Theorical Framework

LISTENING

What is listening comprehension?

1.   Mention one of the problems a L2 learner face.

A:  That, even if we have carefully rehearsed a particular utterance and manage to produce it to a native speaker, it may well result in a torrent of language from the other person.

2.  What do you think about native speaker's accent?

A:  That the accent is something distinctive of a speaker.

3.   Are there listening problems if you don't have a good English level? Explain why.

A:  Yes, because there are some skills needed to be develop in order to be able to understand and reply a message.

4.   What is the listener as tape recorder about?

A:   This analogy suggests that, as long as the input is sufficiently loud to be recorded and does not exceed the length of the available blank tape, then the message will be recorded and stored, and can be replayed later but doesn't mean the message was really understood.

5.   What do you understand by listening comprehension?

A:   When the L2 speaker keep in mind what he/she is listening to.
6.   What is the problem with the tape recorder in the comprehension of the message?

A:   Is that it does not capture all the relevant features of comprehension

7.   What are the difficulties a student has in a listening activity?.

A:  That if the student doesn't have a previous knowledge or at least know something about the treaty context won't be able to use the information to solve assessments or whatever it involves.

8.   How can we avoid the difficulties?

A:  Practising.

9.   Do you think it is important to learn a second language?

A:  Yes, absolutely because the requirements of today's world are increasingly high. 

10. What does 'the mental model' listening involve?

A:   Refers to listener's coherent interpretation.

11. What do you understand by 'coherent interpretation'?

A:  It is when we combine the new information in what we have just heardwith our previous knowledge.

12. What is the effect listening has on speaking?

A:  That we sometimes reproduce what we hear.

Reference: ANDERSON, Ann and Tony Lynch (1993), Listening, Hong Kong: Oxford University Press. Pp. 267.

                    1. What makes listening difficult?


1.Clustering: break down speech into smaller groups of words.
2. Redundancy: in a conversation notice the rephrasings, repetitions, elaborations, and little insertions of 'I mean' and 'you know'. Such redumdamcy helps the hearer to process meaning by offering more time and extra information.
3. Reduced forms: reduction can be phonological, morphological, syntactic or pragmatic.
4. Performance variables: in spoken language, except for planned discourse (speeches, lectures, etc.), hesitations, false starts and corrections are common.
5. Colloquial language: learners who have been exposed to standard written English and/or 'text-book' language sometimes find it surprising and difficult to deal with colloquial language. Idioms, slang, reduced forms, and shared cultural knowledge are all manifested at some point in conversations.
6. Rate of delivery: learners will nevertheless eventually need to be able to comprehend language delivered at varying rates of speed and, at times, delivered with few pauses.
7. Stress, Rhythm, and Intonation: the prosodic features of the English language are very important for comprehension. Because English is a stress-timed language.
8. Interaction: to learn to listen is also to learn to respond and to continue a chain of listening and responding.


                  2. Types of classroom listening performance.


1. Reactive: the role of the lsitener as merely a 'tape recorder'.
2. Intensive: techniques whose only purpose is to focus on components (phonemes, words, intonation, discourse markers, etc).
3. Responsive: consists of short stretches of teacher language designed to elicit immediate responses.
4. Selective: scan the material selectively for certain information.
5. Extensive: aims to develop top-down knowledge.
6. Interactive: include all five of the above types as learners actively participate in discussions, debates, conversations, role-plays, and other pair of group work.

                                              

                  3. Principles for designing listening techniques.

1. In an interactive, four-skills curriculum, make sure that you don't overlook the importance of techniques that specifically develop listening comprehension competence.

Each of the separate skills deserves special focus in appropiate doses.

2. Use techniques that are intrinsically motivating.

Appeal to listeners' personal interests and goals, taking into account the schemata and cultural background(s). Then, once a technique is launched, try to construct it in such a way that students are caught up in the activity and feel self-propelled toward its final objective.

