An Interactive Model of Listening Comprehension Listening is not a one way street. It should be clear from the foregoing that listening comprehension is an interactive process. After the initial reception of sound, we human beings perform at least seven other major
operations on that set of sound waves. In conversational settings, of course, immediately after the listening stage, further interaction takes place as the hearer then becomes speaker in a response of some kind. All of these processes are important for you to keep in mind as you teach. They are all relevant to a learner's purpose for listening, to performance factors that may cause difficulty in processing speech, to overall principles of effective listening techniques, and to the choices you make of what techniques to use and when to use them in your classroom.
Types of Spoken Language Much of our language teaching energy is devoted to instruction in mastering English conversation. However, numerous other forms of spoken language are also important to incorporate into a language course, especially in teaching listening comprehension. As you plan lessons or curricula, the classification shown in Fig. 14.1 of types of oral language should enable you to see the big picture of what teaching aural comprehension entails.
What Makes Listening Difficult? 1. Clustering In written language we are conditioned to attend to the sentence as the basic unit of organization. In spoken language, due to memory limitations and our predisposition for ''chunking," or clustering, we break down speech into smaller groups of words. In teaching listening comprehension, therefore, you need to help studentsTo pick out manageable clusters of words;
2. Redundancy Spoken language, unlike most written language, has a good deal of redundancy. The next time you're in a conversation, notice the rephrasings, repetitions, elaborations, and little insertions of "I mean" and "you know" here and there. Such redundancy helps the hearer to process meaning by offering more time and extra information.
