave taking. This site also practices another type of interactional listening that focuses on simple service-oriented tasks such as ordering lunch and shopping in America. 2. **Transactional communication** Use of technology to support transformational communication was demonstrated in Mr. Lee’s high school health class. Here, students were assign various issues related to smoking to investigate for an upcoming debate on the topic. As a prompt for discussion and a source of information on the topic, his students listened to a lecture on smoking presented in a video clip from the Issues in English program. While listening to the speaker, Mr. Lee’s students typed in the main points they heard on the computer screen. If they had any difficulty understanding the lecture, they would stop the lecture and replay it or ask the computer program for vocabulary assistance. In this exercise students were listening intently to the lecture for transactional purposes as they attempted to determine the key points of the talk for later use in their debate on the topic. 7. Annotated Review of Listening web-based Activities