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saxelmwifo enis swavlebis sakiTxebi:
problemebi da gamowvevebi
Issues of State Language Teaching;
Problems and Challenges
8. The role of a candidate, as of a listener, should be taken into account during the text compilation
and assessment. A candidate can perform the following roles during the listening process: a) The conversation
participant, who can listen and talk; b) addressee, whom the speaker directly addresses, but the addressee does
not have enough ability to respond (for example, a listener at the traditional lecture); c) An auditor, who cannot
respond at all and he is not even expected to answer (for example, the listener of the radio broadcast). This
process is also known as “listening during one-sided communication”; d) The co-listener is not an addressee,
he is a casual listener, who is not expected to respond. A candidate will appear before cognitive requirements
of different levels according to the role, which he performs. For example, if he playsan active role of the conversation
participant, he can recheck the meaning of the heard words by the reaction of other participants of
the conversation. But at the same time, during the process of speaking, he must think of his own speech. This
hampers him to understand the speech of an interlocutor. The role of the co-listener is problematic with regard
to testing, as during listening to the conversation of the strangers, the co-listener does not have the knowledge
of the situation and consituation, that may make it impossible to understand the conversation (Grotjan, 2000,
P. 120; Brown, 1995, P.59; Paschke, 2001, P.151-165).
9. The specificities of the audiotext and the character of instructions of the tasks condition the difficulty
of the tasks, accompanied by the listened text. For example, we should not select “polyvalent by content”
“conceptually difficult” texts (Grotjan, 2000, P. 47) in order to check the listening skills. Other characteristic
features of cognitive-conceptual difficulty of texts for listening are mentioned in the scientific literature
and it is remarked that the texts are comparatively easy to understand for a candidate if:
- There is a small amount of the referents (individuals, objectives) given in these texts;
- The referents are clearly separated from each other;
- Local directions are less complex;
- The sequence of factual narration corresponds to the sequence of the events;
- It is not necessary to understand the listened as a result of complicated logical conclusions;
- The content of the text is coherent and clearly formulated (Brown, 1995).
Due to the above-mentioned difficulties the learners of foreign languages develop specific fear of understanding
the speech in a foreign language which blocks the process of understanding.
Proceeding from the above said, a number of conclusions can be made to develop the skills of listening
and draw up such tests in which the origin of the group of learners will be considered (from the point of view
interference peculiarities), its homogeneous and heterogeneous character, the general language competence,
lexico-grammatical and phonetic-phonological (in the first place, on the level of perception perceiving the
sounds and words discriminating and indentifying them, developing the skill of recognizing and perceiving
such phonetical phenomena as the stress melody, assimilation, reduction, etc., to be able to segment the oral
text in a foreign language); also the skill of recognizing everyday authentic oral speech, its tempo and other
important peculiarities. For the listeners who do not know the foreign language well we should choose a less
spontaneous audiotext. Its less difficult accompanying assignments should be given beforehand. In the text
that will be given for listening the elements of everyday speech must be presented with less frequency. We
should not select, “conceptually difficult” texts, the style of listening must be mainly global and selective,
with little background noise. As for the roles of the listeners for testing the role of an addressee or especially
that of an auditor are preferable.
In a real communication situation the listener uses both the acoustic and visual channels. Therefore,
proceeding from the situation (the place of communication, the people, taking part in the communication, their
gestures and mimicry) he/she can understand the intention of the speaker better, and accordingly, perceive and
remember, the received information better. If there is no visual component, it is considerably more difficult
for the foreign language learner to understand what he hears. It is true, “that, the General European Framework
of Reference pays attention to the relevance of the development of the audiovisual reception (with regard
to films and television), in the tests, checking the understanding of what was listened to, the visual component
remains beyond attention. Evidently, including the video material into the test is hampered due to
technical organizational reasons, though, of course, including the visual component into the test, e.g. commercials,
a segment of a film, etc. would make the test more objective (Ginther, 2002, P. 165-167). Part of the
scholars think it expedient to use a dictation to check the skill of understanding of what one has listened to,
and its integration into such assignments as the transfer of information, multiple choice, circling correct/wrong
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