Issues in development of listening skills

The Process of Listening Comprehension

Listening comprehension is regarded theoretically as an active process in which individuals concentrate on selected aspects of aural input, form meaning from passages, and associate what they hear with existing knowledge. Cognitive psychology defines comprehension as information processing. Schemata are the guiding structures in the comprehension process. The schema is described by Rumelhart (1980, p. 34) as ―a data structure for representing the generic concepts stored in memory. It can be used to represent our knowledge about all concepts: those underlying objects, situations, events, sequences of events, actions and sequences of actions. According to the cognitive comprehension theory, ―schema‖ means an abstract textual structure that the listener uses to make sense of the given text.⁹ The listener makes use of linguistic and situational cues and also the expectations he/she has about the new input to evoke schemata. When a schema has been evoked, it will become a guiding structure in comprehension. If the incoming information is matched with the schema, then the listeners have succeeded in comprehending the text; if they are not compatible, either the information or the schema will be discarded or modified. The principle of schema leads to two fundamental modes of information processing: bottom-up processing and top-down processing. These two processing intersect to develop an interactive processing. Thus, models for listening process fall into three types. Bottom-up processing (the first type of models) is activated by the new incoming data. The features of the data pass into the system through the best fitting, bottom-level schemata. Schemata are hierarchically formed, from the most specific at the bottom to the most general at the top. It acknowledges that listening is a process of decoding the sounds, from the smallest meaningful units (phonemes) to complete texts. Thus, phonemic units are decoded and connected together to construct words, words are connected together to construct phrases, phrases are connected together to construct utterances, and utterances are connected together to construct complete, meaningful text. That is to say, meaning is arrived at as the last step in the process. A chain of incoming sounds trigger schemata hierarchically organized in a listener‘s mind— the phonological knowledge, the morphological knowledge, lexical and syntactical knowledge (syntactical knowledge aids to analyze the sentence structure). Thus, the listener makes use of ―his knowledge of words, syntax, and grammar to work on form‖ in the bottom-up processing (Rubin, 1994, p. 210). This process is closely associated with the listener‘s linguistic knowledge. However, bottom-up processing has its weak points. Understanding a text is an interactive process between the listener‘s previous knowledge and the text. Efficient comprehension that associates the textual material with listener‘s brain doesn‘t only depend on one‘s linguistic knowledge.¹⁰
Top-down processing (the second type) is explained as employing background knowledge in comprehending the meaning of a message. Carrell and Eisterhold (1983) point out that in top-down processing, the system makes general predictions based on ―a higher level, general schemata, and then searches the input for information to fit into these practically satisfied, higher order schemata‖. In terms of listening, the listener actively constructs (or reconstructs) the original meaning of the speaker employing new input as clues. In this reconstruction process, the listener employs prior knowledge of the context and situation within which the listening occurs to understand what he/she hears. Context and situation involve such things as knowledge of the topic at hand, the speaker or speakers, and their correlation with the situation, as well as with each other and previous events.¹¹ We must realize if the incoming information the listener hears is unfamiliar to him, it can‘t evoke his schemata and he can only depend heavily on his linguistic knowledge in LC. Besides, although the listener can trigger a schema, he might not have the suitable schema expected by the speaker. Thus, only relying on top-down processing may result in the failure of comprehension (p. 557).¹²
The interactive processing (the third type) overcomes the disadvantages of bottom-up processing and top-down processing to augment the comprehension. In the early 1980s, it was the tendency that only top-down processing was acknowledged to improve L2 (second language) listening comprehension. However it is now more generally accepted that both top-down and bottom-up listening processing should be combined to enhance LC. Complex and simultaneous processing of background knowledge information, contextual information and linguistic information make comprehension and interpretation become easy. When the content of the material is familiar to the listener, he will employ his background knowledge at the same time to make predictions which will be proved by the new input. As opposed with this, if the listener is unfamiliar with the content f the listening text and deficient in language proficiency, he can only depend on his linguistic knowledge, especially the lexical and syntactical knowledge to make sense of the information. From the cognitive perspective, Anderson (1985) elaborates that comprehension consists of perception, parsing and utilization. Perceptual processing is the encoding of the acoustic or written message. In listening, this covers chunking phonemes from the continuous speech stream (Anderson, 1985, p. 37). During this stage, an individual pays close attention to input and the sounds are stored in echoic memory. While the input is still in echoic memory, some initial analysis of the language code may start, and encoding processes may transform some of the input into meaningful representations (Anderson, 1985).¹³ It seems probable that the same factors in perceptual processing that attend to auditory material excluding other competing stimuli in the environment also attend selectively to certain key words or phrases that are important in the context, attend to pauses and acoustic emphases that may offer clues to segmentation and to meaning, or attend to contextual elements that may fit with or support the interpretation of meaning such as the listener‘s goals, expectations about the speaker‘s purpose, and the type of speech interaction contained (for example, a conversation or a lecture). In the second LC process— parsing, words are converted into a mental representation of the combined meaning of these words. The basic unit of LC is a proposition (Anderson, 1985).
Complex propositions may be differentiated into simpler propositions that can be regrouped by the listener to produce new sentences whose basic meaning does not alter. Therefore, through parsing, a meaning-based representation of the original sequence of words can be stored in short-term memory; this representation is an abstraction of the original word sequences but can be employed to reproduce the original sequences or at least their planned meaning. The size of the unit or segment (or ―chunk‖) of information processed will rely on the learner‘s knowledge of the language, general knowledge of the topic, and how the information is presented. The main clue for segmentation in LC is meaning, which may be represented syntactically, semantically, phonologically, or by any combination of these. Second language listeners may have some trouble in understanding language spoken at typical conversational rates by native speakers if they are unfamiliar with the rules for segmentation, even though they may comprehend individual words when heard separately. Findings from research with second language learners show that memory span for target language input is shorter than for native language input (Call, 1985). Complex input materials may be especially difficult to comprehend in a second language because they need combining of parsed segments in the process of comprehension, thus putting an extra burden on STM (short-term memory) which already may be burdened with un-encoded elements of the new input. The third process, utilization, is composed of associating a mental representation of the auditory meaning with existing knowledge. Existing knowledge is retained in long-term memory as propositions or schemata. Connections between the new input meaning and existing knowledge take place through spreading activation in which knowledge in LTM (long-term memory) is activated so that it is associated with the new meanings in STM. Comprehension occurs when input and knowledge are matched with each other. Perception, parsing and utilization stand for different levels of processing. Of the three levels of processing, perception is the lowest. All three phases are recursive and connected closely, and can occur simultaneously during a single listening event.¹⁴ Coakley & Wolvin (1986) suggest that listening comprehension in a L2 (second language) is the process of receiving, focusing attention on, and assigning meaning to aural stimuli. It includes a listener, who brings prior knowledge of the topic, linguistic knowledge and cognitive processes to the listening task, the aural text, and the interaction between the two.¹⁵ Farris (1998) regards listening comprehension as a process by which students actively form a mental representation of an aural text according to prior knowledge of the topic and information found within.¹⁶

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