3. Utilize authentic language and cotexts.

The relevance of classroom activity to their long-term communicative goals.

4. Carefully consider the form of listeners' responses.

We can infer that certain things have been comprehended through students' overt (verbal or nonverbal) responses to speech. It is therefore important for teachers to design techniques in such a way that students' responses indicate wether or not their comprehension has been correct.

5. Encourage the development of listening strategies.

Most foreign language students are simply not aware of how to listen. One if your jobs is to equip them with listening strategies that extend beyond the classroom.

6. Include both bottom-up and top-down listening techniques.

• Bottom up processing proceeds from sounds to words to grammatical relationships to lexical meanings, etc., to a final 'message'. These techniques typically focus on sounds, words, intonation, grammatical structures, and other components of spoken language.
• Top-down processing is evoked from 'a bank prior knowledge and global expectations' and other background information that listener brings to the text. These techniques are more concerned with the activation of schemata, with deriving meaning, with global understanding, and with the interpretation of a text.

                  4. Listening techniques from beginning to advanced.


Each level (Beggining, Intermediate and Advanced) needs specific techniques in order to reach student and teacher's goals.

Reference: ANDERSON, Ann and Tony Lynch (1993), Listening, Hong Kong: Oxford University Press. Pp. 267.

   Microskills of listening comprehension (adapted from Richards 1983)

1.  Retain chunks of language of different lengths in short-term memory.

2.  Discriminate among the distinctive sounds of English.

3. Recognize English stress patterns, words in stressed and unstressed positions, rhythmic structure, intonational contours, and their rolein signaling information.

4.   Recognize reduced forms of words.

5.  Distinguish word boundaries, recognize a core of words, and interpretword order patterns and their significance.

6.   Process speech at different rates of delivery.

7.   Process speech containing pauses, errors, corrections, and other performance variables.

8.   Recognize grammatical word classes (nouns, verbs, etc.), systems (e.g., tense, agreement, pluralization), patterns, rules and elliptical forms.

9.   Detect sentence constituents and distinguish between major and minor constituents.

10. Recognize that a particular meaning may be expressed in different grammatical forms.

11. Recognize cohesive devices in spoken discourse.

12. Recognize the communicative functions of utterances, according to situations, participants, goals.

13. Infer situations, participants, goals using real-world knowledge.

14. From events, ideas, etc., describd, predict outcomes, infer links and connections between events, deduce causes and effects, and detect such relations as main idea, supporting idea, new information, given information, generalization, and exemplification.

15. Distinguish between literal and implied meanings.

16. Use facial, kinesic, body language, and other nonverbal clues to decipher meanings.

17. Develop and use a battery of listening strategies, such as detecting key words, guessing the meaning of words from context, appeal for help and signaling comprehension or lack thereof.

Reference: ANDERSON Ann and Tony Lynch (1993), Listening, Hong Kong: Oxford University Press. Pp. 267.

READING

Planning Reading Lessons.

  

      Guidance before Reading.

1.    Providing a reason for reading.

‘Reading for relevance.’

The reason for reading does not have to be a simulated ‘real life’ reason: it can also be the completion of a task, and if the task is mind-engaging, this can be just as motivating.

2.    Introducing the text.

The commonest faults in an introduction are these:

·         It is too long.

·         It gives away too much of the content of the text.

·         It is irrelevant.

·         It is monologue by the teacher with no student involvement.

It should not include anything the students can find out from the text, either directly or by inference. If it does, you are doing their work for them.

Agood rule: Never say anything yourself if a student could say it for you. The best instructions are the ones that the teacher mostly draws out from the students.

To sum up, a good introduction has these qualities:

·         It makes the students want t oread the text.

·         It helps the students to relate the text to their own experience, aims, interests.

·         It involves the students actively, for example by means of questions or discussion.

·         It does not tell the students anything they can find out by reading the text.

·         It is usually short.

