In the
English language teaching programs of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, neither the
British Situational Approach to language teaching nor American Audiolingual
Approach paid much attention to listening beyond its role in grammar and
pronunciation drills and learner’s imitation of dialogues. The language
learning theories of those times attributed little importance to listening
beyond the sound discrimination associated with pronunciation learning.
Listening, along with reading, was regarded as a “passive” skill and was simply
taken for granted.
However
slowly and steadily, more attention has been given to listening comprehension.
Today the role of listening and the purpose of listening comprehension
instruction in the S/FL curriculum can be one of four different perspectives. A
generic instructional model for each perspective that reflects underlying
beliefs about language learning theory and pedagogy is outlined below.
1. Listening and Repeating
Learner Goals: To
pattern match; to listen and imitate; to memorize.
a. Instructional material: Features audiolingual style
exercises and/or dialogue memorization; based on hearing-and-pattern-matching
model.
b. Procedure: Ask students to (a) listen to word, phrase,
or sentence pattern; (b) repeat it (imitate it); (c) memorize it (often, but
not always, a part of the procedure).
c. Value: Enable students to do pattern drills, to repeat
dialogue, and to use memorized prefabricated patterns in conversation; enable
them to imitate pronunciation patterns. Higher level cognitive processing and
use of propositional language structuring are not necessarily an intentional
focus.
2. Listening and Answering Comprehension Questions
Learner Goal: To
process discrete point information; to listen and answer comprehension
questions.
a. Instructional material: Features a student response
pattern based on listening-and-question-answering model with occasional
innovative variations on this theme.
b. Procedure: ask students to (a) listen to an oral text
along a continuum from sentence length to lecture length and (b) answer
primarily factual questions. Utilizes familiar types of questions adapted from
traditional reading comprehension exercises, has been called a quiz-show format
of teaching.
c. Value: Enables students to manipulate discrete pieces
of information, hopefully with increasing speed and accuracy of recall. Can
increase student’s stock of vocabulary units and grammar constructions. Does
not require students to make use of the information for any real communicative
purpose beyond answering the questions; is not interactive two-way
communication.
3. Task Listening
Learner Goals: To
process spoken discourse for functional purpose; to listen and do something
with the information, that is, carry out real tasks using the information
received.
a. Instructional material: Features activities that
require a student respond pattern based on a listening-and-using (i.e., “listen
and do”) model. Students listen, then immediately do something with the
information received: follow the directions given, complete a task, solve a
problem, transmit the gist of the information orally or in writing, listen and
take lecture notes, etc.
b. Procedure: Ask students to (a) listen and process
information and (b) use the orally transmitted language input immediately to
complete a task which is mediated through language in a context in which
success is judged in terms of whether the task is performed.
c. Value: The focus is on instruction that is task
oriented. The purpose is to engage learners in using the informational content
presented in the spoken discourse, not just in answering questions about it.
Two types of tasks are (a) language use tasks, designed to give students
practice in listening to get meaning from the input with the express purpose of
making functional use of it immediately and (b) language analysis tasks,
designed to help learners develop cognitive and metacognitive language learning
strategies (i.e., to guide them toward personal intellectual involvement in
their own learning). The latter features consciousness rising about language
and language learning.
4. Interactive Listening
Learner Goals: To
develop aural/oral skills in semiformal interactive academic communication; to
develop critical listening, critical thinking and effective speaking abilities.
a. Instructional material: Features the
real-time/real-life, give-and-take of academic communication. Provides a
variety of student presentation and discussion activities, both individual and
small-group panel reports, that include follow up audience participation in
question/answer sessions as an integral part of the work. Follows an
interactive listening-thinking-speaking model with bidirectional (two-way)
listening/speaking. Includes attention to group bonding and classroom discourse
rules (e.g., taking the floor, yielding the floor, turn taking, interrupting,
comprehension checks, topic shifting, agreeing, questioning, challenging, etc).
b. Procedure: Asks students to participate in discussion
activities that enable them to develop all three phases of the speech act:
speech decoding, critical thinking, and speech encoding. These phases involve
(a) continuous on-line decoding of spoken discourse, (b) simultaneous cognitive
reacting/ acting upon the information received (i.e., critical analysis and synthesis),
and (c) instant-response encoding (i.e., producing personal propositional
language responses appropriate to the situation)
c. Value: The focus here is instruction that is
communicative/competence-oriented as well as task oriented. Learners have opportunities
to engage in and develop the complex
array of communicative skills in the four competency areas: linguistic
competence, discourse competence, sociolinguistic competence, strategic
competence (Canale ns Swain 1980
Reference
Marianne
Celce-Murcia. 2001. Teaching English as a
Second or Foreign Language. Heinle & Heinle Thomson Learning
