Listening Comprehension Skill

Listening comprehension is the receptive skill in the oral mode. When we speak of listening what we really mean is listening and understanding what we hear.


In our first language, we have all the skills and background knowledge we need to understand what we hear, so we probably aren't even aware of how complex a process it is. Here we will briefly describe some of what is involved in learning to understand what we hear in a second language.
Listening Situations


There are two kinds of listening situations in which we find ourselves:


interactive, and
non-interactive.



Interactive listening situations include face-to-face conversations and telephone calls, in which we are alternately listening and speaking, and in which we have a chance to ask for clarification, repetition, or slower speech from our conversation partner. Some non-interactive listening situations are listening to the radio, TV, films, lectures, or sermons. In such situations we usually don't have the opportunity to ask for clarification, slower speech or repetition.
Micro-skills


Richards (1983, cited in Omaggio, 1986, p. 126) proposes that the following are the micro-skills involved in understanding what someone says to us. The listener has to:




retain chunks of language in short-term memory
discriminate among the distinctive sounds in the new language
recognize stress and rhythm patterns, tone patterns, intonational contours.
recognize reduced forms of words
distinguish word boundaries
recognize typical word-order patterns
recognize vocabulary
detect key words, such as those identifying topics and ideas
guess meaning from context
recognize grammatical word classes
recognize basic syntactic patterns
recognize cohesive devices
detect sentence constituents, such as subject, verb, object, prepositions, and the like