Focus on the Interpretive Mode: Listening and Reading

1. Focus on the Interpretive Mode: Listening and Reading pre-semester orientation August 2007

2. Four Skills: Listening, Speaking, Reading, Writing • Three Modes: Interpersonal, Interpretive, Presentational

3. Importance of Input for language acquisition • Comprehensible input or I + 1 • Sources of input: teacher talk, other students, guest speakers, interviews with native speakers, audio and video recordings

4. Think, Pair, Share Take a couple of minutes to think about the different types of listening you do in a typical day. What are the sources of aural input you are exposed to? For what purposes do you listen?

5. Principle: Focus on a wide variety of texts. Does your textbook or the materials you are teaching with provide you with a range of listening texts representative of the different listening contexts you encounter in real life situations?

6. Some parameters • Collaborative vs. non collaborative listening • Aural only mode vs. aural + visual • Pedagogical vs. authentic texts

7. Working with Audio Texts in the Classroom • Sample • Critique and suggestions for improvement

8. Understanding the Listening/Reading Process Bottom-up processing Decoding the linguistic system: recognizing sounds, words, syntactic patterns, etc. Data-driven

9. Understanding the Listening Process Top-Down Processing Drawing on schemata, background knowledge, context to make hypotheses and predictions Conceptually driven

10. Principle: Provide learners with preparation for the text. We generally listen/ read in a well-defined context and hence have certain expectations about what we will hear / read.

11. Pre- Activities • Importance of contextualization:(activating schemata) • Vocabulary preview:present key vocabulary in a context with a matching exercise) • Think ahead: discussion of questions related to topic of text • Predicting (from pictures, title, graph, key words, etc); • Hypothesizing (what might be included in this type of text?) • Providing background knowledge(cultural information unknown to student); searching for background information(send student to library, Web to get information)

12. Principle: Provide learners with a purpose for listening / reading. Listeners should know what they are listening/reading for.

13. Comprehension Tasks • Comprehension questions (give in advance) • Fill in grid, chart with information from text • Dictation, partial dictation, aural cloze (fill in blanks in text • Summarize main ideas of passage

14. Provide learners with the opportunity to listen for a variety of reasons. Intensive listening for detail vs. extensive listening for general ideas vs. pleasure listening. Listening for the gist (analagous to skimming) and listening for discrete information (analagous to scanning).

15. Provide learners with the opportunity for recursive listening. Help learners build up their comprehension skills by working with the same text several times, with each task somewhat more challenging than the former.

16. Provide learners with the opportunity to do something with the information from the text. Integrate the interpretive mode with speaking, writing.

17. Your Turn Think of a listening text you might use in the classroom (weather report, ad, interview, etc). Brainstorm: Pre-listening activities While-listening task Post-listening task.

18. Kathryn K. McMahon Director of Language Programs Romance Languages Kmcmahon@ccat.sas.upenn.edu