Theme : Using authentic materials in teaching lis contents introduction chapter I. Theoretical review

Authenticity of materials used in classroom

According to O’Malley’s point of view “Learning strategies are complex procedures that individuals apply to tasks; consequently, they may be represented as procedural knowledge which may be acquired through cognitive, associative, and autonomous stages of learning. As with other procedural skills at the different stages of learning the strategies may be conscious in early stages of learning and later be performed without the person’s awareness” [3, 52].
There are three main types of linguistic strategies which can also be applied to (listening as well) learning four types of language skills. These are met cognitive, cognitive and social or affective strategies. Met cognitive strategies include the following activities:

1. 
   selective attention: focusing of a listener on special aspects of learning tasks, listening for key words or phrases.
   
2. 
   Planning: planning to concentrate on certain aspects or parts of listening passage, listening for a gist.
   
3. 
   Monitoring: focusing on a task, information that should be remembered, or production.
   
4. 
   Evaluation: evaluation of language production after it has taken place, comprehension after a receptive language activity has been completed.
   

Cognitive strategies are divided into the following activities:

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   Rehearsal: repetition of names of items or objects to remember them;
   
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   Interference: guessing meanings of new linguistic items, predict outcomes, complete missing parts using heard information.
   
3. 
   Summarizing: activity where listeners synthesize what they have heard to ensure the information has been retained.
   
4. 
   Deducting: activity in which learners apply rules to understand language.
   
5. 
   Imagery: use of visual images or pictures for understanding, remembering or organizing new verbal information.
   
6. 
   Transfer: ability to use known linguistic information to apply to and facilitate a new learning task.
   
7. 
   Elaboration: an ability to link or integrate new ideas contained in new information to those with known information.
   

Social or affective strategies contain:

1. 
   Co-operation: an activity where learners work with peers to solve a problem, exchange information, check notes, share ideas, or get feedback on a certain type of activity.
   
2. 
   Questioning for clarification: receiving from a peer or a teacher additional explanation, clarification, paraphrasing or examples.
   
3. 
   Self-talk: the process of thinking to assure oneself that a learning activity will be completed successfully or to decrease anxiety about a task.
   

Top-down strategies are listener based; the listener taps into background knowledge of the topic, the situation or context, the type of text, and the language.¹⁰ This background knowledge activates a set of expectations that help the listener to interpret what is heard and anticipate what will come next [3, 85]. Topdown strategies include:¹¹

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  listening for the main idea;
  
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  predicting;
  
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  drawing inferences;
  
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  summarizing.
  

Bottom-up strategies are text based; the listener relies on the language in the message, that is, the combination of sounds, words, and grammar that creates meaning. Bottom-up strategies include:

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  listening for specific details;
  
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  recognizing cognates;
  
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  recognizing word-order patterns. Strategic listeners also use met cognitive strategies to plan, monitor, and evaluate their listening.
  
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  They plan by deciding which listening strategies will serve best in a particular situation.
  
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  They monitor their comprehension and the effectiveness of the selected strategies.
  
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  They evaluate by determining whether they have achieved their listening comprehension goals and whether the combination of listening strategies selected was an effective one.
  

To develop top-down skills a teacher can get her students to predict the content of a listening activity beforehand, using information about the topic or situation, pictures or key words. By doing this a teacher is helping students to develop their top-down processing skills, by encouraging them to use their knowledge of the topic to help them understand the content. This skill is very important, even advanced learners are likely to come across some unknown vocabulary. By using their knowledge of context, they should be able to guess the meaning of the unknown word, or understand the general idea. There are other examples of common top-down listening activities that include putting a series of pictures or sequence of events in order, listening to conversations and identifying where they take place, reading information about a topic then listening to find whether or not the same points are mentioned, or identifying the relationships between the people involved. A list of top-down strategies proposed by Richards¹²:
Anticipation: working out what comes next

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  Teacher plays half a sentence, learners complete, or answer multiple choice questions.
  

Reference: relating pronouns, etc., to the items they refer to

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  Teacher pauses cassette after ambiguous referring expressions; learners say what they refer to.
  
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  Teacher lists referring expressions/general nouns; learners listen for them and write down what they refer to.
  

Monitoring for information

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  Learners monitor a long text for key words.
  

Relevance: identifying important points made

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  Slot-and-filler summaries;
  
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  Filling in tables (specific/general);
  
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  'Find (four) points about...
  

Learners need to be able to listen effectively even when faced with unfamiliar vocabulary or structures. If the learner understands very few words from the speaker or recordings, even knowledge about the context may not be sufficient for him/her to understand what is happening, and they can easily get lost. Of course, low-level learners may simply not have enough vocabulary or knowledge of the language yet, but there are situations in which higher-level students fail to recognize known words in the stream of fastconnected speech. For this purpose bottom-up, listening activities can help learners to understand enough linguistic elements of what they hear to be able to use their top-down skills to fill in the gaps.Successful listening depends on the ability to combine these two types of processing (skills). Activities which work on each strategy separately should help students to combine top-down and bottom-up processes to become more effective listeners in real-life situations or longer classroom listening. A list of bottom-up strategies:
Discrimination: distinguishing minimally different words

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  Ear training in minimal pairs;
  
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  Teacher dictates minimal pairs.
  

Segmentation: identifying words in continuous speech

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  Teacher dictates sentences, which include contractions, weak forms, elision, and assimilation;
  
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  Learners transcribe a section of an authentic passage;
  
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  Learners listen with transcript, paying attention to weakly stressed items.
  

Extrapolation: working out the spelling of unrecognized words

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  Teacher dictates words in spelling groups (laugh, cough, enough);
  
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  Learners guess the spellings of difficult-to-recognize cognates;
  
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  Matching names to words on a map. There is an example of how using topdown strategies a teacher can get students in listening for main idea. To extract and understand meaning from listening, students need to follow four basic steps:
  
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  Figure out the purpose for listening. Activate background knowledge of the topic in order to predict or anticipate content and identify appropriate listening strategies.
  
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  Attend to the parts of the listening input that are relevant to the identified purpose and ignore the rest. This selectivity enables students to focus on specific items in the input and reduces the amount of information they have to hold in short-term memory in order to recognize it.
  
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  Select top-down and bottom-up strategies that are appropriate to the listening task and use them flexibly and interactively. Students' comprehension improves and their confidence increases when they use top-down and bottom-up strategies simultaneously to construct meaning.
  
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  Check comprehension while listening and when the listening task is over. Monitoring comprehension helps students detect inconsistencies and comprehension failures, directing them to use alternate strategies. teachers and learners focus too much on the product of listening and too little on the process.