Meaningfu

BACKGROUND NOTES FOR RECEPTIVE SKILLS ASSESSMENT

UNIT 1
The Nature of Listening and Reading

Receptive vs. Passive
Why should we call these skills receptive and not passive (as sometimes referred to in the past)?
--The receiver is an active partaker in discourse and interaction.

What are the receptive skills?
Listening and Reading

The pairs (speaking / listening) (writing /reading)

Temporal vs. Spatial skills
Listening and speaking are temporal in nature
Reading and writing are spatial in nature

Issues related to visuality and (audio) comprehension
--visual learners vs. audio learners

“Do you understand” vs. “Can you speak”
Can we expect production of the target language within the realm of receptive skills assessment?

The Nature of Listening
Differenttypes of knowledge used:
--phonology
--lexis
--syntax
--semantics
--discourse

Acoustic Input to the listener
Phonological modification is rule governed and regular
Stress and intonation patterns are just as important as individual phonemes in the sound system related to meaning
In English, intonation patterns are closely related to the structure and meaning of text.
Redundancy and sharedknowledge—language by its nature is redundant. It is full of clues for the listener to understand. Words with a high information content tend to be pronounced more slowly and carefully.
We use our knowledge of the language to replace any missing information.

Real-time nature of listening
There is a need for automatic processing, which leads to temporal tension. This is different fromcontrolled processes, which involves a sequence of cognitive activities under active control. This can be a problem for second language learners.
Varying of interpretations—this can cause breakdowns in understanding. This can be caused by background noise, distractions, lack of concentration. Interpretations can also vary when listening does NOT go wrong.
Different listeners have differentinterests, motivations, and needs.

Linguistic Features of Spoken Text
We speak/listen in idea units—not in sentences. These idea units tend to be strung together by coherence of ideas more than by formal grammar. There are many words that are used much more frequently in speaking than in writing, and vice versa.

--Planned vs. Unplanned discourse. Speech/listening tends to be unplanned (it isless polished, less prepared, it is often just a “first draft.”)

--Shorter idea units
--Tendency to connect via simple connectors (and, or, but)
--Hesitations, fillers, false starts, repairs
--Greater presence of non-standard features (colloquialisms, dialect, slang)
--Tendency to be more personal

There is a continuum from oral to literate texts

The listening situation
Situation candetermine the topic

--Degree of interaction between listener and speaker. The roles can be collaborative or non-collaborative. Non-collaborative requires more interpretation. Collaborative allows for more clarification, back-channeling, or turn-taking.

--The listener’s responsibility to respond. This involves giving signals, back-channeling

--Function of the interaction
Differencesbetween transactional language with the primary purpose of transmitting information and interactional language with the primary purpose of social interaction.

--Application of knowledge of the language
Declarative vs. Procedural knowledge
Declarative: knowledge of facts and things
--understanding words (recognizing and understanding meaning)
IMPORTANT FOR TESTING: high frequency words arerecognized faster than low-frequency. Recognition is faster if the words are in a helpful context. The fainter the sound the longer it takes to recognize the word.
--processing of idea units—it is called parsing when we figure out the relationship between individual words and the whole utterance.
--processing connected discourse—we process various idea units together since complex thoughts are...