Receptive Teaching Skills: 2010-08-08

WHAT IS LISTENING COMPREHENSION?

Mention one of the problem a second language learners face?

is 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.

What do you think about native speakers?

I think that they speak so fast and beause of this we cant understand nothing, and maybe they dont have the patient to understand a L2 speaker.

Are there listening problems if you dont have a good English level, explain why?

yes there are, because you wont understand nothing what is the exercise about.Also because there are some words that we dont know what is the meaning, and during the exercise we lost time just thinking but sometimes inferring can help to have an idea.

ONE VIEW OF LISTENING.THE LISTENER AS TAPE RECORDER

What is the listener as tape recorder about?

Is when the student reproduce the information but not always understand it.

What do you understand as listening comprenhension?

is the ability that the listener's use for remember the message that they received.

What is the problem with the tape recorder in the comprehension of the message?

the problem is if we can be sure that the listener has understood what was said.

AN ALTERNATIVE VIEW OF LISTENING AS ACTIVE MODEL BUILDER

What does the mental model listening involves?

It involves different methods so that students can practice their listening and they can have a bit more of this language.

Learners can know more about this, for example: pronunciation of the words, social context to have a closer look .

What do you do understand by coherent interpretation?

I understand when students has knowledge about it, and it must be clear so that they can recognize all of this and they can try understand, and they do not try to guess the information or invent some things about the language.

What is the effect a listening has on speaking?

I think it has a lot of importance on Speaking and on the others skills because student can learn better with this model and to practice their pronunciation, to improve their reading, it is so helpful because they learn vocabulary and different thing that they need in her learning about this or different language.

WHAT IS SUCCESFUL LISTENING?

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

To separate speech from non-speech sound seems a real achievement: the other parts of the process which we take for granted in our L1 - dividing an unfamiliar speaker's utterances into words, identifying them, and at the same time interpreting what the speaker meant and then preparing an appropiate reply- now become formidable tasks.

How can we avoid those difficulties?

The syntax of the utterance has yo be grasped and the speaker's intended meaning has to be understood.

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

Yes, I think it is really important, because we can learn another culture and we can be able to communicate with other people; L2 could be more important for the society if our native language is not spoken by a big part of people.

EXPOSITION: "TYPES OF CLASSROOM LISTENING PERFORMANCE"

It is helpful for you to think in terms of several kinds of listening performance- that is what your students do in a listening technique or task and sometimes they are themselves the sum total of the activity of a technique.

1.-Reactive: This kind of listening performance requires little meaningful processing, it may be a legitimate, even though a minor, aspect of an interactive, communicative classroom.
This role of the listener is not generating meaning. About the only role that reactive listening can play in an interactive classroom is in brief choral or individual drills that focus on pronunciation.

2.- Intensive: Techniques whose only purpose is to focus on components (phonemes, words, intonation, discourse markers, etc.) of discourse may be considered to be intensive-as opposed to extensive-in their requirement that students single out.

3.- Responsive: The students task in such listening is to process the teacher talk immediately and to fashion an appropriate reply. Examples include:

-Asking questions

-Giving commands

-Seeking clarification

-Checking comprehension

4.-Selective: The purpose of such performance is not to look for global or general meanings, necessarily, but to be able to find important information in a field of potentially distructing information. such activity requires field independence on the past of the learner. Selective listening differs from intensive listening in that the discourse is in relatively long lengths. Examples:

-Speeches

-Media broadcasts

-Stories and anecdotes

Techniques promoting slective listening skills students to listen for:

-Dates

-Facts or events

5.-Extensive: Extensive performance could range from listening to lengthy lectures, to listening to a conversation and deriving a comprehensive message or purpose. Extensive listening may require the student to invoke other interactive skills (e.g., note-taking and/or discussion) for full comprehension.

6.- Interactive: There is listening performance that can include all five of the above types as learners actively participate in discussions, debates, conversations, role-plays, and other pair and group work. Their listening performance must be intricately integrated with speaking (and perhaps other) skills in the authentic give and take of communicative interchange.

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.

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

What makes listening difficult?

CLUSTERING: pick up manageable clusters of words , avoid not retainning long constituents or losing the idea paying attention to every word in a utterance.

REDUNDANCY: take advanse of reduncy in conversation to pay attention just to the sentences with new information. Be aware of insertions of “I mean “ and “you know”.

Reduced forms: As redundancy, reduced forms are very common in native conversation. Reduction can be phonological (“Djeetyeet” for “Did you eat yet “), morphological ( constractions like I’ll ), also syntactic and pragmatics.

Performance Variables: casual speech by native speakers contains hesitations, pauses, and corrections commonly. Also will include ungrammatical forms, some of these forms are simple slips for example “We arrived in a little town that there was no hotel anywhere”.

Coloquial language : learners who have been exposed to standard written English language sometimes find it surprising and difficult to deal with colloquial language(idioms ,slang, reduced forms and shared cultural knowledge).

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.

Strees, rhythm and intonation: English is stress-timed language, English speech can be a terror for some learners. Also intanation patterns are very significant not just for interpreting straightforward elements such as questions, statements but for understanding more subtle messages like sarcarms, endearment, insult, solicitation ,praise,etc.

Interaction: to learn to listen is also to learn to respond and to continue a chain of listening and responding.

