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Decoding Skills: A Neglected Part of Listening Comprehension?

The document discusses how decoding skills, such as identifying sounds and words, are an important but often neglected part of listening comprehension. While activities commonly focus on using context clues and prior knowledge to understand meaning, listeners must also be able to decode what is said through connected speech patterns. Less proficient listeners may struggle to decode and thus cannot effectively apply top-down comprehension processes. The author argues for including more listening activities that specifically target developing decoding abilities, especially for lower-level language learners.

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Rigel Lima
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56 views2 pages

Decoding Skills: A Neglected Part of Listening Comprehension?

The document discusses how decoding skills, such as identifying sounds and words, are an important but often neglected part of listening comprehension. While activities commonly focus on using context clues and prior knowledge to understand meaning, listeners must also be able to decode what is said through connected speech patterns. Less proficient listeners may struggle to decode and thus cannot effectively apply top-down comprehension processes. The author argues for including more listening activities that specifically target developing decoding abilities, especially for lower-level language learners.

Uploaded by

Rigel Lima
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© © All Rights Reserved
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
Download as docx, pdf, or txt
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Decoding skills: a neglected part of listening

comprehension?

17 May 2012 by Oxford University Press ELT 18 Comments

Rachael Roberts, a teacher, teacher trainer and author, discusses the often neglected
use of decoding skills in listening comprehension.

When you sing along to a song, are you sure you’ve got the right words?
Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody contains the line, ‘Scaramouche, Scaramouche, will you
do the Fandango?’, but it is often misheard as ‘will you do the banned tango?’

The Police, actually sang ‘When the world is running down, you make the best of what
is still around’, not ‘you make the best home-made stew around.’
Amusing, but the point is a serious one. When we listen, there are two sets of
processes taking place simultaneously:

1 Meaning building or top down processes


 Drawing upon knowledge of the world, topic or culture.
 Understanding literal meaning
 Selecting relevant information
 Recognising redundant information
 Connecting ideas
 Making inferences

2 Decoding or bottom up processes


 Identifying sounds
 Working out where words begin and end
 Dealing with unknown words
 Recognising where clauses and phrases end
 Making use of sentence stress
 Recognising chunks of language
Over the last few decades, there has been much more emphasis on the first set of
processes. We are all familiar with activities where we activate students’ knowledge
about a topic, encourage them to make predictions and select or reject the information
they hear in order to answer comprehension questions. And these activities are useful;
they just aren’t the whole picture. A good listener is also carrying out the second set of
processes, and these decoding processes can be very challenging for the English
language learner.

Decoding is made particularly difficult by all the features of connected speech.

For example:
‘Will you do the banned tango’ : the final /d/ in ‘banned’ elides into the ‘t’ of tango,
making it sound very similar to ‘Fandango’. Especially if you don’t know what a
Fandango is (it’s a kind of dance, not as well known as the Tango).

Good listeners are able to use world knowledge (such as what a fandango is), together
with ability to decode. If they can’t decode, perhaps because the speaker is inaudible,
they can predict from their knowledge of syntax. Given a sentence like ”When the world
is running down, you make the best …… ‘, they think about what it is that the person
might make the best one of (though stew is a slightly bizarre choice, even if it does
begin with the same consonant cluster as ‘still’!)

Recent research, however, suggests that less efficient listeners have to put so much
energy into decoding that they can’t use their meaning building skills effectively. They
simply can’t hold onto enough of the meaning to make connections between different
parts of the text. So, as well as providing practice of the top down/meaning building
skills, there is a clear argument for more listening activities which focus specifically on
developing decoding skills, especially at lower levels, where students have more limited
vocabulary.

https://oupeltglobalblog.com/2012/05/17/decoding-skills-a-neglected-part-of-listening-
comprehension/

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