Helping Lower Level Students Develop Bottom-Up Listening To Identify Pronunciation Features

Helping Lower Level StudentsDevelop Bottom-Up Listening to Identify Pronunciation FeaturesBy Angga Kramadibrata

Written as a LSA for the Cambridge Delta

Name: Angga KramadibrataAssignment Title: Helping lower level students develop bottom up

listening to identify pronunciation features

CONTENTS PAGE

PAGE

Introduction 3

Analysis 4

Issues and suggestions for teaching 7

Bibliography 12

Appendices 14

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1. Introduction

In this paper I will look at bottom-up listening skills, specifically those needed to help students recognise features of pronunciation so they can more easily identify words while listening. Both bottom-up andtop-down skills will be defined in section 2.1.

Even though Vandergrift (2004:4-5) refers to multiple studies that show both bottom-up and top-down processes are critical in comprehension (Lynch, 1998, 2002; Mendelsohn, 1998; Oxford, 1993; Rost, 2002; and Rubin, 1994), he goes on to say that because lower level students have a narrower knowledge of language, they haveto process language at a smaller level; phrases, words, even syllable level. In fact, “most errors in listening comprehension were caused by students’ mishearing individual words - a failure of the bottom-up process.” (Wilson, 2008:15)

I have found that my lower-level students often have difficulties comprehending speech even when they know all the words in the text because they can’t identify the individual words in natural speech. Studentscan only understand part of listening texts and have to guess how the fragments of what they hear link together (Richards, 2010:244).

The above reasons show that a student’s ability to recognise words and chunks in natural, connected speech, is paramount to comprehension; especially in real-life situations where the language isn’t graded to their level.

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2. Analysis

2.1. Bottom-up and top-down processing

Bottom-up processes are those the learner uses to construct what they hear piece-by-piece, from the parts to the whole (Field, 2003:326), while top-down processes “invlolve the listener going from the whole -their prior knowledge and their content and rhetorical schemata- to the parts” (Nation and Newton, 2009:40).

It should be pointed out that these types of processing link together (figure 1).

Figure 1. Interaction of top-down and bottom-up processing (Rost, 1990:9) (based on Dechert, 1983)

2.2. Listening subskills

There have been quite a few taxonomies detailing the different subskills in listening, but I will detail a

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combination of what Field (1997:144) and Lynch and Mendelsohn (2002:207) came up with:1. Working out the spelling of unrecognised words (with

words with similar spelling conventions as laugh, cough, enough)

2. Monitoring for key words in a text (this can be donethrough focusing students on stressed words)

3. Discriminating between similar sounds (minimal pairs, such as pin and pen)

4. Identifying words in continuous speech to process and cope with fast speech (knowing word boundaries are a bit fuzzy in natural speech, and learning features of connected speech to overcome this.)

5. Relating pronouns, etc. to the items they refer to. (learners are given the pronouns in advanced and while listening, they have to note who they refer to.)

6. Processing the meaning of different discourse markers (so students can anticipate topic changes intexts)

7. Processing how stress and intonation can change meaning (e.g. stress changes depending on new information; or how question tags, depending on intonation, can mean just asking for confirmation [downward intonation] or asking for a real response [upward intonation])

8. Anticipating what comes next (e.g. when teachers pause a listening in the middle and students have toguess what happens next.

9. Understanding the communicative functions and the non-one-to-one equivalence between form and function(illocuctonary meaning), e.g., “it’s cold in here”. Form: Declarative sentence structure, function: a request that the heater be turned on or a window be opened.

Skills 1-7 are connected to bottom-up processing and8-9 to top-down. That said, students will need prior knowledge of context to fully be able to do skill 7. According to the interactive model, students employ bottom-up and top down processes together to achieve

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comprehension of a text, even compensating for the deficiencies of the other (Swift, 2007a).

I think that the following exercises would be beneficial for lower level students to develop their bottom-up processing:

a. monitoring for key words (skill 2)b. recognising minimal pairs(3)c. identifying connected speech (4)d. relating referents in a text (e.g. pronouns) (5),

and e. listening to stress/intonation to guess meaning (7).

