Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

Box 7.1 Reading and memory processes
●
Knowledge of conventional situations (scripts) is important to L2 use.
●
Background knowledge (schemata) is important to L2 learners.
●
Use of ‘vague words’ hinders lower-level learners.
7.2 Listening processes
●
When you listen to something in a second language, do you try to work out
the meaning of every word or are you content with the gist?
●
Do you believe listening comes before or after speaking in the sequence of
teaching the language skills?
Focusing questions
parsing: the process through which the mind works out the grammatical struc-
ture and meaning of the sentence
top-down versus bottom-up: starting from the sentence as a whole and work-
ing down to its smallest parts, versus starting from the smallest parts and
working up
decoding versus codebreaking: processing language to get the ‘message’, ver-
sus processing language to get the ‘rules’
Keywords
Guides to the teaching of listening appear almost every year; some textbooks are
aimed specifically at listening, others include listening components. Yet listening
does not even figure as a topic in most introductions to SLA research. This section
looks first at the process of listening itself and then develops the use of listening
as a vehicle for learning – the most discussed aspect in recent years.
Elements of listening
Most introductions to the comprehension of speech stress three elements: access
to vocabulary, parsing and memory processes.

---

Access to words
At one level, in order to comprehend a sentence you have to work out what the
words mean. The mind has to relate the words that are heard to the information that
is stored about them in the mind, as described in Chapter 3. For example, a native
speaker can answer the question, ‘Is the word “blint” English?’ almost instanta-
neously, somehow working through many thousands of words in a few moments.
Such feats show the human mind is extraordinarily efficient at organizing the stor-
age of words and their interconnections. The context automatically makes particular
meanings of words available to us. To a person reading a research article, the word
‘table’ means a layout of figures. To someone reading about antiques, it means a piece
of furniture. To someone reading a surveyor’s report, it means the depth at which
water appears in the ground, and so on. Somehow the context limits the amount of
mental space that has to be searched to get the right meaning.
Take the sentence, ‘The dog was hit by a bus.’ As people listen to it, they are
retrieving information about the words. They know that ‘the’ is an article used
with certain meanings, here probably indicating the dog is already relevant to the
conversation or known to the listener. Next, ‘dog’ summons up the meanings of
‘dog’ important to this context, its relationships to other words such as ‘bark’, and
the probable other words that contrast with it or come in the same context, such
as ‘cat’. The word ‘hit’ connects in our mental word-store with the verb ‘hit’, with
its range of meanings and its irregular past form, and to expectations that it is
going to be followed by a noun phrase object, here made more complicated by
being in the passive voice. In addition there are links between the L1 vocabulary
and the L2 vocabulary, as seen in Chapter 3.
Parsing
Parsing refers to how the mind works out the grammatical structure and meaning of
the sentences it hears, that is to say, the term is only loosely connected to its mean-
ing in traditional grammar. Take a sentence such as ‘The man ate breakfast.’ To
understand the sentence fully means being able to tell who is carrying out the
action and what is affected by the action, and to realize that ‘ate breakfast’ goes
together as a phrase, while ‘man ate’ does not. Even if our minds are not consciously
aware of the grammatical technicalities, they are automatically working out the
structure of the sentence. Grammar is not just in the back of our minds, but is active
all the time we are listening.
Ideas of parsing in psychology and computational models rely on the phrase
structure idea described in Chapter 2, but tackle it in two opposite directions, either
bottom-up or top-down. Let us start with the sentence, ‘The man ate breakfast.’
Listening and reading processes
126
Sentence
Noun Phrase
Article
Noun
The
man
ate
breakfast
Verb
Noun Phrase
Verb Phrase
Figure 7.1 Phrase structure tree of ‘The man ate breakfast’

---

Bottom-up parsing involves building up the sentence in our minds bit by bit,
putting the sounds into words, the words into phrases, the phrases into a whole
sentence, that is to say, working from the bottom to the top of the tree. So ‘the’ is
put with ‘man’ to get a noun phrase ‘the man’; ‘ate’ goes with ‘breakfast’ to get a
verb phrase ‘ate breakfast’; and the noun phrase ‘the man’ and the verb phrase ‘ate
breakfast’ go together to yield the structure of the whole sentence.
Listening processes 127