Macro Skills: Teaching Listening

• Study notes on Teaching and Assessment of Macro Skills

Listening

• Listening involves understanding sounds, syllables, and phrases.
• It is the foundation for language acquisition.
• Students spend 50% of their time in a foreign language devoted to listening.

Types and Purposes of Listening

• Intensive listening focuses on the form of the language.
• Responsive listening demonstrates understanding and creates appropriate responses.
• Selective listening picks out important information.
• Extensive listening understands longer texts and connects ideas.

Stages of Listening

• Receiving involves hearing and attending.
• Understanding determines context and assigns meaning to words and utterances.
• Remembering recalls details to move forward in conversation.
• Evaluating assesses information to determine its veracity.
• Responding gives feedback

Types of Feedback

• Formative feedback
• Summative feedback

Listening Approaches

• Bottom-up listening decodes the text.
• Top-down listening comprehends using one's schema.

Pre-Listening Activities

• Identify vocabulary needs.
• Activate interest and motivation.
• Put in context.
• Set the listening purpose.

While-Listening Activities

• Provide opportunity for students to re-listen.
• Promote guided listening.
• Give students 'thinking space.'

Post-Listening Activities

• Responding to the text
• Analyzing linguistic features of the text.
• Integrating speaking and writing

Speaking

• Speaking includes styles and functions

Talk As Performance

• Public talk and oral presentations

Talk As Transaction

• Focuses on information and meaning, less on technicalities

Talk As Interaction

• Refers to conversations

Speaking Drills

• Repetition involves repeating phrases
• Substitution involves replacing words
• Q&A involves answering questions
• Transformation involves changing things (+/-)
• Replacement involves replacing words
• Expansion involves adding to

Fixed Routine

• Groups of words used together that are more specific than the individual words

Speaking Situations

• Interactive speaking involves listening and responding.
• Non-interactive speaking involves recorded speech.
• Partially interactive speaking involves a speaker with a live audience.

Speech Act Theory (Austin and Searle)

• Locutionary act expresses literal meaning.
• Illocutionary act conveys the intended meaning with a social function such as stating an opinion or making a request.
• Perlocutionary act is the effect of words on the listener.

Felicity Conditions

• Satisfy the speech act's purpose
• General conditions: Language is understood.
• Preparatory conditions: Authority of the speaker is appropriate.
• Sincerity conditions: The speech act is performed seriously.
• Propositional conditions: Circumstances match the utterance
• Essential conditions: There is an attempt to achieve a purpose.

Reading

Reading Comprehension

• The heart of reading

Fluency Elements

• Rate
• Prosody
• Accuracy

Reading Approaches

• Phonics considers individual sounds.
• The whole language approach teaches multiple macroskills, focusing on meaning.

Chall's Stages of Reading Development

• 0-6 years: Pre-reading (letter recognition)
• 6-7 years: Initial reading (phonological awareness & decoding)
• 7-8 years: Confirmation fluency
• 9-13 years: Reading to learn new information
• 14-18 years: Multiple viewpoints
• 18+ years: Construction and reconstruction

Eye Movements

• Fixation occurs when eyes stop on words.
• Inter-fixation involves eyes moving between stopping points.
• Return sweeps are eyes swinging back to the beginning of the next line.
• Saccades are short, quick jumps.
• Regressions are backward movements.
• Span of recognition is eye recognition of a group of words.

Reading Comprehension Types

• Lexical comprehension involves previewing and reviewing vocabulary.
• Literal comprehension understands explicitly stated information.
• Interpretative comprehension understands facts not explicitly stated by inferring meaning.
• Illustrations may help to infer meaning
• Applied comprehension requires logic or reason from the student.
• Affective comprehension uses social scripts

Writing

• Teaching writing approaches:

Controlled

• Focuses on grammar, sentence structure, and punctuation

Free

• Quick and spontaneous, not worrying about style, grammar, etc.

Guided-Formal

• Small group of children with similar abilities write together

Informal

• A teacher scaffolds individual writing tasks

Communicative

• Learning language by communicating real meaning
• Author's chair is the designated place for students to share their writing

Proofreading Symbols

• Various symbols are used for indentations, deletions, insertions, spacing, capitalization, corrections, and punctuation.

Pedagogy and Assessment

• Beneficial backwash: What is assessed becomes valued and what is valued becomes what is taught.

Types of Questions

• Referential questions expect unknown answers.
• Display questions expect known answers.

Concepts

• Audiolingualism, related to behaviorist psychology, supports language as primarily speech learned through habit.
• Humanistic approach engages the whole person in learning, not just the mind.
• Oral language development is a foundation for reading, writing, and spelling
• Cognitivist view welcomes errors as indicators of knowledge and learning needs.

Language Assessment Task Types

• Imitative tasks involve parroting.
• Intensive tasks are cued tasks to elicit oral language.
• Responsive tasks are brief interactions that test the student's ability to participate.
• Extensive tasks consist of complex, lengthy discourse.
• Interactive tasks involve long, interactive discourse (e.g., role play, games).
• Grammatical-consciousness raising is a top-down approach, while an inductive approach starts with sample pattern sentences.