This has to be an easy one such as the question tag example outlined above (2.2.7). This particular exercise also includes top-down processing.

2.3. Bottom-up decoding skills to recognise pronunciation features

Swift (2007b) argues that a focus on systematically teaching phonology is the best way to develop bottom-up processing skills (par 4). She goes on to say that the following decoding skills are particularly suited to it:1. recognising individual phonemes (exercise b, d);2. recognising phoneme subsequences which form words

(b, c);3. recognising word boundaries (c);4. recognising stressed syllables (a);5. recognising intonation contours (e);6. recognising syllable reduction due to weak forms

and/or elision (a, d);7. recognising catenation(a, c); and8. recognising assimilation (a, c).

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All of the decoding skills above are used by students while doing the exercises identified above. I have put in parenthesis the exercises (from section 2.2.)that correspond to the decoding skill.

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3. Issues and suggestions

3.1 Difficulties in understanding longutterances.

Students often find longer utterances difficult to understand, not because they don’t understand the constituent words and phrases, but because of the “limitations on short-term memory load” (Richards, 1983:231).

This is compounded by students trying to focus and hear every single word (Vandergrift, 2004) that they can’t see the forest for the trees. This is something that I have observed lower-level students find particularly difficult.

Once students have the key words in the text, they can then link together the fragments of what they hear and get meaning out of it.

Suggestion for teaching: Listen to a story and develop listening subskill 2.2.2. monitoring for key words in a text by focusing on stressed words.

Aim: To enable students to understand long utterances by usingbottom-up (monitor for key, stressed words) processes.

Procedure: Students listen to a story (like in Appendix A) while noting down the key stressed, words. The teacher will emphasise that students do not have to write all the words down. Then they compare key words with a partner.

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They do this twice or perhaps three times depending on how difficult they find the task. They then in pairs haveto reconstruct the story using the words that they noted down.

Effect on learner:Even though the recording from the website in Appendix A isn’t as natural as it could be it still has value as theman is exaggerating his story and you can really hear thestresses he puts on the key words. I would try this with a class and if necessary I would probably re-record this with another person, taking care to sound more natural. This is so that the students won’t be able to hear all the words clearly so as to be more realistic and be more reflective of the load in real life.

If done successfully students will understand that it is not necessary to catch every single word that a person says as long as you can focus on the key meaning. This will help develop their ability to listen for gist.

3.2 Difficulties in recognising word boundaries

Another reason students find it difficult to understand natural speech is because the ‘dictionary’ pronunciation of words is often changed by how words interconnect in colloquial speech (Thornbury, 2006:47; Underhill, 1994:59)

One example that my students have had trouble in thepast is: “what do you want?” You can say this utterance in a few different ways, the main ones being:1. /ˈwɒdəjəwɒnt/2. /ˈwɒdʒəwɒnt/3. /ˈwɒtʃəwɒnt/

Here, the words what, do, and you are assimilated and lower-level students will find this difficult to

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understand if it isn’t pointed out that words do blend together.

Suggestion for teaching: Raise awareness of connected speech through a song and develop listening subskill 2.2.4. Identifying words in continuous speech.

Aim: To raise students’ awareness of connected speech and develop their ability to recognise them

Procedure: Both appendix B and C can be useful for this. In B, students listen to the song Hey Jude, by The Beatles and have to correct the wrong lyrics, e.g. “and may get better” should be corrected to “and make it better.” Thisis appropriate because:1. The /k/ in “make” (correct lyric) has a delayed

pronunciation, making it sound like: /meɪ kət/, similar to the tonality of /meɪ get/

2. /k/ (in make) and /g/ (in get) are very similar sounds; they are both velar plosive consontants, theonly difference is that /k/ is unvoiced while /g/ isvoiced. (Thornbury, 1997:159).

In appendix C, instead of correcting the wrong lyrics, students see what Rihanna is singing, and have to write the ‘dictionary’ English. E.g. “Whacha tryna hide” becomes “what are you trying to hide.” Both activities are suitable to lower levels, but I would choose the songbased on the interests of the students.