3.    Setting a top-down task.

Detailed work on a text is more rewarding if students first get a global impression of the kind of text it is, and a rough idea of the way it is organized. This provides a contextual framework that facilitates the more detailed work that follows.

4.    Breaking up the text.

Dealing with the text in several short sections instead of all at once.

·         Advantages

It is easier to work thoroughly on a short section than on a complete text. Locating words and sentences for comment is quicker. The new language can be dealt with section by section, in digestible portions.

It is easier to hold student’s interest if you deal with one section fully and then move on to a fresh one.

It is easy to vary the approach, using silent reading for some sections, practising skimming with others, reading aloud a difficult section yourself, and so on.

Interpretation becomes steadily easier as it builds on the understanding of earlier sections. You can also encourage prediction by asking what the writer is likely tos ay in the next section, what will happen next, etc.

·         How to break up the text.

You can divide the text arbitrarily if there are no natural boundariesin it. For elementary students, sections of four or five lines are long enough. Aim at sections of up to 20 lines with fairly advanced students.

·         Identifying learning points in the text.

Having decided where to break up the text, you must decide three more things:

1.    What is important in this part of the text?

2.    What problems are the students likely to have in understanding this part well enough to see what it contributes to the whole?

3.    How am I going to help the students tackle the predicted problems, and any others that emerge in the course of the lesson?

·         Working with the whole text.

First, it is not always necessary to study every section closely. Second, time must be allotted for working with the whole, even if some sections are dealt with less thoroughly than you would like.

5.    Dealing with new language.

Not teaching all the new language beforehand: helping the students to use the context as a guide to interpreting some of the new language; and practising new ítems after reading, not before, in most cases.

There are often oppotunities for presenting key language ítems during your introduction to the text: this is more effective than presenting them in isolation.

6.    Asking signpost questions (SPQ).

Its purpose is not to test but to guide the readers, directing their attention to the important points in the text, preventing them from going off along a false track.

An obvious danger is that students will look only for the anwswer to the SPQ  and not read the rest of the text carefully. To avoid this:

·         Make sure students know there will be a lot more questions when they have finished reading.

·         Make sure the SPQ cannot be answered until the whole of the section has been read.

·         Devise SPQs that require students to think about the meaning, not just locate information.

      Guidance while reading is under way.

The way you organize the class determines this, but you can vary the organization, and thus vary the way guidance is provides.

Three broad models of class organization:

a.    The individual mode: each student works on his own for much of the time.

b.    The teacher-centred class: the class works with one text; the way it is tackled is controlled largely by the teacher, who decides the sequence of work, sets tasks, checks learning and tries to ensure that every student participates.

c.    Groupwork: the efoort to understand the text is made jointly.

d.    Combining modes: being with individual reading, move on to groupwork and end with a teacher-centred feedback phase. This is ruled out only when a fully individualized programme is operating.

      Guidance from the text: the individualized approach.

a.    Self-access systems: a completely individualized system needs a very wide range and a large number of texts, each with its own guidance material.

b.    Presenting a text supporting material

      Guidance from the teacher: the whole class approach.

Advantages:

·         It is possible to look at the text in much closer detail when working orally

·         The questions you ask and the points you pursue in face-to-face interaction respond more sensitively to the student’s needs than is possible if they have to be written down beforehand.

      Guidance from fellow students: the group approach.

Worksing in groups makes it possible for students to help one another and, in successful groups, the interaction achieves far more than individuals can working on their own.

·         Organizing groups.

o   Groups should not be large.

o   Each group should sit in closed circle or square, not in a line or straggle; it is more difficult to leave people out if they are facing each other.

·         Mixed ability or streamed groups?

o   In mixed groups, weaker students may benefit from the presence of stronger classmates, but may not participate confidently.

·         The teacher’s role in groupwork.

o   While the groups are working, your job is mainly to be available for consultation.

