Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Table of Contents
1. Introduction 3
2. Bottom Up versus Top Down 3
3. Analysis 4
3.1 Structure 4
3.2 Phonological Features 6
3.3 Grammatical Features 8
4. Problems and Solutions 9
5. Conclusion 13
6. Bibliography 13
7. Appendices 15
1. Introduction
I have chosen to focus this assignment on helping English learners to use listening
subskills to understand news reports. News reports are authentic texts which are
receptive skill plays a fundamental role in language acquisition since knowing how to
decipher the answer successfully is just as important as being able to produce the
I also agree with Field when he says that language teachers tend to test more than
teach the listening skills (Field, 2008), therefore, I would like to investigate the
strategies normally used by the native listeners while listening and help my learners
to utilise and adopt these strategies, and have them at their disposal whenever
needed.
well as the area not only myself, but also my colleagues find difficult to plan and
execute successfully.
“Two distinct kinds of processes are involved in listening comprehension, which are
Richard 1986). Bottom-up processing refers to the use of incoming data as a source
of information about the meaning of a message. From his perspective, the process of
levels of organization – sounds, words, clauses, and sentences - until the intended
(Richards, 1990:50).
may take several forms. It may be previous knowledge about the topic of discourse,
term memory in the form of “schemata” and “scripts” – plans about the overall
3. Analysis
3.1 A typical structure of the News report
Begins with ‘The Hook’- first sentence/ headline contains the main
information, also as Thornbury suggests “to provide a succinct answer for the
Who/ what /where / when/ how in this order is the aim of all news stories but
This can all be seen in this extract taken from BBC Afternoon News 18 Oct 2017,
Figure 1:
he will be much more likely to perceive it and understand it well” (Ur, 1984:16).
A proficient listener uses formal schemata, which is the knowledge about the
structure of a certain text type (McCarthy, 2000) which helps him/her to predict in
what order they are likely to hear different news elements. In the above example,
after hearing the ‘hook’ the listener anticipates the information about where or when
it happened: England Wales and Northern Ireland, after hearing this, they predict to
hear more details on how it happened: BBC launching an online tracker, before
hearing a collusion/ summary: waiting time for planned operations around 18 weeks.
doesn’t follow the same pattern as in others; e.g. Spanish or Italian which are
syllable- timed languages. This means that the words that we normally stress in the
sentence are ‘content words’: nouns, verbs, adjectives, i.e. words that carry the
burden of meaning, not the grammatical words, like articles and auxiliaries
(Thornbury, 2003):
A new report is a spoken discourse and therefore these content words will be
By listening to this example, the proficient listener using his bottom-up processing
will be able to pick on the content words: performance /hospitals /slumped across/
UK/ targets /cancer /A&E /planned operations /widely missed, rather than paying
attention to every single word, understanding the meaning of the sentence which is
b) Weak forms
evidence from English that first language listeners exploit this association in order to
For the proficient listener, the ability to recognise the weak forms will aid the
Seen in Figure 2, in spoken language, the words that are not stressed (articles,
prepositions, auxiliaries) become weak and they may be barely audible and rushed
Kelly (2001) explains that intonation is the way in which the voice goes up and down
in pitch while people are speaking. “It is a fundamental part of the way we express
our own thoughts and it enables us to understand those of others” (Kelly, 2001:86)
louder and carries the main pitch movement in an utterance” (Kelly, 2001:72).
As the news reports are aimed at interacting with the audience (Van Dijk, 1988) and
what also can be noticed in this sentence is that sometimes the grammar words can
(Underhill 2005):
// The PERformance of HOSpitals HAS SLUMPED // aCROSS the UK with targets for
In this extract, there are two thought groups and each of them carries the most
prominent unit; has slumped and missed. The proficient listener will be able to
discriminate the main ideas in relation to tone units. From this example, knowing that
one thought group carries one main idea (first being slumped), the listener will
anticipate the second one: missed, they will connect these two together and
understand that the missed operations were the reason why the performance of
The News report makes the use of the present tenses mostly to create a sense of
urgency. Another grammatical structure, in the News Report is the active voice, used
Looking at the news report from Figure 1 we can easily notice typical verb forms
used:
Present tenses
England Wales and Northern Ireland have not hit one of their three key targets.
Active Voice
most frequent syntactic patterns” (Field, 2009: 185). Proficient listeners, after hearing
‘the hook’ in the Present Perfect, will be ‘alarmed’ that this is a recent and important
news and they will anticipate hearing the what and when, where and how related to
this news: England, Wales and Northern Ireland not heating their three targets for 18
months.
(e.g. Italian, Spanish) is very clear to see they lack the phonological knowledge,
which results in them paying attention to every word rather than prominent words of
the utterance in order to get the general meaning of it, thus impacting on their
understanding (Underhill, 2005) as they might put a great focus on function words.
underline what they consider the key words. The teacher explains that key words are
normally given prominence. The teacher plays a recording of the text and asks
learners to listen out for the words they underlined, learners compare their ideas with
the script, they listen to the recording again and correct any differences and then
compare their notes. The teacher takes away the scripts and gives learners a
handout with only the content words, learners reconstruct the full sentences.
