Focus on the Interpretive Mode:
Listening and Reading
pre-semester orientation
August 2007
Four Skills:
Listening, Speaking, Reading, Writing
Three Modes:
Interpersonal, Interpretive, Presentational
Importance of Input for language
acquisition
Comprehensible input or I + 1
Sources of input: teacher talk, other
students, guest speakers, interviews
with native speakers, audio and video
recordings
Think, Pair, Share
Take a couple of minutes to think about the
different types of listening you do in a
typical day. What are the sources of aural
input you are exposed to? For what
purposes do you listen?
Principle: Focus on a wide variety of
texts.
Does your textbook or the materials you
are teaching with provide you with a range
of listening texts representative of the
different listening contexts you encounter
in real life situations?
Some parameters
Collaborative vs. non collaborative
listening
Aural only mode vs. aural + visual
Pedagogical vs. authentic texts
Working with Audio Texts in the Classroom
 Sample
 Critique and suggestions for improvement
Understanding the Listening/
Reading Process
Bottom-up processing
Decoding the linguistic system:
recognizing sounds, words, syntactic
patterns, etc.
Data-driven
Understanding the Listening
Process
Top-Down Processing
Drawing on schemata, background
knowledge, context to make hypotheses
and predictions
Conceptually driven
 Principle: Provide learners with
preparation for the text.
We generally listen/ read in a well-defined
context and hence have certain
expectations about what we will hear /
read.
Pre- Activities
Importance of contextualization: (activating schemata)
Vocabulary preview: present key vocabulary in a context
with a matching exercise)
Think ahead: discussion of questions related to topic of text
Predicting (from pictures, title, graph, key words, etc);
Hypothesizing (what might be included in this type of text?)
Providing background knowledge (cultural information
unknown to student); searching for background information
(send student to library, Web to get information)
 Principle: Provide learners with a
purpose for listening / reading.
Listeners should know what they are
listening/reading for.
Comprehension Tasks
Comprehension questions (give in
advance)
Fill in grid, chart with information from text
Dictation, partial dictation, aural cloze (fill
in blanks in text
Summarize main ideas of passage

Provide learners with the opportunity to listen
for a variety of reasons.
Intensive listening for detail vs. extensive
listening for general ideas vs. pleasure listening.
Listening for the gist (analagous to skimming)
and listening for discrete information (analagous
to scanning).

Provide learners with the opportunity for
recursive listening.
Help learners build up their
comprehension skills by working with the
same text several times, with each task
somewhat more challenging than the
former.

Provide learners with the opportunity to
do something with the information from the
text.
Integrate the interpretive mode with
speaking, writing.
Your Turn
Think of a listening text you might use in the
classroom (weather report, ad, interview,
etc).
Brainstorm: Pre-listening activities
While-listening task
Post-listening task.
Kathryn K. McMahon
Director of Language Programs
Romance Languages
Kmcmahon@ccat.sas.upenn.edu