Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1998. Vol. 2. Eger Journal of English Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 26)

Studies - Richard Cauldwell: Listening comprehension: three problems and three suggestions

learners: 'Just listen to the stresses, they'll be in the most important words, then you'll understand'. There are three problems with this view: first, very often, 'important' words such as negatives are often unstressed, and so-called 'unimportant' grammatical words are stressed; second, research indicates that it is difficult to pick out stressed words in a language which is not your own (c.f. Roach 1982); third, the concept of stress is loosely defined and fails to distinguish between word-level stress, and stresses associated with higher order phenomena such as tone units. Misdirected charity Although all listening comprehension recordings are described as 'natural' very few of them are truly so. Many (though not all) are scripted and artificially slow: very few are instances of 'naturally occurring speech', or 'authentic speech'. The reasons for this can be found in statements such as the following from Penny Ur: Students may learn best from listening to speech which, while not entirely authentic, is an approximation to the real thing, and is planned to take into account the learners' level of ability and particular difficulties. (Ur, 1984, p. 23) I myself find nothing wrong in what Penny Ur says here but I would argue that listening comprehension materials are often ove

r-charitable in leaning towards 'the learners' level of ability' and not taking account of the level of ability required to understand spontaneous fast speech. The gap between the learners' level and the target level (fast spontaneous speech) is a gap that we as teachers and materials writers must help learners bridge. But we cannot help them bridge this gap if we continue with our charitable focus on what learners can manage at their current level. We have to help learners cope with speech which is abov

e their current level, and to arrive at a description of 'above current level', we need a description of the topmost level - a description of the features of 'difficult' (fast spontaneous) speech. We need such a description for use in teaching so that we can have an equal focus on both where our learners are, and where they have to get to. 11