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Post by Liliane Carvalhaes on Sept 19, 2016 16:46:40 GMT
Can you think of situations in which either yourself or your students experienced difficulty in listening comprehension that could be related to a shortcoming in phonological knowledge? Of course, when it come to students that do not expose themselves in listening constantly English of any kind, they will definitely have difficulty in listening skill. When a student of mine come to me and say that sometimes they can´t undestand diferent sounds, if it is an "F" or a "V". or words that can sound the same such as "Saturday" and "sad today". I feel that dificulty when I listen to a Jamaican speaking. I can undestand one word out of 10. How can successful listening comprehension be achieved in English L2? BY exposing more to the language, it would be a great alternative and that is what i suggest my students. Listen and read at the same time, can help one to connect better the informations acquired. The exercises in the textbooks that works with isolated words is a good match too for the student to mingle and work listening skills problems. Dear Priscila I also have some difficulties when I listen to a Chinese speaking english as well as a Jamaican. But once you relate to this individual or have a daily relationship with him /her (thru a job, school..) it becomes easier to understant him/her. It falls of on the same theory: repetion leads to perfection. It takes time but I think it works. |
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Yuri Wenceslau Fioravante
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Post by Yuri Wenceslau Fioravante on Sept 19, 2016 19:45:17 GMT
Yes, I guess that misunderstanding is very recurrent because of this case, mainly as I said in other forums when it comes about changing minimum pairs or if they even have similar sounds, but when have quite different meanings, leading to a problem in understanding, generating then different meanings, compromising communication.
But also, this may happen mainly if the words or chunks that were not understood are key to the messages.
Then, I guess that successful listening comprehension will be achieved through constant, guided and, whenever possible, contextualized exposure. That means that I find much more difficult to understand a live programming radio that I would have no hints about the content of the news covered, than to listen to a podcast of a show that I could read the summary of the content covered. Concerning music and videos from TV or movies, I would always recommend the use of subtitles and lyrics, understanding written language as a resource to facilitate understanding of the texts contained.
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Yuri Wenceslau Fioravante
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Post by Yuri Wenceslau Fioravante on Sept 19, 2016 19:53:06 GMT
Can you think of situations in which either yourself or your students experienced difficulty in listening comprehension that could be related to a shortcoming in phonological knowledge? Of course, when it come to students that do not expose themselves in listening constantly English of any kind, they will definitely have difficulty in listening skill. When a student of mine come to me and say that sometimes they can´t undestand diferent sounds, if it is an "F" or a "V". or words that can sound the same such as "Saturday" and "sad today". I feel that dificulty when I listen to a Jamaican speaking. I can undestand one word out of 10. How can successful listening comprehension be achieved in English L2? BY exposing more to the language, it would be a great alternative and that is what i suggest my students. Listen and read at the same time, can help one to connect better the informations acquired. The exercises in the textbooks that works with isolated words is a good match too for the student to mingle and work listening skills problems. Hi, Pri! Of course, it's a consensus that students must be exposed, but don't you think that sometimes they need a kind of guidance to know what is suitable to be listened? I myself, for instance, as a learner, I have reached the plateau effect since I was an intermediate student in 2007 and I don't feel like I have been progressing since then, even though I haven't stopped studying English. I would say that there must be a kind of grading in the level of complexity, so then the learner can be exposed to a certain kind of discourse that would provide input suitable enough to improve their linguistic and/or communicative competences. Don't you think? Cheers, Yuri. |
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Post by ariadne on Sept 19, 2016 21:50:34 GMT
From my experience, I do believe that a shortcoming on phonological knowledge can cause problems for us not only on listening comprehension but moreover and stronger on our speech, when we don't know a phonological sound we can't produce it properly and it so we tend to replace it to another similar sound we have on our native language, as mentioned by Grosjean (2010), as we believe is the same sound we were suppose to produce. However, native speakers usually will have trouble understanding us when we do so and that can lead to communication problems and embarrassing situation, for instance having to repeat a word many times, using a synonym or having to explain what we meant. Giving all of that, I am convinced that having a phonological knowledge of the foreign languages we learn is of great importance, specially if you are not exposed to it as a child. Doing so will allow us to learn the proper articulation features we must do to produce certain phonological sounds we do not have in our native language and improve our listening and, moreover, pronunciation skills.
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Post by ariadne on Sept 19, 2016 22:18:18 GMT
Concerning our listening comprehension, a very important thing I believe we must do in order to be able to understand native speakers better is listening to native speakers talking to each other or giving a speech to native speakers and follow the transcript. It help us to realize how different a word can be pronounced depending on the environment as environment has a huge influence on pronunciation of words, for instance a word ending in a vowel sound will influence a following word in different ways depending if it begins with a consonant or another vowel sound or even the same vowel sound, the same happens with words ending with a consonant sound. That has to do with the way we link words and omit some sounds due to articulation difficulty or to favor speech fluency and speed for instance. I believe that doing listening practices like this is also primordial to improve our speaking as we learn how native speakers say words connected to each other when they are in a sentence and as we mime them we learn how to do it ourselves in order to sound more fluent and natural. Plus, listening practice help us to develop better intonation and flow as well as putting the stress on the main words of a sentence as well as to soften the secondary words of it and that makes a huge difference on our speaking and helps ours listeners to understand us better. It is important to highlight how intonation and flow play a huge part on meaning, for instance we can say the same sentence giving it different meanings depending on the intonation and pauses we make, so we must do our best to get it right and not to sound rude or give the wrong idea of what we meant by a sentence.