SUMMARY

This skill involves important things that help to the Ss to understand the message or the activity, and for this there are some techniques and exercices that are for different levels.On the other hand we have that are factors that have an influence during the exercise like: the intonation, stress of the words, that sometimes these can be a confuse for the SS.

However the teacher have to promote some strategies that can help to his students, and she doesn’t think that the Ss understand all, he have to tell them some key words that will help the Ss, not only give the information or the instructions, also he have to create a context, as well the teacher have to think in the students goals and objectives, in adition utilize authentic language and material, for example: the topics have to be interesting as well because this have to be useful for the Ss, it means beyond the classroom; applicable in the real life.

Finally there are some listening techniques that the teacher have to include in the class:

• Top down: is the backround knowledge about the topic, this can hel the student to interpret what is the topic about and predict what will listen.

• Bottom up: refers to the language in the message it means; sounds, grammar, combination of sounds, for the final message.

SUBSKILLS

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

2.- Discriminate among the distinctive sounds of English.

3.- Recognize English stress patterns, words in stressedand unstressed positions, rhythmic structure, intona contours, and their role in signaling information.

4.- Recognize reduced forms of words.

5.- Distinguish word bounderies, recognize a core of words and interpret word, 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, described, predict outcomes, unfer links and connections between events, deduce causes and effects, and detect such relations as main idea, supponing idea, new information, given information, generalization, and exemplification.

15.-Distinguish betwen literal and implied meanings.

16.-Use facial,kinesic, body language, and 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.

Brown, Douglas (2001).Teaching by Priciples An Interactive Approach to Language Pedagogy.Second Edition.Longman.

READING

READING:

Reading is a receptive skill, is metacognitive skill because it can help the students to think, make a decision, etc,they can learn vocabulay and develop the understanding, and they can learn vocabulary. The comprehension I think is the main goal for this skill, because is very important understand the message in the text.

MODELS:

The reading involves 3 models:

TOP-DOWN: refers to aspects that the student has a previos knowledge about the topic

BOTTOM-UP: its means how the readers extract specific information in the reading.

INTERACTIVE: there are a mix it means; the bottom-up and the top-down.

Finally these 3 models have to work together for processing the information.

READING SUB-SKILLS

1.-Recognizing words and phrases in English script.

2.-Using one´s own knowledge of the outside world to make predictions about and intrerpret 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, i.e.,that contribute nothing to interpretation.

6.-Understanding the meaning and implications of grammatical structures, e.g. cause, result, purpose, reference in time (e.g. verb tenses; compare: “He could swim well” past, “He could come at 10 a.m.” future).

7.-Recognising discourse markers: e.g. therefore + conclusions, however + contrast, that is + paraphrase, e.g. + example.

8.-Recognising the function of sentences even when not introduced by discourse markers: e.g. example, definition, paraphrase, conclusion, warning.

9.-Understanding relations within the sentences and the text (words that refer back to a thing or a person mentioned earlier in the sentence or the text, e.g. which, who, it).

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.

Will, Janes (1998) .TEACHING ENGLISH THROUGH ENGLISH, Ed.Longman.Edingburgh.pp 192.

READING STEPS:

PRE-READING:

The lesson plan with all the necessary things; the objectives well defined etc.
The teacher and students work together for know the previous knowledge about the reading (experience, speculating and predict).
The most important that the teacher have to do is, find an interesting reading for the Ss.
Also the teacher have to do an introduction about the topic.

WHILE READING:

If the Ss dont know words/ vocabulary they have to infer them.
May be the organization for the reading could be: individual or work group) or combined.
The Ss underline the most important paragraph or lines that were important for them.

POST- READING:

In this step the teacher have to check if the students understand and comprehend the text, so he has to ask some questions for the Ss.
The Ss have to answers giving opinions or facts.
The Ss have to answer the exercises and then with the teacher they will check them.
The reading have to be meaningful and useful for the SS for the real life,and the teacher have to take in account this.

READING STRATEGIES

1.-EFFICIENT READING:

The Ss have to understand and comprehend the text.
The objectives these involves what the Ss and teacher want from reading.
The material have to be the correct.
The teacher have to take all the resources in the text.

2-WORD ATTACK SKILLS:

It means the new words and the Ss have to infer them.
The Ss are going to learn whrn they ignore difficult words.
lexical items.
active, receptive and throway vocabulary.

3.- READING FOR PLAIN SENSE:

Understanding syntax.
interpreting cohesive devices.

4.- UNDERSTANDING DISCOURSE:

Text organization.
what is the main idea of the text; how many paragraphs are, the author etc.
Presuppositions underlying the text.
the Ss have to predict.

LAURA EDITH SANTANA SANTANA

TESTING READING STRATEGIES:

INFORMATION -TRANSFER TECHNIQUES

Another set of information for testing students understanding of text is the use of information transfer techniques, often associated with figures (as before, this term is used to cover all non-linear material such as chart, tables, illustrations). The information in a text is transferred to a table or diagram (either provided by the teacher, or generated by students). In the process the text becomes reduced and its content is presented in a partly graphic or visual form. Some teachers may recognize this as a graphic outline. The language items are linked with the information structure and the ideas of the text.

Nuttall, Christine (1996), TEACHING READING SKILLS IN A FOREIGN LANGUAGE, Edit.Macmillan Heinemann.UK.p.224.

LAURA EDITH SANTANA SANTANA.

TESTING TECHNIQUES
Ordering parts of a text