Writing
While Listening - Tackling
the Double Challenge of Note Taking
by Alex Case
1
Students
of even a high level often complain that listening is one
of their weaker skills, usually meaning that communication
with native speakers breaks down not because they can't make
themselves understood, but because they don't understand what
is being said to them. This can be especially true in countries
where exposure to English is less due to factors such as dubbed
films or English language pop music being less popular. The
use in class of texts that test more than teach and which
are of limited interest rarely persuades students that they
want to do more of the same at home. On top of this, exams
such as the CAE (Cambridge Advanced English) ask students
to do other things at the same time as listening such as reading,
processing logically difficult multiple choice questions or
writing. Of these, the process of writing whilst listening
is probably the most difficult and the least examined in TEFL
literature.
This
article aims to examine how we can make the double challenge
of note-taking easier for our students, both by making the
lessons more engaging for them and by giving them a real insight
into what they are being asked to do. The article uses the
CAE exam as an example, but all the concepts and activities
should be relevant for any students who will need to do this,
such as students wishing to study in English-medium universities.
If none of these external criteria apply, the article should
provide some food for thought on how, or even whether, to
use the note-taking tasks that textbooks provide. To this
end, this essay will examine:
-
The history of listening in EFL
- The theory of how people listen
- Listening in a foreign language
- Listening and note-taking
- Note-taking in the CAE exam
- Practice and development activities
The
history of listening in EFL
In EFL, listening first came to the forefront in the audio-lingual
method, although this mainly consisted of comprehension and
then repeating dialogues. Things have developed somewhat,
so that now what we might call the 'standard listening' might
be considered the one that consists of: lead-in, pre-teach,
general comprehension task, detailed comprehension task, post-text
production task. More recently, but less well known, there
has been increasing talk of a 'micro-skills' approach to listening,
responding to the perceived weaknesses in what I have called
the 'standard listening' above, that 'it does little or nothing
to improve the effectiveness of [students'] listening or to
address their shortcomings as listeners'(1). These two approaches
are examined in more detail below.
The
theories of how people listen
In the most general terms, one theory of the process by which
people listen and understand is (2):
- The listener takes the sounds into their short-term memory
- The sounds are organised into constituents (sense groups)
- The listener interprets the sense, using the semantic meaning
- The meaning is stored in long term memory, the original
words being forgotten
I
would generally accept this theory. One experience I have
had that seems to back this up is finding myself singing a
song in English that is sung in Spanish! More commonly, it
is exactly in songs that people often remember whole strings
of the exact sounds even when they have misheard the lyrics
and what they sing along to themselves is gibberish- so obviously
the model above is not the entire story.
Listening
in a foreign language
The second language learner undergoes the same process as
above, but their needs can be analysed in more detail. What
a student needs to be able to understand, or at least cope
with, a text in L2 can be divided into two parts
1. Knowledge
2. Strategies to cope with lack of that knowledge
Knowledge
can be split down again into:
- Knowledge of the pronunciation system
- Knowledge of lexis
- Knowledge of grammar
- Knowledge of culture
In
terms of pronunciation, the learner will need to be
able to distinguish between the individual sounds of the language,
e.g. 'ankle' and 'uncle'. In contrast, they will also need
to identify variations on the same sound as the same thing,
e.g. cope with variations by accent. A particular problem
of English is that a word familiar in the written form might
be totally unrecognisable when heard.
In linked speech, students will need to cope with weak forms,
elision etc. in order to interpret the message. In order to
get the 'pragmatic' meaning of what is being said, they will
also need a good grasp of the intonation system. It should
be pointed out here that 'system' is used in a rather broad
sense, in that there is no evidence to suggest that any single
intonation pattern links with any function in a totally generalisable
way (3).
The
problem of lexis particular to listening is the greater
occurrence of informal language which might not might be familiar
to a student who has learnt mainly from reading. In a similar
way, students will come across grammatical features
of natural speech such as contractions, reduced forms (such
as missing off the subject) and the inevitable production
of ungrammatical forms- in part because the sentence, basis
of traditional grammatical descriptions, does not strictly
exist in fast natural speech.
Cultural knowledge a student might lack includes the
concept of 'scripts'. The evidence suggests that a native
speaker has hundreds of formulaic, stored scripts to use when
interacting in familiar situations, which help them interpret
to pragmatic meaning of what is being said (4). These vary
from culture to culture (and even within the L1 speaking community),
and lack of knowledge can lead to misunderstanding.
I
think what is most noticeable about the above is how much
work can be done to improve a student's listening ability
without even touching a tape, and how little these are examined
in traditional listening materials.
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