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Post by ariadne on Sept 19, 2016 22:57:14 GMT
Plus, I would like to highlight that I do not believe we must understand each word is being said by a person in order to have a clear understanding of what they mean as we can guess the words we "missed" by the context of a conversation or lecture. Even when listening to our native language some words can escape us and that does not compromise or everyday communication, does it? Moreover, I do not think that some minor mispronunciation such as on minimal pairs is a big problem when the word in insert in a context, some words have such a similar pronunciation that even native speakers make jokes about that when a friend says a word, pretending they took it for another one, for instance the words sheet and shit, I heard many times native speakers joking about it on T.V shows as they have a very close pronunciation. Of course we must give our best to learn the difference between these words sounds but when in context it will hardly compromise comprehension, getting the right pronunciation of initial sounds of words as well as putting the stress on the correct place make is a much bigger issue, I am convinced.
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Post by Aristeo on Sept 19, 2016 23:47:43 GMT
In my opinion among all the skills that we have to develop when we are learning a second language,the most difficult is listening comprehension.Chatting with people involved in this process I realized that almost all of them share the same opinion.Even Portuguese, our mother-tongue, is a bit difficult to understand when we are, for instance, watching a Portuguese channel program on T.V. I agree with some colleagues when they mention the need of exposure and immersion and, if possible, living some time abroad to boost this learning would be very useful.To conclude,I believe that reaching a good level in English listening comprehension is not an easy task,however, with persistence it can be accomplished.
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Post by Igor Gomides on Sept 20, 2016 0:53:18 GMT
As I was Reading the chapter, I remember once when I was in a mall in the US where I could really feel the disadvantages of my accent. I went with my wife,(she is native-like fluent) and the treatment was notoriously different when I asked for something than when she did. And until I read the chapter I had never thought about the advantages of having accents. It was good to know.
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Renata Soares Veloso
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Post by Renata Soares Veloso on Sept 20, 2016 1:22:06 GMT
"Can you think of situations in which either yourself or your students experienced difficulty in listening comprehension that could be related to a shortcoming in phonological knowledge?"
I could not differentiate the "L" sound in English from Portuguese. I would drive my poor Phonetics professor crazy as I could not say "million"
\ˈmi(l)-yən\. Instead, I would say /mi.ʎˈən/, as I could not understand the difference.
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Post by Liliane Cravalhaes on Sept 20, 2016 2:01:45 GMT
Can you think of situations in which either yourself or your students experienced difficulty in listening comprehension that could be related to a shortcoming in phonological knowledge? - In fact, yes, the video you have posted in our last forum ceigroup5.freeforums.net, about "speaking Monolingually in one´s L2, the video "The Mutilingual Mind/Alexa Pearce/TEDxNYU, I almost was not understanding what Alexa was speaking, I tried over and over again to understand her better. It was awful. Is it a case? How can successful listening comprehension be achieved in English L2? - As a student, I can say that the immersion in an universe of a foreign language, I mean, if we have an opportunity to live abroad is one of the best things we can do when we are trying to learn a second language. Our perception becomes much more alert, our hearing keener and we are 24 hours listening to a different sound, new words, other references that sometimes is not possible here. I think it can help a lot. I agree with you Dayse. The immersion in an universe of a foreign language gives the learners another perspective. It becames a much easier process because , as you said, new words and new sounds can be notice when we are living abroad but not when we are here in Brazil. I believe that our listening skill gets "sharper" when we are immersed in a different enviroment. |
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Post by Marisa Carneiro on Sept 20, 2016 13:28:24 GMT
One activity that we use in the language course in which I work is the “read along”. This activity is only used as extra activities for the weaker students. The idea is to students choose one piece of listening and, at home, they listen to the track and read aloud at the same time. The intention is that students should realize their mistakes on the spot and self-correct. I really don’t know how scientifically or efficient is that strategy, but at least students became self-aware of their mistakes and I believe it helped to reduce their errors. Another strategy that I use is to teach first the sound and later the written word. Again, I’m not sure about the scienfic evidences and efficiency and I only use these strategies because is the instruction that my coordinator gave to me. However, the intention is to students get used to the sound before seeing its spelling and I believe it's worth the effort. Dear all, Vinicius touched upon a topic that is of great help for language learners: the teaching of listening strategies. A second and important point is related to decoding abilities, essential for the effective processing of the oral signal. In other words, learners need to develop their ability in matching input to their knowledge of words and their meanings. John Field, in his 2009 book, describes such process as: Decoding takes the form of a matching process. On one side of the
process is the group of acoustic cues which have reached the listener’s
ear; on the other is the listener’s knowledge of the language being used. That knowledge is stored long term in the listener’s mind and consists
of the spoken forms of words and maybe the individual sounds of the
language as well. It seems likely that it also includes chunks of language
in the form of familiar and recurrent sequences of words (just about,
do you know, should have done, anything else).There is no comprehension if there is no decoding. Contextual clues are not enough to lead to effective comprehension. Cheers, Marisa |
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Post by Marisa Carneiro on Sept 20, 2016 13:50:31 GMT
Dear all,
Listening comprehension in a foreign language involves the integration of several processes, from decoding phonemes to ultimately constructing meaning. Exposure to a variety of accents is necessary and very much welcomed, but it takes more than exposure to help learners comprehend the speech signal. Learners need to adapt to the unfamiliar characteristics of the L2 (phonology, word forms, grammar structures, intonation patterns). Decoding processes and meaning building processes can and should be part of listening instruction.
Cheers,
Marisa
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