LISTENING PROCESS MENTAL PROCESS

LISTENING PROCESS

There are two distinct processes involved in listening comprehension. Listeners use 'top-down' processes when they use prior knowledge to understand the meaning of a message. Prior knowledge can be knowledge of the topic, the listening context, the text-type, the culture or other information stored in long-term memory as schemata (typical sequences or common situations around which world knowledge is organized). Listeners use content words and contextual clues to form hypotheses in an exploratory fashion. On the other hand, listeners also use 'bottom-up' processes when they use linguistic knowledge to understand the meaning of a message. They build meaning from lower level sounds to words to grammatical relationships to lexical meanings in order to arrive at the final message. Listening comprehension is not either top-down or bottom-up processing, but an interactive, interpretive process where listeners use both prior knowledge and linguistic knowledge in understanding messages. The degree to which listeners use the one process or the other will depend on their knowledge of the language, familiarity with the topic or the purpose for listening. For example, listening for gist involves primarily top-down processing, whereas listening for specific information, as in a weather broadcast, involves primarily bottom-up processing to comprehend all the desired details.

LISTENING IS AN INVISIBLE MENTAL PROCESS

Listening is an invisible mental process, making it difficult to describe. Listeners must discriminate between sounds, understand vocabulary and grammatical structures, interpret stress and intention, retain and interpret this within the immediate as well as the larger socio-cultural context of the utterance (Wipf, 1984). (Rost, 2002) defines listening, in its broadest sense, as a process of receiving what the speaker actually says (receptive orientation); constructing and representing meaning (constructive orientation); negotiating meaning with the speaker and responding (collaborative orientation); and, creating meaning through involvement, imagination and empathy (transformative orientation). Listening is a complex, active process of interpretation in which listeners match what they hear with what they already know.

MENTAL PROCESS INVOLVED IN LISTENING

In intensive listening the listener tries to understand everything that he hears. For this purpose, fairly short texts are chosen and specific tasks are set by the teacher

Extensive listening does not focus on any particular language point. It gives learners general practice and increases their exposure to the language. Extensive listening activities include the following:-

*                  Main point/gist of the message

*                  The topic of the passage

*                  Specific point of information within the passage

*                  Opinion or attitude of the speaker.

Listening comprehension can be divided into five sequential components each dependent upon the preceding one:

*                  The ability to identify the sound, stress and intonation patterns, voice qualities in the second language and to discriminate between them and similar sounds in the native language.

*                  The perception/construction of a message from the.

*                  Holding the message in one’s auditory memory until it can be processed.

*                  Decoding the message with the help of the previous information stored in the memory

*                  Plan a response or store it in the second language.

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