Theoretical Framework

1*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 accent?

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.

1.- 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.

2.- 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.

*We also have to apply our linguistic knowledge to formulating a correct and appropriate response to what has been said.

3.- 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.

3*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.

4*An alternative view of listening: the listener 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.






EXPOSITION OF:  "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.


1.- What makes listening difficult?
Clustering: when you memorize just what speaker's saying.
Reduced forms: As redundancy, reduced forms are very common in inative conversation.


I think those are some obstacles to a good listening. There are commonly in any exercise because of the topic or any circumstance.

SUBSKILLS

Table 16.1 Microskills or listening comprehension adapted from Richards 1983

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 Pric

SUMMARY 

PLANING READING LESSONS        

Creating a climate in which Reading is valued, and getting students t oread more.

Some preliminary issues :  Teaching reading does not mean excluding speaking, listening and writing.  It is a question of focus: some lessons concentrate on reading, others do not.  The other skills are always needed, to provide variety, to enable the students to learn effectibely or to give you feedback.

The need for a flexible programme: Different texts need different treatment and cannot all be  handled within a single framework.  Moreover, to explore a specific strategy, such as detecting presuppositions, we might use several texts, none of them studied very thoroughly.  Some skills may be practiced by referring to whole books, a few even by studying sentences.

Planning a text-based lesson:  The first step is to find out what potential the text offers; we shall return to this shortly.

Activities for a text-based lesson: Practice General reading efficiency: skimming, scanning, rapid learning, use of reference apparatus.

Global or detailed study?

Global understanding: that is, to understand the text as a whole and relate it to personal experience, other sources of knowledge, other texts and so on.  It is logical to suppose that we must understand the parts before we can understand the whole, but we know that comprehension do not work so tidily.

All this implies that we should begin by using a top-down approach and later switch between the two approaches, as each kind of interpretation supports the other according to the needs of the moment.

Reading as making hypothesis

Readers can often produce a reasonable hypothesis about a text after skimming it, by using a top-down approach.  This means that a lesson can start on a positive note:  ‘What do we know about this text? So what do you think its message is likely to be?

You can start by asking for hypothesis based on the title, or on a skim through the whole text. Do not confirm or reject the students’.  If they have different views, point out that subsequent reading can focus on establishing which is most accurate; return to them later, when bottom-up work has progressed far enough.

Accuracy and overall message: Work on a text normally culminates in response to the overall message. Sometimes this should be done without much detailed interpretatiton, to give practice in using top-down strategies and ignoring trivial difficulties.  To do this safely students must judge whether a difficulty is trivial or not by determining how far it obscures the overall message.

Assesing the learning potential of a text: Most texts offer opportunitites for practicing some of the reading skills we have discussed.  This of course contributes to an understanding of each particular text, but when you ask students to scan for a piece of information, or infer the meaning of an unknown word, or work out what evidence there is of biased reporting, they should be made aware of the skills involved, so that they can apply them to other texts.  Both aspects need to be kept in mind.

Guidance before reading

1.-  Providing a reason for reading

2.-  Introducing the text

3.-  Setting a top-down task

4.-  Breaking up the text

5.-  Dealing with new language

6.-  Asking signpost questions

Providing a reason for reading:  it is not practicable for the students to choose their own texts.  Having to read texts chosen by somebody else raises the issue: why should the students want to read this?

In real life, we read for a purpose that influences the way we read.

Introducing the text: it is often helpful to introduce a text before starting work on it, but the wrong kind of introduction is worse than none at all.  The commonest  faults in an introduction are these:

·         It is too long

·         It gives away too much of the content of the text

·         It is irrelevant (and thus confusing rather than helpful, since it sets up misleading expectations)

·         It is a monologue bye the teacher with no student involvement.

A lengthy introduction takes up valuable time and is also likely to give away too much of the content of the text.  Have a look at the tasks you want to set.

