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Scola WorkshopSpring, 2006

“Technology-mediated Language Learning Beyond the Classroom”University of Pennsylvania

Developing Listening Comprehension Using SCOLA Online Newscasts: Theoretical and Practical Considerations

Luba Iskold, Ed. D.Muhlenberg College

Allentown, PA

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Background Information

Theoretical Foundations of Second Language Acquisition

• Competing theories are typical of all disciplines that attempt to explain complex phenomena

• Although there is no one unified theory of second language acquisition, this state of the art is reflective of the complexity of the acquisition process and thevariability of individuals and contexts (Brown, 1994)

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Kreshen’s (1985, 1989, 1990) Hypotheses about L2 Acquisition

• Articulated the most influential and the most controversial hypotheses about L2 acquisition

• Advocated a “natural order” of language acquisition

• Emphasized listening to large amounts of “comprehensible input” in early stages of instruction

• Was instrumental in bringing listening comprehension to the front with regard to its importance to the overall process of language acquisition

• Provided the foundation for comprehension-based approaches to L2

• Supporters: Terrel, Ehrman, and Herzog, 1984

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Cognitive-theoretical View of Language Acquisition

• Is based on cognitive view of learning represented in the work of Anderson (1985), and instructional implementations drawn by Gagné (1985), Perkins & Solomon (1989)

• Contradicts the view of L2 acquisition as a learning process which is most effective when it occurs unconsciously (Schmidt, 1990)

• Advocates high degrees of learner involvement in the process of learning

Learners:

• Consciously select information from their environment• Organize this information• Relate it to what they already know• Retain the information they consider important• Use the information in appropriate contexts• Reflect on their own success in learning

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Cognitive View of L2 Acquisition

• Think about the language demands• Apply prior knowledge and skills to new learning• Model “expert” performance• Seek feedback, • Refer to rules for refinements in performance

L2 acquisition occurs most effectively with high degrees of learner involvement

The learner should be able to achieve expert-like performance in complex skills

Automaticity is the shift from conscious to spontaneous processing (McLaughlin, 1990)

O’Mally and Chomat (1993), based on cognitive-theoretical view of learning, assert that in classroom and non-classroom settings L2 learners:

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Sociocultural Approach to Language Learning

• Places L2 acquisition in a context of social practices• Emerged from a more general sociocultural theory

proposed by Vygotsky (1962, 1978)• Examines the relationship between

Mind ■ Language ■ Communication ■ Culture

Focuses on three major concepts: ■ Genetic Analysis ■ Social Learning■ Mediation

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Sociocultural Approach to Language Learning

Genetic analysis

• Suggests that interpretation of learning should take into account broad social, cultural, and historic trends

Social learning

• Postulates that learning to read and write is a social practice rather than an individual skill

• Interactions with teachers or peers allow students to advance through their “zone of proximal development” (ZPD), the distance between what they can achieve by themselves and what they can achieve when assisted by others (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 58)

• Learning is not an isolated fact of cognition, but a “a process of gaining entry to a discourse of practitioners via apprenticeship assistance from peers and teachers” (Warschauer, 1997)

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Sociocultural Approach to Language Learning

Mediation • Interprets the teacher’s role as a “facilitator, guide, and,

when appropriate, expert” in apprenticing students into “discourse and social practices” of the communities of native speakers (Warschauer, 1997, p. 90)

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Research Related to Listening

• Research on listening and reading comprehension• Factors that affect listening comprehension• Research on listener characteristics• Authentic materials in listening research• Video in listening research

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Research Related to Listening

The process of listening consists of internal operations and therefore is not easy to measure

Researchers examined top-down, bottom-up, and parallel processing:

Bacon, 1992; Bernhardt & James, 1987; Danks, 1980; Chaudron, 1983; Glisan, 1988; Lund, 1990, 1991; Rubin, 1994; VanPatten, 1989

Process refers to how listeners interpret input in terms of what they know, or identify what they do not know, and use different kinds of signals to interpret what is said (Rubin, 1994, p. 210)

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“Listening to Learn” & “Learning to Listen” (Lund, 1991)

Traditional approach: listening is a language-recognition skill rather than a cognitively controlled process (Swaffer & Bacon, 1993)

More recently, listening began to be recognized as the foundation of language instruction. The receptive skills of listening provided the basis for comprehension-based approaches, which Lund (1991) characterizes as “listening to learn.”

