RESEARCH

Listening

 

◈ THE LISTENING PROCESS: RELEVANT BACKGROUND AND RESEARCH 

▣ RESEARCH 

■ Garnes and Bond proposed that listeners process incoming speech by employing the following four microprocessing strategies (holding the stream of speech in short-term memory would, of course, underlie all of these): 

1. attending to stress and intonation and constructing a metrical template, or pattern, to fit the utterance
2. attending to stressed vowels
3. segmenting the speech stream into words that correspond to the stressed vowels and their adjacent consonants 
4. seeking a phrase - with grammar and meaning - compatible with the metrical template identified in the first strategy and the words identified in the third



■ Interference from the sound system of the native language. This may well favor a different processing procedure because of differences in rhythm and syllable structure, making it hard to construct metrical templates and identify stressed syllables and their vowel nuclei.



■ Lack of a sizeable audio-receptive lexicon and lack of knowledge about common collocations will impede the segmentation of each intonation contour into words or chunks; likewise, imperfect understanding of morphology and syntax will make it challenging to identify words, phrases, or clause boundaries and to assign meanings.



■ An examination of written transcriptions of an audio-recorded speech prepared by advanced second language learners at UCLA indicates that verbs are commonly misheard (e.g., thought for fraught). Personal names are often not recognized as such (e.g., down the reed instead of Donna Reed), and idioms are often misheard (e.g., more stuff and barrel for lock, stock, and barrel); both proper names and expressions are prime candidates for mishearing even among native speakers (Celce-Murcia, 1980). These are some of the errors that intermediate and advanced L2 learners make due to a lack of lexical, grammatical, and cultural knowledge and difficulties with the L2 sound system (See also Harada, 1998). In their attempts to process oral discourse, low-level learners can even misconstrue the hesitation phenomena produced by native speakers as words (cf. Voss, 1979; Griffiths, 1991): 

Uh, heard as a 
huh? Heard as up? 
hmm heard as him



■ To see what problems low-intermediate L2 listeners have with aural comprehension of English, Martin (1982) asked five native speakers of Spanish to listen to short but complete radio broadcast segments and then give close paraphrases (in English or Spanish) of what they had heard. Martin also asked them to introspect and report back on their problems. Here are two samples of her data: 

1. Original radio segment: New York. A presidential economic expert says the current recession will linger for a few more months. 
1-1. Learner's report: I understood something about one expert, economy concerning the president. I did not understand that very well. 
2. Original radio segment: Poland. The Communist government denies that Solidarity leader Lech Walesa will soon be free. 
2-2. Learner's report: I missed the very beginning. I do not know what said that—someone in Poland.



■ Noting that places, where comprehension broke down seemed to yield the best information about the L2 learners' listening strategies, Martin followed the same procedure but with longer segments, and then, in examining all her data, she found that her consultants had used two different strategies: (1) bottom-up word-level strategies (which associate meanings with specific words) and (2) top-down idea level (which deal with the establishment of a topic and help relate all subsequent meaning bits to the main idea). Her data indicated that three progressive stages seemed to underlie the listening process for these L2 learners: 

1. An initial orientation period when the listener gets used to the physical features, i.e., the speaker's voice quality and pronunciation, rate of speech, and vocabulary; this varies in length, but the listener cannot process the discourse effectively until s/he gets oriented to the speech signal. 
2. A search for a central idea begins with the listener taking in words, phrases, and clauses; these can be decoded and pieced together to form a tentative message based on top-down strategies. 
3. New incoming information is matched against the perceived main idea and the listener's previous knowledge; adjustments are made, and problems of consistency are identified, reflecting the listener's effort to use top-down and bottom-up strategies to interpret the message.



■ Experimental evidence indicates that listening practice is more critical for oral skills development than speaking practice.