Setting a top-down task:  Detailed work on a text is more rewarding if students first get a global impression of the kind of text is, and a rough idea of the way it is organized.  This provides a contextual framework that facilitates the more detailed work that follows.

You might for example start by asking for predictions about the text based on the title or an illustration.

If you don’t think your students are ready to embark on work related to the whole text, you can still start work on each section of the text by giving a global activity relating to that section.

Breaking up the text:  A long text is daunting to readers who are not very skilled or speedy.  When you ask the class to read it silently, the slower students feel inadequate while the faster ones finish long before the time allowed, becoming bored and restless.

You cannot change the fact that some people read better than others, but you can reduce the effects of the differences by dealing with the text in several short sections instead of all at once.

Advantages of breaking up the text:  The new language can be dealt with section by section, in digestible portions.  And it gives you a simple way of dividing the work if you need several periods for it.

Thorough understanding of the first section helps students to interpret the second; interpretation becomes steadily easier as it builds on the understanding of earlier sections.

How to break up the text: You can divide the text arbitrarily if there are no natural boundaries in it.

Identifying learning points in the text:

1.-What is important in this kind of text?

2.- What problems are the students likely to have in understanding this part well enough to see what it contributes to the whole?

3.- How am I going to help the students tackle the predicted problems, and any others that emerge in the course of the lesson?

Working with the whole text: For some kinds of work, the text cannot be handled in sections.

 

Two words of caution.  First, it is not always necessary to study every section closely, but even if you want to push students to read fast, just for the gist, it is still easier to work with short sections to begin with.

Second, time must be allotted for working with the whole, even if some sections are dealt with less thoroughly than you would like.

Signpost questions:  Questions of this kind are particularly useful when the reading lesson is based (as I suggest it usually should be) mainly on silent reading.  It is helpful to give the students a question or task  before they read.  This gives a specific reason for reading: they read more purposefully in order to find the answer or complete the task.

To avoid this:

·         Make sure students know there will be a lot more questions when they have finished reading.

·         Make sure the SPQ cannot be answered until the whole of the section has been read.

·         Devise SPQs that require students to think about the meaning, not just locate information.

READING

It is a skill to understand a text, get information, analyze.

• No independent texts
• Authentic texts
• Reading should not be separated from other skills
• Active skill
• Flexible and varied reading exercises
• Clear objectives: testing or teaching
• 
  

Reading:  It is a constant process of guessing, and what one bring to the text is often more important than what one finds in it.  This is why students should be taught  to use what they know to understand unknown elements.


MODELS-TEXT

• TOP-DOWN - Genearl idea of the text.
• BOTTOM-UP- Read with details.
• INTERECTIVE-  Top-down and bottom-up.

- Study of the layout: title, lenght, pictures and typeface.
-  Making a hypotheses about the contents and function 
- Anticipation of where to look for confirmation of these hypotheses according what one knows of such text types.
-  Skimming through the passage
-  Confirmation or revision of one's guesses
-  Further prediction
-  Second reading for more detail.

READING SUBSKILLS

1.-Basic reference and information-finding skills [e.g. title, using contents page, index. footnotes, bibliography, chapter headings and sub-headings, chapter summaries]

2. Deducing meaning and use of unfamiliar lexical items through understanding word formation and contextual clues

3. Understanding grammatical [syntactic and morphological] relationships at the sentence level

4. Understanding relationships between parts of text through cohesive devices [especially grammatical cohesion such as noun-pronoun reference]

5. Understanding relationships between parts of text through discourse markers [especially for introduction, development, transition and conclusion of ideas]

6. Understanding communicative functions of sentences with and without specific markers [e.g. definition and exemplification]

7. Understanding conceptual meaning in text [e.g. comparison, cause & effect, audience & purpose]

8. Understanding explicitly stated ideas and information in text

9. Understanding ideas and information in a text which are not explicitly stated

10. Separating essential and non-essential content in text: distinguishing main idea from supporting detail [e.g. fact & opinion, statement & example, proposition & argument]