·         Planning group tasks.

o   The tasks must be explicit so that there is no doubt about what has to be done.

o   A task must specify exactly what is to be done, engage every member of the group and promote vigorous discussion.

·         Worksheets and aswer sheets.

o   A simple and effective way to control groupwork is a worksheet setting out the tasks in the  order they are to be done.

      Guidance when reading has been completed.

The work to be done at this stage may include some of the following:

·         Eliciting a personal response from the readers.

·         Linking the content with the reader’s experience/knowledge.

·         Considering the significance of the text in the book from which it is taken.

·         Establishing the connection with other work in the same field.

·         Suggesting practical applications of theories or principles.

·         Working out the implications for research/ policy/ theory, etc, of the ideas or facts in the text.

·         Drawing comparisons/ contrasts between facts, ideas, etc in this text and others.

·         Recognizing/ discussing relationships of cause and effect.

·         Ascertaining chronological sequence.

·         Tracing the development of thought/ argument.

·         Distinguishing fact from opinión.

·         Weighing evidence.

·         Recognizing bias.

·         Discussing/ evaluating characters, incidents, ideas, arguments.

·         Speculating about what had happened before or would happen after the story; or about motives, reasons, feelings, if these are unexpressed.

 Reference: NUTTALL, Chistine (2004) 'Teaching Reading Skills in a foreign language.' Ed. Macmillan. Honk Kong. Pp 282.

Reading: is a constant process of guessing, and what one brings to the text is often more important that what one finds in it. This is why students should be taight to use what they know to understand unknown elements.

Reading process:

Models of reading:

• Top-down: the reader sees the text as a whole and relates it to his own knowledge/ experience.
• Bottom-up: the reader builds up a meaning from the black marks on the page: recognizing letters and words, working out sentence structures. He must scrutinize the vocabulary and syntax to make sure he has grasped the plane sense correctly.
• Interactive: the reader continually shifts from one model to another.

Reading skills:

1.   Recognising words and phrases in English script.

2.  Using one's own knowledge of the outside world to make predictions about and interpret a text.

3.   Retrieving information stated in the passage.

4.   Distinguishing the main ideas from subsidiary information.

5.   Deducing the meaning and use of unknown words; ignoring unknown words / phrases  that are redundant.

6.   Understanding the meaning and implications of grammatical structures.

7.   Recognising discourse markers.

8.   Recognising the function of sentences -even when not introduced by discourse markers.

9.   Un derstanding relations within the sentence and the text.

10. Extracting specific information for summary or note taking.

11. Skimming to obtain the gist, and recognise the organisation of ideas within the text.

12. Understanding implied information and attitudes.

13. Knowing how to use an index, a table of contents, etc. Understanding layout, use of headings, etc.

Referece:  WILLIS, Jane (1981). 'Teaching English through English.' Ed. Longman. Edinburgh. Pp. 192

Reading Strategies.

HOW WORDS ARE LEARNED?

How important is vocabulary?

• Without grammar very little can be conveyed, without vocabulary nothing can be conveyed (linguist David Wilkins).
• 'Vocabulary acquisition is the largest and most important task facing the language learner' (Swan and Walter).
• Important: communicative approach, lexical syllabus, lexical chunks and corpus linguistics.

What does it mean 'to know a word'?

At the most basic level, knowing a word involves knowing: its form and its meaning.

• The form of the word tells you nothing about its meaning.

We need to distinguish between receptive knowledge and productive knowledge. Receptive knowledge exceeds productive knowledge and generally -but not always- precedes it. That is, we understand more words than we utter, and we usually understand them before we are capable of uttering them.

How is vocabulary learned?
In learning their first language the first words that children learn are typically those used for labelling (mapping words on to concepts).