At the same time, Rubin (1994) suggests that teachers and scholars “will recognize more and more the importance of teaching listening comprehension in a L2 classroom (p. 199), which Lund defines as “learning to listen” (p. 105)

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Factors that Affect Listening Comprehension

How do listeners integrate phonologic, syntactic, lexical, and sociolinguistic information?

According to Rubin (1994), the following factors affect listening comprehension:

• Text Characteristics (variations in listening passage/text or associated visual support)

• Interlocutor Characteristics (variations in the speaker’s personal characteristics)

• Listener Characteristics (variations in the listener’s personal characteristics)

• Process Characteristics (variations in the listener’s cognitive activities and in the nature of interaction between speaker and listener)

• Task characteristics (variations in the purpose for listening and associated responses)

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Authentic Materials in Listening Research

• A growing interest in designing materials to teach comprehension more effectively

• Teaching comprehension via authentic texts and video

Studies by Cromer and Thompson (1980), Manning (1988), Mueller (1980)

• Identified a relationship between mental imagery and creative thinking

• Demonstrated that appropriate contextual visuals can enhance students’ performance on listening comprehension recall tasks

• Video technology permits students to witness “real world interaction as they observe native speakers in authentic settings using different accents, registers and paralinguistic cues (Secules et al. 1992, p. 480)

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Authentic Television

Television, movies, and video

• Expose viewers to real-world texts that are informative, interesting, motivating, and “current” (Thompson & Rubin, 1996)

• Are most readily available and least expensive samples of fully contextualized authentic speech, they are an important source of materials for teaching listening comprehension (Garret (1991)

Richardson (1989) identified categories of videos:

• Video materials intended for native speakers, including broadcast television and feature films

• Video materials intended for a L2 classroom

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Authentic Discourse

Geddes and White (1979) draw a distinction between the types of authentic discourse:

Unmodified authentic discourse, a genuine act of communication

Simulated authentic discourse, a discourse for pedagogical purposes, but at the same time exhibits features that have a high probability of occurrence in genuine acts of communication (p. 130)

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• Are very useful, but insufficient for bring the target culture to students

• Are frequently created to introduce specific linguistic structures

• Present scripts produced solely for student consumption

• Solicit answers to artificial, unauthentic questions

Authentic texts play an important role at all levels of language learning: Bacon, 1992; Byrnes, 1984; Eykyn, 1992; Herron, 1994; Joiner, 1991; Omaggio Hadley, 1993a; Richards, 1983; Thompson and Rubin, 1996; VanPatten, 1989)

Textbooks and curricular materials:

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Video in Listening Research

Rivers (1975) reported data on how adults spend theircommunicative time:

40%-50% listening

25%-30% speaking

11%-16% reading

9% writing

In our “media saturated” world students are “increasingly expected to obtain information from oral rather thanwritten sources” (Joiner et al., 1989, p.427)

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Video in Listening Research

• Learning to listen, to understand, to assimilate, and to evaluate what one hears through media sources is therefore an important aspect of using our native language

• Similarly, the ability to listen and to understand is an important goal in learning L2

• Programs from target countries (documentaries, news reports, guided tours) provide a rich source of information about civilization and culture (Herron, 1994)

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Newscasts as a Source of Authentic Videotext

Nearly essential consumer product

•Available on the Internet in overflowing supply

•Major resource for information gathering, similar to newspapers

•Provide information on current matters of interest in the target country

•Present paralinguistic information, including manners, gesture, and

speaking styles

•Significant source of authentic language, particularly rich in cognates

•Allow viewers to see a country the way that country sees itself

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Why use SCOLA Newscasts?

