Assigned Reading Reflections (Listening/Week6-2/16/2009)

The content of this week’s reading assignment is about listening skill in language learning process. It is clear that listening is one of the crucial components of language but it was regarded a passive skill throughout history. The importance of listening is emphasized in the apple book “We can expect to listen twice as much as we speak, four times more than we read, and five times than we write”.
Four model of listening is explained in the book:
Model #1 listening and repeating (imitating)
Model #2 listening and answering the comprehension questions
Model #3 task listening (listen and do)
Model #4 interactive listening
It is stated that listening is not a passive skill but a receptive skill which needs special attention in language study. It is described as highly active, clearly participatory, verbal experience.
Some of the listening ways are:
Bidirectional listening two way listener to speaker vice versa
Unidirectional listening input comes from a variety of ways
Auto directional listening self dialogue communication
The motto of listening skill might be “It is not what you say it is how you say it!”
Some of listening types are:
Transactional listening: message oriented
Interactional listening: personal oriented
Bottom-up processing: from sounds to words, words to grammatical relationships to lexical meanings.
Top-down processing: general to details