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Towards integrating television materials into english teaching and learning at the national university of Rwanda: an exploratory case study of the second year english course

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par Pravda Mfurankunda
University of the Western Cape, Cape Town - Masters in Education 2005
  

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2.5.2. Listening skills.

Concerning listening skills, the current approaches to language teaching advocate integrated skills in the classroom. That is to say listening and speaking should not be separated from each other. Instead they should be integrated, that is reciprocal listening should be encouraged in order to allow learners to interact with the input and thus enhance comprehension.

Anderson & Lynch (1991:4) provide us with a situation where people can be faced with an unfamiliar listening environment with limited language proficiency. In this case, the sort of difficulty they have to cope with is predictable. Firstly, it shows that listening skills are as important as speaking skills; we cannot communicate face-to-face unless the two types of skill are developed in tandem. Secondly, another thing about listening is that under many circumstances, it is a reciprocal skill. Anderson and Lynch make this point in the following words:

We cannot practice listening in the same way as we can rehearse speaking, or at least the part of speaking that has to do with pronunciation, because we usually predict what we will have to listen to (1991: 4).

2.5.2.1. Interactional and transactional functions of language

Interactional uses of language are those in which the primary purposes for communication are social. Richards (1990:54) explains that the emphasis is on creating harmonious interactions between participants rather than on communicating information whereas transactional functions of language are those in which language is being used primarily for communicating information. They are message oriented rather than listener oriented (1990:55). As stated by Brown and Yule cited in Richards (1990:56) examples of transactional uses of the language range from several aspects such as news broadcasts, lectures, etc. Briefly, Richards concludes that language in its interactional functions is needed to interact with the teacher and peers while accomplishing class tasks, and language in its transactional functions is needed in order to acquire new skills, assimilate new information, and construct new concepts. (1990:56-57).

In short, as the visual element is the focus in this study, its importance in listening comprehension is vital. Hence, Kellerman (1990) cited in Kilfoil and Van der Walt (1997) indicates the importance of visual information for listening, because language learners are particularly dependent upon visual context for spoken information, in the sense that they need all the help they can get to make sense of the sounds coming at them (1997:150). In fact, from the association of both visual and verbal input television materials supply, students are able to develop effective listening strategies. These as Miro (1998:1) recommends, enable learners to do what native speakers would do: that is, to take a top-down approach to listening, by making inferences from what they hear. Top-down and bottom-up processing are explained below.

2.5.2.2. Top-down and bottom-up processing

To begin with, two listening processes are central to any theory of listening comprehension as Richards (1990:50) puts it. These distinct kinds of processes are referred to as `bottom-up' and `top-down' processing. Bottom-up processing concerns the use of incoming data as a source of information about the meaning of a message (1990:50). He furthers his discussion and argues that:

From this perspective, the process of comprehension begins with the message received, which is analysed at successive levels of organization- sounds, words, clauses, and sentences- until the intended meaning is arrived at. Comprehension is thus viewed as a process of decoding.

Regarding top-down processing, this deals with the use of background knowledge in understanding the meaning of a message (1990:51).He gives further details about how background knowledge contributes to easier understanding of given listening material. He states that the background may take several forms. It may be previous knowledge about the topic of discourse, it may be situational or contextual knowledge, or it may be knowledge stored in long-term memory in the form of `schemata' and `scripts' - plans about the overall structure of events and the relationships between them (1990:51). The next section deals with a content-based model to language teaching.

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