Effect on learner:Here students can see how words in English tend to changepronunciation when not in isolation. This awareness raising will not only help students listening skills but also might encourage them to actually use connected speech while speaking.

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3.3 Difficulties in recognising minimal pairs

I sometimes find my lower-level students incomprehensible because they do not discriminate betweenlong and short vowels. This is connected to listening because a study by Sheldon and Strange (1982) shows that even when students are aware of minimal pairs and can produce them, they can still find it difficult to perceive it when listening. For my Indonesian speakers, “all vowels with the exception of /ə/ are pronounced withmore or less comparable length: bit/beat, pill/peal, full/fool, cot/caught.” (Swan and Smith, 1987:280).

This difficulty in discriminating minimal pairs is not just endemic of Malay and Indonesian speakers; Ur (1984:11) also pointed out that Hebrew speakers find it difficult to differentiate between /i/ and /i:/ (fit/feet, bin/been).

Suggestion for teaching: Raise awareness of minimal pairs and develop listening subskill 2.2.3. discriminating between similar sounds.

Aim: To raise awareness of how minimal pairs can change meanings of words and to develop students ability to discriminate between similar sounds.

Procedure: It would be best if students were taught the phonetic symbols in a previous lesson.

First students listen to a live listening activity in which the teacher reads out a short story with minimal pairs (Appendix E) and the students have to reconstruct it with a partner.

After feedback, the teacher will highlight the minimal pairs: Ben, bean, bun, burn, bin, and ban. The teacher

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will then use the phonetic chart to show how by only changing the phoneme between /b/ and /n/ you can say a totally different word from what you want.

We can use appendix D for further practice in the discrimination between two phonemes. E.g. when the students hear the short /i/ they have to go left on the map, and if they hear the long /i:/ they go right. The teacher then can read out sentences such as: “I went to Europe last week on a sheep/ship” and students have to follow the prompt. After students are comfortable the teacher can provide sentences to the students so they cando it in pairs while the teacher monitors.

Effect on learner:As mentioned above, even if the students can produce the minimal pairs, they still might find it difficult to recognise them (Sheldon and Strange, 1982); the above procedure focuses the learner into the specific subskill of discriminating individual sounds and has enough practice that it will help them develop. There is also a variety of different inputs, from a relatively extended text (the teacher’s live listening of a story), single utterances (sentences used for practice in appendix D), and single words (when highlighting minimal pairs).

3.4 Difficulties in recognising the weak form

Vowel reduction is vital in creating the rhythms of the English language; helping students recognise and produce weak forms can develop their listening (Underhill, 1994:64). In a study by Anderson and Lynch (1988) cited by Nunan (1991:25) one particularly difficult type of functional word that has weak forms is the pronoun.

I was once quite surprised that a lower-intermediatestudent couldn’t respond when I asked “where have you

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been?” as we had just reviewed the present perfect a few weeks back. It turned out that she couldn’t recognise thereduced forms of have (/həv/), you (/yə/), and been (/bɪn/).

Suggestion for teaching: Raise awareness of the weak form and do live listening for weak forms

Aim: To raise awareness of weak forms in English, and to develop students ability to recognise them.

Procedure: It would be best if students had been taught sentence stress in a previous class.

Learners first hear the script in Appendix F, modelled bythe teacher, and asked to clap the rhythm of the script. The second time, they do it again quietly and pay attention to the unstressed words.

Students then compare how they say the individual words to how the teacher says the words in an utterance. This will raise awareness of how some words, when not stressed, will reduce to the weak form. Then, students practice reading the script in pairs, paying attention totheir partner’s stress and weak forms. During this the teacher will monitor, support and model where necessary.

Effect on learner:Thornbury (1997:167) calls these types of texts “jazz texts”, saying that they are meant for students to hear and practice the rhythm of the language. If this activityis done “musically”, with an emphasis on beats, rhythms and melody (intonation), it can cater to multiple intelligences and can show students that rhythm is essential in English (Underhill, 1994:64).

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As this activity is both receptive and productive, it canmodel different types of English. There will be English from a proficient language user (the teacher) as well as that of a lower proficient user (the students). This willbe a better reflection to what students will have to dealwith in the real world.

