This afternoon I had the chance to attend a lecture by the well known material writter and teacher trainer Jeff Stranks which was organized by CUP here in Recife. The topic was : "Listening, Lexis, Learning". The speaker argued that it is essentially important to enlarge students' vocabulary perception when teaching listening. He believes that developing students' listening skills is rather unnecessary since the learners are already profficient in their mother tongue. For him, the problem is not that they do not have these skills. In fact, the problem is the English language itself. Students will understand a spoken text if their vocabulary range is large enough, and if their perception of those words in connected speech is accurate.
In part, I do agree with what he said. On the other hand, this is just a tip of a huge iceberg. Understanding spoken language goes far beyond pronunciation and vocabulary. If we view language only as sentences we are neglecting its real nature which is discourse. Words occur in sentences, sentences occur in texts, and texts occur in discourse. When people communicate through spoken language they produce meaning through interaction. That means that they make use of their intercultural and social competence, linguistic competence, pragmatic competence, strategic competence, and so forth, all at the same time.
It could be true that the first step to understand spoken language is to undestand interconnected words in sentences. However, the meaning of a spoken production in real communication lies beyond the words most of the times. Implied meaning, social factors, cultural aspects, different speakers, different situations, grammar, pronunciation, etc, work all together to convey meaning. Obviously, our students will not get all that in a blink of an eye. It demands time, dedication and awareness. But, we should bear in mind that listening is not restricted to the pronunciation of words and sentences.
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