• SCOLA introduces regularly scheduled newscasts

• Includes game shows, talk shows, feature films, and cultural programming from selected regions

• An archive of the past week’s programming allows choosing from a variety of materials

• Materials are immediately available via the Internet

• News episodes are relatively brief (2-3min.) and are easily identifiable

• Programming is commercial-free

• It is easy to point students to a specific episode

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• Users do not have to surf the Internet to find the assigned video

• SCOLA grants copyright permission to use materials in class and for research purposes

• Learner control of the video input accommodates for individual differences and learning styles:

Students may watch the video as many times as needed

Students may control their path through the video by pausingand replaying specific segments of each episode

Such flexibility is likely to reduce anxiety and make video viewing more enjoyable than classroom group video viewing

Why use SCOLA Newscasts?

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Factors that Affect Listening Comprehensionas Found in SCOLA Newscasts

Text Characteristics:

• Unmodified authentic discourse: Texts are produced by native speakers and for native speakers

• Dry, monotonous monologues delivered by “talking heads” with little visual support

• Subject matter unfamiliar to students

• Long sentences with complex relative clauses

• Sophisticated, frequently unfamiliar vocabulary

• Figurative expressions, including idioms and metaphors

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Factors that Affect Listening Comprehensionas Found in SCOLA Newscasts

Speech (Interlocutor) Characteristics

News anchors and reporters express meaning efficiently, thus speech is characterized by:

• Fewer normal pauses, hesitations, corrections, paraphrase

• Diminished word or even sentence boundaries

• Reduction of vowels and assimilation of consonants

• Input is rehearsed and read (vs. produced spontaneously)

• Written language is delivered via an audio-visual medium

• Interviews are prepared and edited, thus merely resemble natural discourse

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Factors that Affect Listening Comprehensionas Found in SCOLA Newscasts

Listener Characteristics

Most students at the Intermediate level have had littleprior exposure to unmodified authentic discourse

L2 viewers have imperfect control of linguistic code

L2 viewers exhibit low tolerance for information gaps

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Factors that Affect Listening Comprehensionas Found in SCOLA Newscasts

Process Characteristics

By nature, newscasts is a one-way medium

Negotiation of meaning is absent from discourse

Viewers carry out a passive, receptive role

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Factors that Affect Listening Comprehensionas Found in SCOLA Newscasts

L2 viewers may:

• Experience a comprehension shock from non-interactive speech flow

• Find it difficult to filter out less important items

• Exhibit frustration, or give up when speech is too fast

• Get tired of watching mundane news

• Find news boring for the lack of relevance to their own experiences

• Disengage from listening and just keep watching

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Factors that Affect Listening Comprehensionas Found in SCOLA NewscastsTask Characteristics: Ancillary Materials Provided by SCOLA

Pros:Insta-Class is an excellent addition to SCOLA

Provides weekly English translations for one news episode

Provides weekly comprehension questions for that same episode

Cons:Materials created by SCOLA developers are limited in quantity and variety

Seem appropriate for classroom environment only

Need substantial reworking to be completed online

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Instructional Challenges:

• Adapting the broadcasts to the learning needs of students with various proficiency levels

• Adapting material to instructional goals:

Listening to Learn vs. Learning to Listen (Lund, 1991)

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Listening to Learn - video as a vehicle to other skills, an integrated approach

Video provides a starting point for work on productive skills:

vocabulary developmentstructural analysisconversationanalytical writing

Instructional Objective:

Creating activities to cultivate productive skills

Instructional Challenges:

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Learning to Listen - skill acquisition for comprehension

Purely receptive approach that involves the teaching of listening strategies

Instructional Objectives:Creating activities to cultivate listening skills for structural and sociocultural comprehension

Developing learning activities to accompany unmodified authentic discourse

Assisting viewers with comprehension of unmodified authentic discourse

Instructional Challenges:

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Why is it time-consuming and difficult?

• Matching the difficulty of the task to the level of students’ proficiency

• Preparing various types of activities, to keep students interested

• Identifying timely topics with significant shelf life

• Finding relevant materials to complement video segments (e.g., newspaper article, cultural commentaries, Internet links, etc.)

