Characteristics of spoken texts

Spoken texts are a relevant part of listening comprehension since most of our understanding depends on them or at least they have different elements that are important factors which contribute to aid or affect listener’s understanding. Spoken texts have many characteristics some of these characteristics are unique to listening comprehension and some others are shared, for example, with reading. Among these characteristics we find; phonological modification (assimilation, elision, and intrusion), accent, prosodic features (stress and intonation), speech rate (radio monologues with160 words per minute, conversations with 210 w/m, interviews with 190 w/m, and lecturers to NNS with 140 w/m), hesitation (unfilled pauses, filled pauses, repetitions, and false starts), discourse structure (lecture comprehension), and non-verbal signals.

 

The differences between first and second language listening

Although some of the factors that hinder listeners from acquiring the correct understanding, we may suppose that the processes have similar pitfalls. According to Buck (2001), second-language listening more problems arise due to insufficient knowledge of the linguistic system, or a lack of knowledge of the socio-cultural content of the message.

The differences, according to Buck (2001), are: First-language knowledge (here, there are elements that help listeners acquire comprehension automatically), Second-language knowledge (learners may face problems for developing a high-level ability of language and comprehension), and compensatory skills (pieces of information that are useful to get the most out of the messages he or she is receiving).

 

In the educational field, teachers should consider that the Listening Process goes trhough three main stages; 

Pre-listening:

Warm up (introduction of the topic and get students’ attention by using the some listening strategies and exercises that strengthen students during the next stage). 

Characteristics: Introduce the topic, use pupils’ knowledge, engage interest, encourage prediction, essential vocabulary (Noticing), set a task, tell how many times will hear, use of bottom-up activities (Bottom-up primacy)

While-listening

Listen and respond (the main part of the listening).

Characteristics: students do the task, teacher gives time to check and discuss, teachers elicits answers. 

Post-listening.

Follow-up (activities in connection to other linguistic skills can work together)

Characteristics: encourage personal responses, speaking or writing tasks.

 

During the teaching of the Listening Process, teachers should also make their students work with some of the Techniques in Listening such as

Listen and complete

Listen and correct

Listen and do

Listen and draw

Listen and guess

Listen and match

Listen and re-order

 

Real-life listening

Listening to the news, watching a film or chatting at a party are part of communicative situations that Penny Ur (1984) considers real-life listening activities and which are under a veil of certain generalizations such as purpose and expectation, response, visibility of the speaker, environmental clues, shortness and informal speech. 

 

What makes listening difficult?

Some characteristics in spoken language should be considered because of their influence in comprehension, and because they could block this comprehension in certain forms.

Clustering. In teaching listening it is important to teach how to pick out manageable clusters of words.

Redundancy. It is very common in spoken language. Such redundancy helps the learner to process meaning by offering more time and extra information.

Reduced forms. It can be phonological, syntactic, and pragmatic.

Performance variables. They are hesitations, false starts, pauses, and corrections. This part must be taught in order to help students to have a better comprehension.

Rate of delivery. It is about the speed the message is delivered and the fluency.

Stress, rhythm, and intonation. Brown says that the English language is a stress-timed language. It has to be with the syllables and the way they are affected by these terms.

Interaction. To learn to listen is to learn to respond and so on. Our students need to understand that good listeners are good responders by negotiating the meaning.

 

Listening vs speaking and reading

            In order to reach a better stage in communication, Anderson and Lynch (1988) talk about the importance that listening and speaking as well as listening and reading have. They mention that the effectiveness in communication will depend on how skilled the L2 learners are so that utterances can be considered useful aids that will support comprehension. Of course that, it doesn’t come alone.

            The process that involves listening and speaking has not reached the level of improvement that it deserves, especially because our L2 teachers may not feel very much the necessity to approach activities to the ongoing problem that our learners face while listening. Additionally, the learners hardly ever use English language as to negotiate the meaning because most of the learning processes in second language have put learners in a receptive role.

            On the other hand, the process that involves the listening and reading skills is still a complex and difficult relationship as explaianed by Anderson and Lynch (1988). In spite of listening and speaking skills start to have connection in early age stages, before pre-school days, reading starts to be part of the communication process only after the child has certain oral and listening structures and the teacher leads this child to the process in which many new written forms will be learned.

            Although there has been some research on schoolchildren to determine the relationship of listening and reading skills, the fact is that the outcomes tend to illustrate the importance of the two skills, but with certain exceptions because some children performed poorly at some of the different stages of the research that Neville applied in 1985 (Anderson and Lynch 1988).

            Finally, learners’ efficiency in the listening skill will depend in that interdependence with the other two skills already seen. They will become useful tools to achieve success in dealing with real-life listening situations. 

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anderson, A & Lynch, T. (1988) Listening. China: OUP

Brown, D. (2001) Teaching by principles. An interactive approach to language pedagogy. NY: Longman.

Buck, G. (2001) ASSESSING LISTENING. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Ur, P. (1984) Teaching listening comprehension, United Kingdom: CUP

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