Teaching the receptive skills

Overview

1. Listening comprehension in a
communicative perspective

2. Reading comprehension in a
communicative perspective
 1.1. listening comprehension
• Recognising sounds, words and clauses in a
message (bottom-up view)
• Making sense of the text in context (top-down
view)
• Listeners as model-builders:
- We store the meaning but not the actual
linguistic form of messages.
- Listeners are active as they construct an
interpretation of messages using both bottom-up
and top-down knowledge.
 1.2. Types of listening
Texts
• monologues,
• dialogues
• conversations
Understand
• The logical sequence of utterances
• Turn taking
• Communicative intent of speaker (s)
 1.3. Listening is difficult?
• The type of language involved
• The purpose of listening
• The context in which listening is taking place
Also:
• Organisation of information
• Familiarity of topic
• Explicitness and sufficiency of information
• Type of referring expressions used
• Static or dynamic relationships?
1.4. Listening in functional terms
• Interactive listening
- With an interpersonal function of
establishing and maintaining social
contacts
- With a transactional function in order to
obtain goods and services
• Non-interactive listening
 2.1. Reading comprehension
• Bottom-up (outside – in acc. to Cambourne):
Print  every letter discriminated  phonemes and graphemes
matched  blending  pronunciation  meaning
• Top-down: the reader is at the heart of the reading process
(Cambourne)
Past experience, language intuitions and expectations  selective
aspects of print  meaning  Sound, pronunciation if necessary
• The Frame theory (Minsky):
Human memory consists of sets of stereotypical situations (frames).
They guide comprehension by providing a framework for making
sense of new experiences.
• The schema theory (Bartlett)
Knowledge is organised into interrelated patterns. They stem out of our
previous experience and guide us as we make sense of new
experiences. They enable us to make predictions about what we
might expect to experience in a given context.
• Widdowson:
Reinterpreted the schemata theory form an
applied linguistics perspective.
Two levels of the language:
Systemic – phonological, morphological,
syntactic elements of the language
Schematic – our background knowledge
• Two types of schemata :
With a propositional meaning
Functional level of the language
 2.2 Types of reading texts
• Genre: language exists to fulfil certain
functions and these functions largely
determine the structure of the text and the
language it contains.
Stages of the listening and reading
lessons
• The pre-, while- and post-stages
• Objectives
• Listening and reading tasks typical of the these
stages
In 6 groups list tasks typical of the pre-, while- and
post-listening and reading tasks respectively.
Compare with the other groups’ work. How are the
tasks different during the different stages?
 Hands-on
• Task:
Look through your course book and identify
what text genres are represented.
Consider reading and listening texts.
Compare to your colleagues’ findings.
Is there a difference in text genres for the
different levels?