• Developing web-based activities for languages with non-Roman alphabets

Instructional Challenges:

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Designing Tasks for Video Viewing

The concept of helping students to develop their listening skills through specific strategies has emerged in the past fifteen years:

• Applying to L2 successful techniques and strategies used for teaching receptive skills in the L1 (Bernhardt & James, 1987; Byrnes, 1984; Dunkel, 1986)

• Adapting to listening instructional reading models

• Richards (1983) suggested manipulation of two variables: the input and the task (pp. 227-229)

INPUT MICRO-SKILLS TASKS

• His taxonomy includes 33 micro-skills for listening

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Adapting Tasks vs. Adapting Texts

Language of instruction:

• L1 questions and tasks may be used to check comprehension

• L2 questions may provide cues for comprehension, and assist with teachingspecific linguistic aspects of videotext

Activities & Tasks:

Previewing • Viewing • Post Viewing

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Previewing

Objectives:

• Elicit students’ background knowledge

• Identify students’ previous experiences

• Generate a meaningful framework for further development of comprehension

• Generate a meaningful framework for further development of linguistic skills

• Reduce anxiety of confronting the unknown

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Facilitation of deductive reasoning and predictions:

• Providing cultural information via ancillary materials and cultural commentaries

• Playing the synopsis of the upcoming news, when possible

• Watching the video without sound: making inferences/deductive reasoning, based on visual cues

• Discussing still shots from the video

• Generating L1 and/or L2 questions guiding toward comprehension

• Generating a list of key words germane to the topic (in English)

• Looking up L2 equivalents for 8-10 key words to check if they would come up in the video text

Previewing:Examples of Tasks

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Video Viewing

Low-production Activities & Tasks:

• Scaffolding, assisting with comprehension of lexical items:

(e.g., add subtitles, or full scripts, then steadily withdraw help as the semester progresses)

• Identifying main ideas, characters, places (multiple choice)

• Focusing attention on particular features of the videotext

• Scanning the videotext for specific information

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Item format: multiple choice, or T/F:

• Recognizing vocabulary

• Identifying cognates

• Conducting grammar observations

• Testing hypotheses

• Classifying statements (T/F)

• Determining intonation patterns

Video Viewing

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High Production Skills:

Post Viewing

Tasks that bring the language of the video into active use:

• Recall, recognition, and application exercises

• Comparing findings with other students in the group

• Naming the topics covered in the video

• Discussing how the topics treated correspond to anticipations from experiencing L1 news

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Facilitating retention of linguistic items processed during video viewing:

• Cloze exercises for active vocabulary development

• Paragraph-level oral and written summaries

• Examine the acronyms (practice saying; explain the meaning)

Fostering critical thinking and students’ analytical skills:

• Comparing relative place of importance of specific news in the L1 and L2 newscasts

• Compare L1 and L2 stories for content and approach

• Express your opinion about the event

Post Viewing

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Conclusion

Select:

• Most interesting materials with lots of visual support

• Topics that learners are most likely to understand

• Topics about which students have some background knowledge from reading newspapers, watching TV in their L1

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Encourage students to:

• Check out online news sites in English, such as CNN or Reuters

• Look for similarities/differences in international news coverage

• Compare the coverage, including categories of news and order of presentation

Conclusion

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ConclusionAvoid

• Cognitive overload

• Task overload

• Long video episodes, exceeding 3 min. in length

Provide

• Comprehension checks to sustain high degree of concentration

• Parallel texts for reading (full text, captions, key words)

• More viewing sessions of fewer discrete episodes

• Class time and screen space for note taking

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ConclusionDevelop

• Multi-skill exercises with extended shelf life

• Ancillary materials that are likely to have considerable shelf life: Recent History, Ecology, Health, etc.

• Materials on L2 cultures reporting about American life (takes away from authenticity)

• Expandable tasks, ranging from Novice to Intermediate High Level: from basic comprehension of names, places and numbers - gradually moving on to using video as a vehicle to other skills

• Flexible learning environments compatible with developing technologies

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Developing quality ancillary materials appears excessive for individual faculty

Team effort is more likely to be successful.

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Contact Information:

Dr. Luba Iskold

2400 Chew StreetMuhlenberg College,

Languages, Literatures and Cultures,Allentown, PA 18104

Phone: 484-664-3516Fax: 484-664-3722

E-mail: iskold@muhlenberg.eduhttp://www.muhlenberg.edu/depts/forlang/LLC/iskold_home/index.htm