An Introduction to Applied Linguistics

Part 4: How I Approach Tasks
My notes and other school materials are carefully organized 
0 1 2 3 4
I write lists of everything I need to do each day 
0 1 2 3 4
I enjoy a sense of structure in the classroom 
0 1 2 3 4
Closure-oriented – Total
I gather lots of information, and then I make last-minute decisions 
0 1 2 3 4
I prefer fun or open activities rather than structured activities 
0 1 2 3 4
My schedule is flexible for changes 
0 1 2 3 4
Open – Total
Part 5: How I Deal with Ideas
I can summarize information easily 
0 1 2 3 4
I enjoy tasks where I have to pull together ideas to form one large idea 
0 1 2 3 4
By looking at the whole situation, I can easily understand someone 
0 1 2 3 4
Synthesizing – Total
I prefer to focus on grammar rules 
0 1 2 3 4
I enjoy activities where I have to compare or contrast two things 
0 1 2 3 4
I’m good at solving complicated mysteries and puzzles 
0 1 2 3 4
Analytic – Total
Part 6: How I Deal with Input
It is easy for me to see the overall plan or big picture 
0 1 2 3 4
I get the main idea, and that’s enough for me 
0 1 2 3 4
When I tell an old story, I tend to forget lots of specific details 
0 1 2 3 4
Global – Total
I need very specific examples in order to understand fully 
0 1 2 3 4
I can easily break down big ideas into their smaller parts 
0 1 2 3 4
I pay attention to specific facts or information 
0 1 2 3 4
Particular – Total

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3
Language Skills and Assessment

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Listening
Tony Lynch
University of Edinburgh
David Mendelsohn
York University
What Is Listening?
Listening involves making sense of spoken language, normally accompanied by 
other sounds and visual input, with the help of our relevant prior knowledge 
and the context in which we are listening. Rather than thinking of listening as a 
single process, it is more accurate to conceive of it as a bundle of related processes 
– recognition of the sounds uttered by the speaker, perception of intonation 
patterns showing information focus, interpretation of the relevance of what is 
being said to the current topic and so on. 
Usually we are unaware of these processes in our own language; achieving 
comprehension seems relatively effortless unless we encounter unhelpful 
conditions, such as poor acoustics or an unfamiliar accent. Under more demanding 
conditions, we may become more conscious of listening processes, and the same 
thing applies in trying to understand a second or foreign language (L2). Not the 
least of the problems we face as listeners is the fact that we generally get only one 
chance to process the (linguistic and other) input, and have to do so in real time. 
Only sometimes do we get the chance to ask the speaker to repeat or rephrase. 
Traditionally, listening was viewed as a passive process, in which our ears were 
receivers into which information was poured, and all the listener had to do was 
passively register the message. Today we recognize that listening is an ‘active’ 
process, and that good listeners are just as active when listening as speakers are 
when speaking. 
Active listening is also an interpretive process. Listening used to be thought of as 
the exact decoding of the message. In fact, listening involves subtle interpretation. 
This has long been recognized in reading, but it has taken a long time for it to 
be accepted in terms of listening. Its acceptance impacts directly on our notion 
of ‘correctness’ – it requires an acknowledgement of the inherent variation in 
listeners’ comprehension of what they hear, and of the importance of context and 
non-linguistic variables in this interpretation. 
Finally, it is important to note that listening is not merely an auditory version 
of reading, just as speech is not simply a spoken version of writing. Among the 
unique features of listening are the following:
• Its usually ephemeral, one-shot nature.
• The presence of a rich prosody (stress, intonation, rhythm, loudness and more), 
which is absent from the written language.
• The presence of characteristics of natural fast speech, such as assimilation, 
making it markedly different from written language, for example, /g
∂mmt/ for