CAPES 5 : Four Skills - Listening

One way of looking at the work foreign language teachers do is to distinguish between four different ways of dealing with language. Two of these are receptive - listening and reading - while two are productive - speaking and writing. During this module, we will be dealing with the first of these.

Human babies are already tuned into the sound system of their mother's language before they are even born (see Boysson-Bardies, cited in the Didactics bibliography). As they develop, their auditory systems become more and more specialized ; by the time they get to the collège, they may find it very difficult to actually hear the sounds of a foreign language (the exact age at which they lose aural plasticity is a subject of debate, but estimates have been progressively pushing the fatal moment further and further back into infancy). So a FL teacher must be concerned to help her pupils hear the sounds of the language. She will need to work on phonemes, on stress and on intonation patterns.

Take a look at a textbook for 3e. Look through the introduction and see what the authors have to say about the sounds of the language. The leaf through the first lesson ; can you find any exercises which are intended to help the pupil work on listening to and hearing the sounds of the language?

What makes a listening comprehension task easier or harder? Debra Hoven, of the University of Queensland, suggests there are three basic factors to be taken into account : text, task and context features.

(If you have a question of a comment, write to me at tmason@timothyjpmason.com)