Listening Comprehension

Matt Altstiel
5/2/07
TESL 3001

Listening Comprehension

Listening comprehension is a vital language skill without which one can not carry out a conversation, understand any type of auditory media and recall some events. Therefore, Brown outlines many specific related concepts for an interactive model of listening comprehension. The <> involves the brain’s capability for short term memory and image creation. The clustering nature of speech, colloquialisms and redundancies can often interfere with this image creation since certain expressions are often take far too literally. Regardless of the language or the listener, they do have the natural ability to divine the type of speech (lecture, speech, conversation), (Brown 249). Beyond that however, speech acts involved in everyday conversation can be baffling for the listener if they are unaware or unfamiliar with pragmatics and the general speech patterns. While a small feature of my natural speech, I was informed that several expressions I used hindered comprehension. As such as I would say things like <>, <> and <>.

Based on the lesson in class and the guest speaker on this subject I knew I should incorporate speech acts into the lesson plan. Students even mentioned afterwards how helpful that type of instruction had been. For instance, I spent ten minutes sections each class on speech acts which logically build into the original lesson plan like talking to your boss, talking to your son’s/daughter’s teacher and the like. After they understood various ways to apologize and accept/reject those apologies, they were eager to use them. This led naturally to a role play between a employee and their boss in which they apologized for missing work and continued into asking for a couple of days off. The triggers I taught them to listen for that introduced a speech act helped them recall background relevant information consistent with schema building.

Another major problem for students was the difference between intended and perceived meaning. Sarcasm and humor were very hard for students to detect. Therefore, while I did try to make class any less fun or alter the way I taught too much, I did try to eliminate any sarcasm and pragmatically based humor. Instead, I relied more on general humor that students would be more likely to understand and avoided colloquialisms. Some speech acts and clusters are unavoidable, so I learned which occurred most commonly and taught them accordingly. While they may learn them through coincidence, explicit teaching, practice and being mindful of the techniques in Brown can’t hurt.