Listening Comprehension: Some Notions and Strategies
The idea that the meaning of a message is not fully contained in its words or manner of
presentation, but rather evolves from these in the relationship between the message's emitter
and receiver, is not an uncommon one. The
Louisiana
Foreign Language Contents Standards
recognize this reality in a focus statement for its "Communication Strand", where, in the 3rd
paragraph, the foundational theory for the "modes of communication" is the notion that
"meaning lies within the listener, viewer, or reader, and that within dialogue (whether oral or
written) meaning is constantly being negotiated." The statement continues "This concept of
negotiating meaning is especially important when dealing with persons of another culture or
who speak another language."
We all know that negotiating from a position of weakness is the fool's strategy. Our strength in
deriving relevant meaning in our own native language brings into play a multitude of learned
behaviors and skills, often performed unconsciously: our general and field-specific knowledge,
a battery of similar experiences, semantic parsing, querying, our notions of non-verbal
language, our previous exposure to and recognition of discrete components in the specific
communication act, our daring, our patience and tolerance for information gaps and inference,
creating effacing and replacing horizons of expectation, to name a few in this devilishly complex
node of communication assistants.
Unfortunately, we are not equipped with a fully portable version of these, and we walk into our
second-language learning experience with a nearly blank slate. We grope in relative darkness
for a long time before we realize that our ears are little more that assembly-line workers in
the manufacture of sense, that words are too often empty vessels, that morphology cannot
measure meaning, and that grammar is groundless by itself. In addition, our frustration at not
being able to grasp most of the meaning often brings a sense of intellectual resignation.
Our textbooks and other canned curriculum materials often give us a false impression of the
content-to-meaning relationship in messages, by presenting an abundance of scripts which are
not only created solely for student consumption, but which are written either to present
structures or to serve out totally reliable answers to relatively unauthentic and
decontextualized questions. Even the realia is chosen to provide precise answers to discrete
item queries. Because it is often clipped and reset (edited sometimes) on the textbook page with
little regard to the context in which target language speakers use it, it does not do nearly enough
to bring our students into the target culture.
While I do not discount the value of materials produced by educational publishers in providing
students with listening activities for which they can accomplish 100% of the goals, and in
calling students attention to the context of targeted structures, I like to think that the ultimate
goal of every student is to walk away from an authentic speech encounter with some notion of its
meaning. It is not language acquisition research, but rather common sense that dictates the need
for early practice at this. Using authentic materials in the semi-controled environment of
multi-media, where learners can sometimes play it again, provides them with the chance to
evolve their own succession of horizons of expectations and to fashion their own communication
assistants.
With patience, repeated exposure to authentic speech, successful students begin to use what they
do have to shape and transform what their ears pick up. These aids may include some
rudimentary grammar observations, cognates, vocabulary recognition, guessing and
hypothesizing from guesses, etc. A number of them are outlined in articles about strategies in
listening comprehension, listed in this site's bibliography
.
One of the things we can do as teachers or highly motivated learners is to sequence activities for
expanding comprehension, and perhaps to bring into play a variety of subdomains in which our
several intelligences can operate. A good foundational article for this is the one by Randall Lund
in the bibliography: "A Taxonomy for Teaching Second Language Listening."
My suggestions do not conform to any paradigm suggested by Lund's matrix, but they do take into
account a number of opportunities offered by the world wide web. They focus mainly on news
broadcasts. News may not be of interest to all students, but there are some important reasons
why I have chosen it.
News is an almost unavoidable consumer product, which has taken on many different formats in
order to win public attention. It seems to be in plentiful supply on the net, downloadable and
often in the slim format provided by RealAudio.
