巧妙设计活动 优化课堂教学 培训2.docx

1、巧妙设计活动 优化课堂教学 培训22 Analysing language skills2.1 Introduction Before we proceed, in Chapter 3, to consider in more detail the com- ponents of a language learning task, we need to draw together what we know about language use. We shall do this by looking at recent research into the nature of what we m

2、ay call the four macroskills of listening, speaking, reading and writing.We have already noted that a conventional approach to syllabus design has been to produce specifications or inventories of discrete linguistic items to build into composite items in the learning programme. These specifications

3、have variously taken the shape of lists of forms, or functions, or notions, or particular skills. It is the last of these categories, with its emphasis on language behaviour, which we shall find most useful in helping us to chart those language activities which will help us make up our language lear

4、ning tasks.When in Chapter 3 we construct a framework for designing and monitoring tasks, we shall be considering all the skills conjointly as they interact with each other in natural behaviour. In real life as in the classroom, most tasks of any complexity involve more than one macroskill. There ar

5、e occasions, certainly, when one is simply listening, speaking, reading or writing to the exclusion of the other skills: examples might be watching a soap opera on television, reading a novel, giving a lecture, or writing a letter to a friend. But there are many other examples where a number of skil

6、ls are interwoven into a complex language activity. I would like us therefore to get away from the notion that general language programmes can be constructed from separate components concentrating on separate macroskills. Where possible these skills should be integrated, though this is not to say th

7、at there cannot be specialised components focusing on one or two of the skills to the exclusion of others.Nevertheless, for convenience our starting point in this chapter is the discrete macroskills and what research has shown us about each of them in turn. We will consider later in the chapter such

8、 issues of syllabus design as when for classroom purposes we integrate skills and when we deal with them separately, and how we relate them to the aims of the learner and the goals of the programme.2.2 The nature of listening comprehensionIn their book on listening, Anderson and Lynch (1988) disting

9、uish between reciprocal listening and non-reciprocal listening. Reciprocal listening refers to those listening tasks where there is the opportunity for the listener to interact with the speaker, and to negotiate the content of the interaction. Non-reciprocal listening refers to tasks such as listeni

10、ng to the radio or a formal lecture where the transfer of information is in one direction only - from the speaker to the listener. Anderson and Lynch underline the complexity of listening comprehension by pointing out that the listener must simultaneously integrate the following skills:- identify sp

11、oken signals from the midst of surrounding sounds;- segment the stream of speech into words;- grasp the syntax of the utterance(s);- (in interactive listening) formulate an appropriate response. They point out that in addition to these linguistic skills, the listener must also command a range of non

12、-linguistic knowledge and skills. These include having an appropriate purpose for listening; having appropriate social and cultural knowledge and skills; having the appropriate background knowledge. They stress the active nature of listening, and demonstrate the inadequate nature of the listener as

13、tape-recorder view of listening comprehension. We do not simply take language in like a tape-recorder, but interpret what we hear according to our purpose in listening and our background knowledge. We then store the meaning(s) of the message rather than the forms in which these are encoded. The actu

14、al grammatical structures themselves are often rapidly lost. Conversely, being able to remember the actual words of a spoken message does not necessarily mean that the message itself has been comprehended. Anderson and Lynch record an anecdote which illustrates the importance of background knowledge

15、. An old woman, passing one of the authors in the street, said Thats the university. Its going to rain tomorrow. Initially, the listener was unable to interpret the utterance. It was only after the speaker repeated herself, and drew the listeners attention to a bell ringing in the distance, that he

16、was able to get to the meanings behind the words. In doing so, he needed to draw on the following information: general factual information: 1. sound is more audible downwind than upwind 2. wind direction may affect weather conditions local factual knowledge: 3. the University of Glasgow has a clock

17、tower with a bell socio-cultural knowledge: 4. strangers in Britain occasionally refer to the weather to oil the wheels of social life. 5. a polite comment from a stranger usually requires a response knowledge of context: 6. the conversation took place about half-a-mile from the University of Glasgo

18、w 7. the clock tower bell was just striking the hour (Anderson and Lynch 1988: 12-13) By drawing on these various sources of knowledge, the listener was able to conclude that the old woman was drawing his attention to the fact that the wind was blowing from a direction which brought with it the thre

19、at of rain. The change in the wind direction was signalled by the fact that the university clock tower was audible. The woman was, in fact, making a socially acceptable comment to a stranger, i.e. talking about the weather, although she chose a rather idiosyncratic way of doing it. In his analysis o

20、f listening comprehension, Richards (1987a) distinguishes between conversational listening (listening to casual speech) and academic listening (listening to lectures and other academic presentations). (By academic listening Richards means listening to lectures in an academic context, not an English

21、language learning context.) Conversational listening involves the ability to:- retain chunks of language of different lengths for short periods- discriminate among the distinctive sounds of the target language- recognise the stress patterns of words- recognise the rhythmic structure of English- reco

22、gnise the functions of stress and intonation to signal the information structure of utterances- identify words in stressed and unstressed positions- recognise reduced forms of words- distinguish word boundaries- recognise typical word order patterns in the target language- recognise vocabulary used

23、in core conversational topics- detect key words (i.e. those which identify topics and propositions)- guess the meanings of words from the contexts in which they occur- recognise grammatical word classes (parts of speech)- recognise major syntactic patterns and devices- recognise cohesive devices in

24、spoken discourse- recognise elliptical forms of grammatical units and sentences- detect sentence constituents. Academic listening involves the ability to:- identify purpose and scope of lecture- identify topic of lecture and follow topic development- identify relationships among units within discour

25、se (for example major idea, generalisations, hypotheses, supporting ideas, examples)- identify role of discourse markers in signalling structure of lecture (for example conjunctions, adverbs, gambits, routines)- infer relationships (for example cause, effect, conclusion)- recognise key lexical items

26、 relating to subject/topic- deduce meanings of words from context- recognise markers of cohesion- recognise function of intonation to signal information structure (for example pitch, volume, pace, key)- detect attitude of speaker toward subject matter.Study these and decide which are likely to be ca

27、rried out by the learner in the world outside the language classroom, which are only likely to occur in the classroom, and which might occur both inside and outside the language classroom. Rather than seeing these lists as relating to conversational and academic listening respectively, I would prefe

28、r to suggest that the first list contains a set of enabling microskills which learners might employ in any listening task regardless of whether it is a conversational Or academic task. The second list contains what might be called rhetorical or discourse com- prehension skills. Once again, these may

29、 be needed for both conver- sational and academic listening. Richards also classifies listening tasks according to whether they require the learner to engage in bottom-up or top-down processing. Bottom-up processes work on the incoming message itself, decoding sounds, words, clauses and sentences. B

30、ottom-up processes include the following - scanning the input to identify familiar lexical items;- segmenting the stream of speech into constituents, for example in order to recognise that a book of mine consists of four words;- using phonological cues to identify the information focus in an utteran

31、ce;- using grammatical cues to organise the input into constituents, for example, in order to recognise that in the book which I lent you the book and which I lent you are major constituents, rather than the book which I and lent you.Top-down processes use background knowledge to assist in com- preh

32、ending the message. (We have already seen, through the example provided by Anderson and Lynch, the importance of top-down processes in listening comprehension.) Richards provides the following examples:- assigning an interaction to part of a particular event, such as story telling, joking, praying, complaining;- assigning places, persons or things to categories;- inferring cause and effect relationships;- anticipating outcomes;- inferring the topic of a discourse;- inferring the sequence between events;- inferring missing de