Evaluation: This activity combines both the recognition of the tone units and a
practice in reconstructing the meaning from those units. I believe this activity will be
very useful to analytical learners who will be made aware that they do not need to
4.2 Learners focusing too much on the weak forms, missing out on the content
words.
As mentioned earlier, many European learners pay a great focus on function words,
Solution: Key words gap-fill (Appendix 2). The teacher hands out a short script with
only grammar words in it. The teacher asks the learners if they can make sense of
the text. S/He then tells the learners that the important words are missing on their
scripts, listen and fill them in. Learners listen and fill in the gaps, the teacher pauses
after each sentence. When learners have completed the tasks, the teacher asks
them if they noticed anything about how they heard the words that they had on the
paper and the words they were filling the gaps with.
Evaluation: Raising awareness activities are the great tool to draw students’ attention
to the weak forms as Kelly advocates “in many cases, the simple awareness of their
Many learners, e.g. my Chinese University students are unaware of the fact that
different genres have a quite predictable structure, also known as the script (Brown,
2000:6) which they could use to their advantage while listening to a text. Very often
they rely on only their bottom-up processing while the top-down or better
combination of both would be much more effective “knowledge of the syntax of the
target language and real-world knowledge” (Brown, 2006) e.g. they don’t know the
hook comes fist and cannot use this to anticipate the further information.
Solution: Teacher asks learners about what kind of information we normally hear in
the news and if we hear it in any particular order. Learners are given pieces of the
news on the separate cards (Appendix 3), first they put them in the correct order,
then match them with the label cards: hook, what, when, who, how, summary.
Learners compare their answers, the teacher gives corrections if needed. Learners
then listen to another piece of news to check if the information is presented in the
same pattern.
Aim: To make learners aware of the script and structure of the news reports and how
allowing them to focus on the structure, hopefully showing them that knowledge of
world (formal schemata) helps us to anticipate the kind of information we might hear
and when we predict our brain will be “activated” to help us better understand but
also knowing they structure of the particular genre can support the understanding of
the text.
information
A colleague of mine who works in Poland has noticed that her students find it difficult
to understand the news reports because they don't know which words they should
focus on. My students of the same nationality on the general English courses in
England struggle with it too. They can identify grammatical structures, but are unable
to use them for general understanding of the main points. E.g. when hearing the
piece of information from the news that is in the active voice: BBC launches the
online NHS tracker, they will not associate the active voice with the importance of
Solution: Teacher plays the longer version of one of the news stories (Appendix 4)
(but not a headline). Learners listen to get a general idea of who, where and what
happened.
The teacher checks the gist and if learners know anything about this story. Students
listen again, now they need to note down the main points of the story. Students are
then asked to write a dramatic headline for the story based on the ideas they
collected. Teacher plays the headline and learners compare. They then discuss the
Evaluation: If the learners succeeded, (they wrote the headline in the present tense,
active voice) The teacher draws their attention to the grammatical forms of the
sentences they got the main ideas from, and ask the learners to notice the
similarities between sentences and the headline. If learners failed, the teacher will
ask them to underline the present tense sentences and help them to make
12 |Katarzyna Malkowska – Helping Upper-Intermediate learners to use listening subskills to
understand News Reports
connections with the headline, since they will be the sentences with the main
(student’s ability to control their own learning (Vandergrift and Goh, 2012)).
5. Conclusion:
Working on this assignment has been a real eye opener. It made me understand the
give them metacognitive tools to continue developing them outside the classroom.
6. Bibliography:
Books
University Press.
Vandergrift, L., Goh, C. (2012). Teaching and Learning Second Language Listening.
White, G. (2010), Listening- Resource Books for Teachers, Oxford University Press
Online articles:
https://www.slideshare.net/jonsaward/tv-news-language
https://www.thenewsmanual.net/Manuals%20Volume%202/volume2_48.htm
http://www.scales.me.uk/2010/09/structure-of-tv-news/
Appendix 1
Part 1
2. He was the actor inside one of the world's most famous and best loved robots
Kenny Baker who played r2d2 in the Star Wars films has died at the age of 81
3. Hundreds of residents of the northern Syrian town of Man Bij who were used as
human shields by Islamic state militias have been freed. There’ve been scenes of joy
and relief as they celebrated their freedom in the streets.
Part 2
1. EMERGENCY, LOUISIANA, RAIN, CAUSED, FLOODING
Text taken from World News Today - BBC News Channel + BBC World News Aug 13:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6-ehUzruDc
Appendix 2
Raising awareness of the weak forms
Appendix 3
seriously impressive
Tom Harrison aka Mr. gorilla is
Where
while wearing an ape costume has been
from extinction.
Appendix 4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_Rcn-iO2qM