The ability to read from a French-language newspaper is part of the basic information gathering
skills expected of all foreign-language professionals, as well as of students at a certain point in
their studies (for example, and to a limited extent, fourth-semester college students). This
skill is strongly implicit in the National Standards document (Communication 1.3, in a "Sample
Progress Indicator" for Grade 12). Because of the many different things reported, newspaper
reading is a way to begin enlarging the topical variety necessary to upward movement on the
Oral Proficiency Scale. It is also gives students an extended and significant encounter with a
vocabulary particularly rich in cognates, and is itself a major resource for the study of
contemporary culture. Finally, it is authentic, containing everyday language as well as a
credible notional variety. The same can be said of opportunities provided by newscasts. I have
suggested below activities are sequentially arranged to help learners progress in the
recognition-comprehension continuum. There is no compelling reason for doing all the
activities.
I would begin by saying that learners need to think through the kind of information contained in
English-language newscasts they have heard (categories of news, order of category
presentation).
Provided the French newscast has been downloaded that day, learners can go to English-language
WWW news sites like CNN or Rueters to read the day's report. There will be enough
similarities in the international news to make the CNN or Reuters reports valuable precontact
experiences.
News from Reuters Online
CNN
Perhaps students could even listen to an appropriately short newscast in English, either on the
radio or the WWW. This will do two things: 1) It will help to shape up their idea of how news is
formatted, framed and presented (order of, kinds of news, etc.), and 2) These initial
English-language experiences will provide some of the specific content material for the
learner's horizon of expectations before encountering the French audio document. Learners
could engage in guessing which news items might show up in a French broadcast, ranking a pool
of likely candidates according to the degree of probability. One activity would be to make a
master list of key words in English (words repeated often, words germane to the topic, etc.).
Another activity might be look up the French equivalents of a small number of key words to see
if they will show up in French broadcasts. Still another might be to observe how each candidate
story is treated, and what its relative place of importance in the English-language newscast or
report is, and ask themselves how this might play out in a French-language broadcast.
Next, learners might find a French-language
newspaper on the www, scanning it as quickly as possible to determine if relevant topics
are treated. Here is a page with pointers on how to read a French-language newspaper:
LEARNING TO
READ A FRENCH NEWSPAPER
During a reading, learners should be active, looking for the same key-word vocabulary they had
seen in their English source, and noting cognates. They might also make a list of vocabulary
they have no idea about. They should be thinking about what stories appear in both the English
and French sources, and and comparing them for content and approach if possible. A final task
might be to draw up a list of words they would expect to hear in radio or television coverage, and
guess at what kind of on-sight video footage they would see on a television news broadcast.
When they first listen to the French-language news broadcast, learners should not attempt to
take in all the details at one time. With software like RealAudio, it is possible (in the case of an
archiveable download) to stop the delivery to contemplate a particular news story. If it is
streamed RealAudio, the student can stop it at a certain point and play it again. It may also be
possible to make a temporary alalog or digital recording. Learners might first identify the
subjects of the news stories and count them. If they are in a group, they might compare their
findings. Next they might determine whether the topics treated correspond to their
anticipations formed while experiencing the English-language news, or the French-language
print news. A similar activity might occur with vocabulary. Learners see if words encountered
during a reading of French print news occur in the broadcast, or they might search for the
French equivalents of key words listed during their encounter with English-language
news.
Moving up a level, learners might ask themselves if the radio presentation of each topic is more
detailed or shorter than what they encountered in either the English-language source or the
French-language print source, asking which details are missing and are missing from the radio
version or which, in the radio broadcast, are supplemental. Learners might attempt to identify
or replicate topic or summary sentences for each story, or they might write their own short
summary in French. They might attempt a title for each. Knowledgeable teachers might make a
transcription from which several cloze-procedure dictations could be made, depending on their
chosen focus. Finally, learners can attempt information gap exercises where there are parallel
(English & French) treatments of news topics, writing in English information that was missing
in the English-language stories or interpreting into French material which was absent from the
French-language story
Just a note about variety, there are other speech samples which can be examined on the radio and television link page: vocal music, several kinds of news
magazines (RFI), and an ever-expanding set of other topics.
TennesseeBob Peckham
Director, the Globegate Project
University of Tennessee-Martin
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