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

2. capable of managing a productive balance between the effort to perceive words in tone units, and the effort to understand meanings of the speaker 3. capable of not worrying about stretches of speech which are beyond their capacity to understand It will be objected that this can only happen with advanced students. I would argue that it is possible, indeed necessary, to aim at this type of comfort with all levels of students. And the way to do this is to spend more time in the post-listening phase helping students learn from those parts of the recording they have difficulty with - more work on perception. In defence of perception exercises There was a time when listening comprehension exercises did involve perception exercises (cf. Field, 1998) but they have generally disappeared, a fact that Gillian Brown describes as 'a quite extraordinary case of throwing the baby out with the bath water' (1990, p. 145). Gillian Brown goes on to argue: Students do ... need help in learning to interpret the spoken form of the language and, in particular, the form of the phonetic signal. What we need to do...is to think more carefully about the appropriate methodology... (Brown, 1990 p. 146). Brown makes two important points: first we need to bring back perceptual work; second, we need to think carefully about how we do it. Clearly we have to balance the requirement to work on perception with the requirement to avoid straining for every word. Although at first sight it might seem impossible to reconcile these requirements, it is in fact quite easy to do so. For a 'non-straining' approach to listening, learners have to be made familiar and comfortable with the features of the stream of speech which most distinguish it from writing. Current approaches to Listening Comprehension are denying them the means of acquiring this comfort and familiarity. 14