Methodology

Index



 Introduction 2

 Factors that influence in listening 3

 Input 3

 Listening activities proposal 4

 Conclusion 6

 Bibliography 7

 Annexes 8































Introduction

The aim of my proposal is to reinforce the listening activity by means of a simple exercise in which students have to pay attention in thedifferent mistakes that could appear in a written transcription.
In order to do that, we can distinguish four processes in the listening activity:

1. Speech recognition: students have to recognize what they hear

2. Memory in processing: students have to understand what they hear.

3. Discourse comprehension: students must interpret some discourse segments in order to have a good comprehensionof the whole text.

Linguistics give a great emphasis in the active participation of the listener in the comprehension process by means of a computing analogy:
• Identify the information.
• Relate the new information to what you already have stored.
• File the new information.
• Use the new information as appropriate.

4. Accessing the process: there are some processing stages that candifficult the discourse comprehension:
• Noise.
• Distraction.
• Syllable restructuring.
• Syllable identification.
• Key word association.
• Linking with more than one key words
• Recognition of phrases.
• Recognition of whole utterances.



















Factors that influence in listening

Moreover, there are some factors that influence in the listening activity.These factors are the following ones:

1. Text factors
It is clear that if you talk slower and clearer and use more common vocabulary, you stand better chance of being understand. We can distinguish some features that can make a text misunderstood:
Ø The number of people spoken about.
Ø Their distinguishability in the text.
Ø The configuration of space and time elements.
Ø The explicitness ofexpressions used.
Ø The accessibility of the topic.

2. Listener factors
There are two hypothesis that explain what happens when a listener of limited L2 proficiency tries to process L2 text:
According to the threshold hypothesis, a listener has to achieve a certain level of proficiency in order to process speech properly.
The interdependence hypothesis claims that L2 performance is sharedwith the L1.


Input

It is also important to highlight the importance of input in this class of exercises. Input consist of any information students receive and have to select to do what activities demand. The main characteristics that can define input are the following ones:

Relevance
Students pay attention only to information which seems to them relevant. This fact is strongly relatedwith the purpose of the exercise; what exercise requires.

Authenticity
A good listening have to include authentic language, this idea leads us to genuiness using everyday spoken discourse.

Difficulty
As it has been said before, there are some facts that make difficult the listening comprehension. Among them we can point out the number of individuals who are speaking, the distinctionbetween them, the spatial relationship, the order of events, inferences we can deduce from their discourse and the clear information that is expose in the listening.

Simplification
This characteristic permit the accessibility of discourse to learners of a second language, that is, how a listening activity could be comprehended. Simplification is divided into restrictive and elaborate.
Restrictivesimplification is the use of simple and easy terms in order to be understood: simple lexicon, simple syntax, clear phonology, use of prototypical questions-answer or use of prototypical rhetorical patterns to give a clear information.
Elaborate simplification means the enrichment of the input. It consists on make variations in the listening discourse in order to provide students with new form...