11. Transferring information or knowledge from one context to another [e.g. from science to engineering]

12. Skimming text [surveying to obtain gist]

13. Scanning text [reading for specific detail]

14. Note-making from text

STRATEGIES

1-Efficient Reading

-Objective: infer, acquire

-Using the text effectively

-Improve reading speed

2.-Word attack skills

-Lexical items

-Active, receptive and thruway vocabulary

-infer form context

-Dictionary

3.-Reading for sense: text attack skills

-Understanding Syntax

-Interpreting pro-forms, lexical cohesion.

4.- Understanding Discourse

-Recognizing functional value, text organization, implication and making inferences.

READING PROCESS

-Pre-reading

• Provide purpose to read
• Contextualize
• Skimming the text
• Ask some questions
• Introduce the text

-While reading

• Infer words in the text
• Work in groups or individually
• Understand the general idea
• Identify some unknown words

-Post-reading

• Draw conclusions
• Opinion or fact
• Draw comparisons

TESTING TECHNIQUES
Ordering parts of a text

• ·         Order by chronological events
• ·         Logical events
• ·         By context

• Advantages
• ·         Understand the main idea
• ·         Identifying order
• ·         Recognizing parts of speech
• ·         Guessing meaning from context
• ·         Inferring meaning

• ·         Identifying order

FILLING THE GAPS

• Context
• Longer text
• Higher level 

MULTIPLE CHOICE

• identify
• Scoring easy
• Rapid and Economical
• Disvantages:
• Cheating is facilitated
• Knowledge

GUESSING WORD MEANING FROM CONTEXT

• Encourage readers to make and test predictions.
• it is very useful
• Focussed mostly on evidende

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

HOW WORDS ARE LEARNED

How important is vocabulary? 

Without Grammar very little can be conveyed, without vocabulary nothing can be conveyed.

If you spend most of your time studying grammar, your English will not improve very much.  You will  see most improvement if you learn more words ans expressions.

There are good grounds for retaining a grammatical organisation.  While vocabulary is largely a collection of items, grammar is a system of rules.

What does it mean to know a word?

We have been talking about the importance of having an extensive vocabulary -that is, knowing lots of words.  But what does it mean to know a word? At the most basic level, knowing a  word involves knowing:

-Its form, and 

-its meaning

How is vocabulary learned?

Acquiring a vocabulary requires not only labelling but categorising skills.

Finally, they child needs to realise that common words like apple and dog can be replaced by superordinate  terms like fruit and animal.  And that animal can accommodate other lower order words such as cat, horse and elephant.  This involves a process of network building- constructing a complex web of words, so that items like black and white, or fingers and toes, or family  and brother are interconnected.

They have the conceptual system that these words one with another.  Learning a second language involves  both learning a new conceptual system, and constructing a new vocabulary  network - a second mental lexicon.  L2 lexicon are simply acquaintances.

How many words does a learner need to know?

The input that infants receive is tailoired to their immediate needs-it is interactive, and it is often highly repetitive  and patterned- all qualities that provide optimal conditions for learning.

-Grammar

-Meaning

-Range , connotation and idiomaticy

What kind of mistakes do learners make?

All lexical errors are instances of a wrong choice of form- whether a spelling error  (e.g. beggening, shell ) or a suffix error (peopleless), or the wrong word altogether (hope, watching, inhaling) 
-form-related
-meaning- related




What are the implications for teaching?


-Learners need tasks and strategies to help them organise their mental lexicon by buiding networks  of associations - the more the better.
-Teachers need to accept that the learning of new words involves a period of  'initial fuzziness'
-Learners need to wean themselves off a reliance on direct translation from their mother tongue.
-Learners should aim to build a thresold vocabulary as quickly as possible.
-Learners need to make multiple decisions about words




*Learners need a critical mass of vocabulary to get them over the threshold of the second language.