Reconceptualizing language teaching: an in-service teacher education course in uzbekistan

SECTION 4.2
Listening and Communicative Competence 
“When people listen – whether they are listening to a 
lecture, a news broadcast, or a joke, or are engaging in a 
conversation – they are listening to a stretch of discourse. 
... good listeners make use of their understanding of the 
ongoing discourse or co-text (i.e., they attend to what has 
already been said and predict what is likely to be said next” 
(Celce-Murcia & Olshtain, 2000, pp. 102-3).
INTRODUCTION
Listening within Grammar Translation Method (GTM) classes in Uzbeki-
stan has been an activity within which purely linguistic features such as 
phonetics (i.e., whether one pronounces sounds correctly), grammar (e.g., 
whether tenses are used properly), semantics (i.e., whether one can trans-
late what is heard within the meanings fixed in dictionaries) have been 
taught and assessed. As such, listening and the comprehension of it have 
depended upon knowing these linguistic features. With an outgrowth of the 
works of anthropological linguists such as Hymes and Halliday (Celce-Mur-
cia, Brinton, & Snow, 2014, p. 8), listening has started to be regarded as an 
activity of interpretation, and not just understanding the linguistic rules/
features. An interpretation of what is listened to is closely connected with 
the term discourse – a social event happened in a particular time and space 
within which prior knowledge, sociocultural knowledge, shared norms and 
rules as well as a certain regime of truth determine the meaning of a con-
versation. This definition implies that comprehension of a listening activity 
is closely connected with interpreting a particular discourse, and not the 
text itself. This section will show how one can teach listening via discourse 
in the context of communicative competence.
GOALS
This section illustrates how one can teach listening communicative-
ly. To achieve this goal, this section presents two classroom activities: one 
targets sociolinguistic competence, one examines listening and pragmatic 
competence.