Euripides Depiction of Woman

Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages, Inc. (TESOL)Listening Comprehension: Approach, Design, ProcedureAuthor(s): Jack C. RichardsReviewed work(s):Source: TESOL Quarterly, Vol. 17, No. 2 (Jun., 1983), pp. 219-240Published by: Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages, Inc. (TESOL)Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3586651 .Accessed: 02/12/2012 22:28Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp .JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [e-mail]. .Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages, Inc. (TESOL) is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize,preserve and extend access to TESOL Quarterly.http://www.jstor.org
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TESOL QUARTERLY, Vol. 17, No. 2, June 1983 Listening Comprehension: Approach, Design, Procedure JACK C. RICHARDS University of Hawaii at Manoa This article outlines three dimensions in the teaching of listening comprehension. In approach, it discusses the nature of spoken discourse and offers a theory of listening comprehension that takes into account the processes that listeners make use of. In design, it analyzes learners' listening needs, proposes a taxonomy of micro- skills, and establishes objectives for teaching these skills. And finally, in procedure, it presents classroom activities and exercise types that can be used to attain these objectives. Not to let a word get in the way of its sentence Nor to let a sentence get in the way of its intention, But to send your mind out to meet the intention as a guest; THAT is understanding. Chinese proverb, fourth century B.C. In this article, three dimensions of conceptualization, planning, and performance involved in the teaching of listening comprehension are considered. These are referred to as approach, design, and procedure (Richards and Rodgers 1982). Initially, an outline of some of what is known about the processes involved in listening is presented. This is the level of approach, where assumptions about how listeners proceed in decoding utterances to extract meanings are spelled out. The next level, that of design, is where an operationalization is made of the component micro-skills which constitute our competence as listeners. This in turn enables objectives to be defined for the teaching of listening comprehension. At the third level, that of procedure, ques- tions concerning exercise types and teaching techniques are examined. These three levels illustrate the domain of methodology in language teaching. APPROACH Message Factors Current understanding of the nature of listening comprehension draws on research in psycholinguistics, semantics, pragmatics, dis- LISTENING COMPREHENSION 219
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All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions course analysis, and cognitive science (e.g., Clark and Clark 1977, Leech 1977, Schank and Abelson 1977, Marslen-Wilson and Tyler 1980, Dore and McDermott 1982, Clark and Carlson 1982). There is little direct research on second language listening comprehension, however, and what follows is an interpretation of relevant native language research. Three related levels of discourse processing appear to be involved in listening: propositional identification, interpretation of illocutionary force, and activation of real world knowledge. The central question from both a theoretical and pedagogical perspec- tive concerns the nature of the units listeners make use of in under- standing language. Do we listen for intonation, stress, words, grammar, sentences, or some other type of language unit? Much of the linguistic and psycholinguistic literature on comprehen- sion suggests that propositions are the basic units of meaning involved in comprehension and that the listener's ultimate goal is to determine the propositions which an utterance or speech event expresses (Clark and Clark 1977, Foss and Haikes 1978). But propositions are repre- sented indirectly in the surface structure of utterances. Listeners make use of two kinds of knowledge to identify propositions: knowledge of the syntax of the target language, and real world knowledge. Syntactic knowledge enables the listener to chunk incoming discourse into seg- ments or constituents. The following sentence would have to be chunked as in (1) rather than (2) in order to identify its propositional meaning: I am informed that your appointment has been terminated. 1. I am informed/that your appointment/has been terminated. 2. I am/informed that your/appointment has/been terminated. The ability to correctly identify chunks or constituents is a by-product of grammatical competence. Knowledge of the structure of noun phrases, verb phrases, and the grammatical devices used to express such relationships as complementation, relativization, and coordina- tion in English allows us to segment discourse into the appropriate chunks as part of the process of propositional identification. Where segmentation is difficult, comprehension is also difficult. But knowledge of the world is also used to help identify proposi- tions, enabling listeners to sometimes bypass the constituent identifica- tion process. Hence, (1) below is understood as (2) because, in real life, this is a plausible reconstruction of likely events involving cats and rats: 1. and rat cat it chased the ate the 2. The cat chased the rat and ate it. The following processes therefore appear to be involved in comprehen- sion: 220 TESOL QUARTERLY
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