Teaching Listening

Strategies for Developing Listening Skills

Language learning depends on listening. Listening provides the aural input that serves as

the basis for language acquisition and enables learners to interact in spoken communication.

Effective language instructors show students how they can adjust their listening behavior to deal with a variety of situations, types of input, and listening purposes. They help students develop a set of listening strategies and match appropriate strategies to each listening situation.

Listening Strategies

Listening strategies are techniques or activities that contribute directly to the comprehension and recall of listening input. Listening strategies can be classified by how the listener processes the input.

Dr. Stephen Krashen at the 5th Annual Extensive Reading Seminar in Nagoya, Japan.

Krashen's Theory of Second Language Acquisition by Vivian Cook

Acquisition	Learning
implicit, subconscious	explicit, conscious
informal situations	formal situations
uses grammatical 'feel'	uses grammatical rules
depends on attitude	depends on aptitude
stable order of acquisition	simple to complex order of learning

What is Language?

    Language is a system of conventional vocal signs by means of which human beings communicate.

I-  Language as System:

A language is not just a collection of sounds and words; it is also the rules or patterns that relate these to each other. Here we have the concept of duality of patterning which corresponds to the fact that every language has two levels.

a. Meaningful Units: such as morphemes which are the smallest meaningful units of language.

E.g.: cats → cat + s

b. Meaningless Units: are units that have no meaning in themselves although they serve as components to the meaningful units such as the phonemes.

E.g.: cats → /k/ + / æ/ + /t/ + /s/

This distinction between a meaningful word “cats” and its meaningless parts /k/ + / æ/ + /t/ + /s/ is important. This duality enables humans to produce a huge number of meaningful words and sentences out of relatively few (meaningless) sounds. In English there are only about thirty-five basic sounds yet with those we can produce infinity of utterances. For instance, small signs produce infinite messages. This is one of the main characteristics that distinguish human language from the more simple communication systems of other animals.

The PPP methodology for Communicative Language Teaching

In recent years, the purely "structural" approach to language teaching has been criticized, as it tends to produce students who, despite having the ability to produce structurally accurate language, are generally deficient in their ability to use the language and understand its use in real communication.

What is the "structural" approach to language teaching?  If your classroom is full of students that memorize vocabulary and grammar rules through repitition and rote learning, and are corrected for even the smallest mistake whilst speaking or writing English, then you are a champion of the structural teaching approach.  No doubt your students are learning a lot of English, but how effective and how enjoyable is this process?

An approach to language teaching has been developed which attempts to overcome the weaknesses of the "structural approach" (which incidentally is the kind of teaching methodology that tends to prevail in Asian public schools).  The new approach is based on viewing language as a combination of:

a)   Linguistic Structures          b) Situational Settings          c) Communicative Acts

This is known as the "communicative approach" to language teaching.  Communication is not simply a matter of what is said (structure/lexis), but where it is said, by whom, when and why it is said.  In short, this is basically the "communicative function" or "purpose" of language.

At the opposite extreme from the structural approach, and with at least as many flaws, is the purely "conversational" approach, where it is assumed that exposure to lots of conversation from a native English speaker will produce a high level of aptitude in the students.  Whereas the structural approach promotes accuracy and tends to inhibit communicative confidence, the conversational approach tends to create communicative confidence in combination with many entrenched errors.  Being keen to communicate and yet not being able to do so properly is almost as risky as knowing what to say but not having the confidence or practice to use it.

El Aprendizaje en el Conductismo

Los paradigmas de la Educacion

What is Language?

Language has been studied for many years and from different perspectives. Ancient Greek philosophers elaborated on its proper use and purpose, modern scholars analyzed how it is produced and perceived. Everything that has so far been said about language can be ascribed to a certain general conception of talking about this issue. There are four such different approaches to talking about language: treating it as a social fact, as natural behavior, as a mental organ, or as an abstract object.

Language as a social phenomenon was first described by Ferdinand se Saussure who claimed that providing only historical description of languages (as it was done at his time) should not be the only approach to this complex entity. He maintained that crucial information about language can be obtained from its common users, who in most cases do not posses practically any theoretical knowledge about their native tongue and yet are competent speakers. Moreover, as Saussure assumed language use reflects the contemporary structure which should enable synchronic language analysis (language used at a given point in time) in addition to diachronic analysis concerned with the past linguistic forms. The social aspect of using language, or speech was called parole by Saussure, while the underlying knowledge of linguistic structure was known as langue.

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Another view on language, mainly language as behavior partially derived from the behaviorist psychology and philosophy. Linguists representing this attitude focused on different languages used by various people rather than on linguistic universals, as they assumed that linguistic data is best gathered by observation of human behavior and interaction. Apart from that, it was assumed that meaning of sentences is not observable, thus it must be analyzed referring to introspective judgments. What follows this assumption is the definition of language provided by linguists who represent this approach. They maintain that language is: the totality of utterances that can be made in a speech community.

According to the third approach to language started by Noam Chomsky language is a mental organ. Having noticed certain similarities among languages Chomsky expressed the view that they cannot be explained by environmental factors or be accidental and there needs to be a special mental ability embedded in human brains. He defined language by means of generative grammar: a finite set of rules which would enable users to make an unlimited number of expressions. Representatives of this approach support the view that it is not particular languages that should be analyzed, but the Universal Grammar, or the mental organ that allows humans to speak.

The last group is constituted by scholars who claim that language is an abstract object as it does not occupy any space or time. Thus this view is in opposition to Chomsky’s ideas, but linguists who agree with it emphasize that the analysis of the best abstract models of language can bring helpful effects of the entire area of study.

• Bibliography

- Wiśniewski, Kamil. "Linguistics - What is language? » Język angielski online." Język angielski online. N.p., n.d. Web. 2 May 2010. .

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Structuralism and Saussure