• Vocabulary requires not only labelling but categorising skills.
• Common words can be replaced by superordinate terms.
• Process of network building (constructing a complex web of words, so that items are interconnected).
• The degree of semantic overlap between words in different languages can vary a lot. This is often a cause of lexical errors.
• Many cross-language errors are due to what are known as false friends (words that may appear to be equivalent, but whose meanings do not in fact correspond). Generally speaking, however, languages that share words with similar forms (called cognates) have many more real friends than false friends.
• As well as false and real friends, there are strangers: words that have no equivalent in the L1 at all, since the very concept does not exist in the learner's lexicon.
• By analogy with false friends, real friends and strangers, it may be the case that, for a good many second language learners, most of the words in their L2 lexicon are simply acquaintances. They have met them, they know them by name, they even understand them, but they will never be quite as familiar to them as their mother tongue equivalents.

How many words does a learner need to know?
Potential size of the lexicon: an educated native speaker will probably have a vocabulary o f around 20, 000 words. Most adult second language learners, however, will be lucky to have acquired 5, 000 word families even after several years of study.
It has been calculated that a classroom learner would need more than eighteen years of classroom exposure to supply the same amount of vocabulary input that occurs in just one year in natural settings.

• Grammar: also problematic is the grammar associated with the word, especially if this differs from that of its L1 equivalent.
• Meaning: when two words overlap in meaning, learners are likely to confuse them. Words with multiple meanings, can also be troublesome for learners. Having learned one meaning of the word, they may be reluctant to accept a second, totally different, meaning. Unfamiliar concepts may make a word difficult to learn. Thus, culture-specific items such as words and expressions associated with the game cricket will seem fairly opaque to most learners and are unlikely to be easily learned.
• Range, connotation and idiomaticity: words that can be used in a wide range of contexts will generally be perceived as easier than their synonims with a narrower range. Words that have style constraints, such as very informal words, may cause problems. Words or expressions that are idiomatic will generally be more difficult than words whose meaning is tranparent. It is their idiomaticity, as well as their syntactic complexity, that makes phrasal verbs so difficult.

What kind of mistakes do learners make?

Words errors are categorised into two majors types: form-related and meaning-related.

Form-related errors include mis-selections, misformations, and spelling and pronunciation errors. A mis-selection is when an existing word form is selected that is similar in soun or spelling to the correct form.

Misformations often result from misapplying word formation rules, pruduce non-existent words. Sometimes these misformations will show a clear influence from the learner's mother tongue.

Spelling mistakes result from the wrong choice of letter (shell for shall), the omission of letters (studing dor studying), or the wrong order of letters (littel for little). Pronunciation errors may result from the wrong choice of sound (leave for live), addition of sounds (eschool for school), omission of sounds (poduk for product) or misplaced word stress (comFORtable for comfortable).

Meaning-related errors typically occur when words that have similar or related meanings are confused and the wrong choice is made. Meaning-related wrong-choice errors may derive from the learner's L1, where the meaning of an L1 word may not exactly match its L2 equivalent.

Learners may also be unaware of the different connotations of related words, causing wrong-choice errors.

What are the implications for teaching?

What then are the implications of these findings for the teaching of vocabulary?

• Learners need tasks and strategies to help them organise their mental lexicon by building networks of associations- the more the better.
• Teachers need to accept that the learning of new words involves a period of 'initial fuzziness'.
• Learners need to wean themselves off a reliance on direct translation from their mother tongue.
• Words need to be presented in their typical contexts, so that learners can get a feel for their meaning, their register, their collocations, and their syntactic environments.
• Teaching should direct attention to the sound of new words, particularly the way they are stressed.
• Learners should aim to build a threshold vocabulary as quickly as possible.
• Learners need to be actively involved in the learning of words.
• Learners need multiple exposures to words and they need to retrieve words from memory repeatedly.
• Learners need to make multiple decisions about words.
• Memory of new words can be reinforced if they are used to express personally relevant meanings.
• Not all the vocabulary that the learners need can be 'taught': learners will need plentiful exposure to talk ans text as well as training for self-directed learning.