Listening comprehension (Part II)

Abstract

In human interaction, speakers and listeners rely on a number of interactional conventions, they make assumptions about each other's knowledge and likely behaviour, and they have internalised a set of textual schemata. These phenomena are studied in linguistic sub-disciplines such as pragmatics and text linguistics, and they are obviously implicated in the decoding processes at work during LC. As such, they cannot be omitted from this survey article. Unfortunately, however, relatively little research has been carried out on their role in listening processes and strategies. We shall therefore try to characterise the nature of the problem by referring to the more general descriptions of the comprehension process undertaken by Labov and Beaugrande, and conclude by mentioning some aspects of artificial intelligence research-a field of study which has endeavoured to come to terms with the way language comprehension is dependent on cognitive schemata.

Resolving word boundaries in spoken French: Native and non-native strategies

“…In order to get around the word identification difficulties resulting from inadequate knowledge and process, non-natives might use contextual information to make inferences about the identity of lexical constituents. This suggestion has repeatedly been made in the language teaching literature (Dirven & Oakeshott-Taylor, 1984;Dunkel, 1986;Glisan, 1988;Godfrey, 1979;Joy, Lian, & Russell, 1983;Klein, 1986;Lian, 1985;Mille, Loury, & Pecheur, 1982;Nord, 1981;Richards, 1983;Smith, Packam, & McEvedy, 1986;Vanderplank, 1988). Although this suggestion is theoretically appealing and pedagogically promising, it is not yet clear whether context can, in fact, help language learners, either to understand the gist of spoken discourse or to recognize individual words within discourse.…”

“…Data for the native speakers provides additional support for the notion that the on-line use of contextual information as a guide for word recognition is highly dependent on processing skill (Yelland, 1987). In light of these findings, it may be over-ambitious to encourage language learners to use inference and prediction as remedial strategies to compensate for their imperfect linguistic knowledge and processing skills (Dirven & Oakeshott-Taylor, 1984;Dunkel, 1986;Glisan, 1988;Godfrey, 1979;Joy, Lian, & Russell, 1983;Klein, 1986;Lian, 1985;Mille, Loury, & Pecheur, 1982;Nord, 1981;Richards, 1983;Smith, Packam, & McEvedy, 1986;Vanderplank, 1988). The non-native subjects of this experiment apparently did not draw on contextual information to guide lexical processing, but rather to confirm (or disconfirm) their lexical identifications.…”

What You Don't Know Can't Help You

“…Voss (1984), on the other hand, used shorter segments (approximately 220 words) of spontaneous speech from commercial recordings in his studies of speech perception difficulties of native and nonnative listeners. Dirven and Oakeshott-Taylor (1985) focused on the problems of dialect, dialogue versus monologue, news broadcasts, and academic texts in their discussion of variation in ESL listening materials.…”

Teaching Pronunciation: The State of the Art 2021

“…The reflective listening techniques can be extended by attention to the decoding and interpretation of pronunciation as well as active listening ‘around’ the speaker’s pronunciation, that is, to other linguistic and non-verbal cues to the speaker’s meaning. Listeners would then be applying both ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’, in the sense of Dirven and Oakshott-Taylor (1984) – or ‘macro’ and ‘micro’, in the sense of Richards (1983) – listening strategies to the processing of heard speech. The flipside of this orientation requires the speaker to tailor communication, including pronunciation, to the expected needs of the listener.…”