Conclusion

Brown (1986:286) pointed out that many types of listening task only give opportunities to practice without developing students’ listening skills. I believe that doing the above tasks that focus on the bottom-up processes will train lower-level students to be better listeners, as opposed to just testing their listening ability.

Bibliography

Brown, G. (1986, 12). Investigating Listening

Comprehension in Context. Applied Linguistics,

7(3), 284-302. doi: 10.1093/applin/7.3.284

Field, J. (2003, 12). Promoting perception: Lexical

segmentation in L2 listening. ELT Journal, 57(4),

325-334. doi: 10.1093/elt/57.4.325

Field, J. (2008). Listening in the language classroom.

Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Nation, I. S., & Newton, J. (2009). Teaching ESL/EFL

listening and speaking. New York: Routledge.

Nunan, D. (1991). Language teaching methodology: A textbook for

teachers. New York: Prentice Hall.

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Richards, J. C. (1983, 12). Listening Comprehension:

Approach, Design, Procedure. TESOL Quarterly,

17(2), 219. doi: 10.2307/3586651

Richards, J. C. (2010). Methodology in language teaching:

An anthology of current practice. Cambridge:

Cambridge Univ. Press.

Richards, J. C. (2009). Teaching listening and speaking:

From theory to practice. Singapore: SEAMEO Regional

Language Centre.

Rost, M. (1990). Listening in language learning. London:

Longman.

Sheldon, A., & Strange, W. (1982, 12). The acquisition of

/r/ and /l/ by Japanese learners of English:

Evidence that speech production can precede speech

perception. Applied Psycholinguistics, 3(03), 243. doi:

10.1017/S0142716400001417

Swan, M., & Smith, B. (1987).Learner English: A teacher's guide to

interference and other problems. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

Thornbury, S. (2006). An A-Z of ELT: A dictionary of

terms and concepts used in English language

teaching. Oxford: Macmillan Education.

Thornbury, S. (1997). About language: Tasks for teachers

of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Underhill, A. (1994). Sound foundations. Oxford:

Heinemann.

Ur, P. (1984). Teaching listening comprehension. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.

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Vandergrift, L. (2004, 12). 1. Listening To Learn Or

Learning To Listen? Annual Review of Applied

Linguistics, 24. doi: 10.1017/S0267190504000017

Wilson, J. (2008). How to teach listening. Harlow:

Pearson Education.

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Appendices

Appendix A

A story to remember: http://www.esl-lab.com/story1/story1.htm

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Appendix B

Taken from: hancockmcdonald.com https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CCEQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fhancockmcdonald.com%2Fmaterials%2Fwrong-lyrics-2&ei=5WFTVOO8AY2UaNjqgPAM&usg=AFQjCNHTxkWoWIkcwlB42nl7Xha9vnh6hQ&sig2=ZC4OcXKNsRJt9xq9l_v0Gg

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Appendix C

Created by: Tim Keeley, EFL teacher at The British

Institute Paskal, Bandung, Indonesia.

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Appendix D

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From Pronunciation Games by Mark Hancock © Cambridge University Press

1995.

Appendix E

I have a friend called Ben. His landlord has banned from

doing something now. It’s because one day when cooking

beans on a bun for breakfast, he burnt it so he had to

bin it and it really created a stink. So now, his

landlord has banned ben from binning burnt beans and

buns. (Story by: Akhmad Kramadibrata)

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Appendix F

A B

Are you ready?Are you ready?

Not quite. Just a minute.

Hurry up!Hurry up!

Don’t rush me.Don’t rush me.

Come on, Allan,Hurry up!

I’m coming.

Hurry up.

I’m coming.I’m coming.

Hurry up!

All right!

We’ll be late.We’ll be late.

No, we won’t. Don’t Panic.

We’ll be late. No, we won’t.No, we won’t.

Here I am.

At last.At last!

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What’s the rush?

(from Speaking Clearly by P. Rogerson and J. Gilbert, cited

in Thornbury (1997:35))

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Helping Lower Level Students Develop Bottom-Up Listening To Identify Pronunciation Features

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