The concept of «listening comprehension» should be considered from the psycholinguistic point of view, while «listening» from the methodological point of view. Since the features of the listening comprehension skill is a component of verbal activity. It is also worth noting that auditing is a complex multilevel type of speech activity. Thus, the purpose of this article is to study the peculiarities of auditing as a type of speech activity. The object of this article is the peculiarities of the listening-perceptual skill.
Keywords: auditing, speech activity, linguistics, phonetics, skills.
The problem of the quality of students' speech training seems to be very relevant, because due to the demand for foreign languages in the modern world there is an increasing demand for an optimal balance between the number of graduates, the quality of their knowledge and the demand for them. Qualitative development of auditory comprehension skill can contribute to the formation of graduate's key competences necessary for solving various tasks both in professional and social spheres. The development of students' auditory comprehension involves the creation of such conditions in the process of teaching students foreign language communication that would promote the development of their information processing skills using modern information technologies, positive transfer of the existing skills to new situations of professional activity [1].
The first necessary speech activity for mastering communication is listening and listening comprehension. Listening is an active thought process aimed at perceiving, recognizing, and understanding new speech messages every time, which involves creative combination of skills and their active application in correspondingly changed situations to the features of the speech stream. Thus semantic hearing speech perception is a perceptual speech activity, which is carried out as a result of a number of complex logical operations, such as:
— analysis;
— synthesis;
— deduction;
— induction;
— comparison;
— abstraction, concretization, etc. [2]
As part of the formation of auditing as a type of speech activity. The semantic processing of an audio text is considered as a three-level model. The first stage of the semantic processing of the audio text is the perception of the subject situation. At this stage, the primary perception of the text is formed. The clarification of the subject situation in the audio text occurs at the second level — the construction of the content scheme of the text. The final phase of comprehension is the construction of the semantic model of speech activity. Here occurs the understanding of the general idea of the statement and one's own evaluation of what one has heard. Within the framework of this model it is necessary to activate the mechanisms of auditory memory, internal utterance, recognition and logical understanding.
The analytic-synthetic stage of perception and understanding of a sound message implies step-by-step performance of consistently complicating mental operations:
— comparing the perceived language units with the perceptual standards stored in memory;
— detecting and singling out language units from the speech stream;
— giving out correspondences of the perceived language units with perceptual standards;
— establishment of semantic connections between parts of the text.
Critical listening is associated with a deep understanding of audio information, which is often meaningfully complex and is not limited to simple recognition of language signs, and often the content plan of what is heard is broader than the plan of expression. Hidden meaning, implicitness, and understatement are very often realized in speech with the help of subtext, presupposition (past experience of communicants), and the conclusion that the recipient of the message himself makes. The effectiveness of attention and the listening process depends on subjective and objective factors (noise and interference, acoustic, room characteristics). Subjective factors include the listener's gender, type of nervous system, temperament, and intellectual ability. Situational listening represents listening to the teacher's speech and relies on extralinguistic and paralinguistic factors, is a psychological act of natural communication, justified by the need to understand information, forms the psychological mood for the perception of foreign language speech, promotes the switch from the native language base to the foreign language, the formation of appropriate speech reactions, prompting the act of speech. Listening comprehension is a multilevel process characterized by the unity of perceptual and semantic components, the specificity of the object, subject and result of activity, the active nature of information acquisition and processing.
When teaching listening comprehension it is necessary to form the following skills:
— highlight the main thing, not paying attention to the details that are not essential for understanding the main content, discarding the secondary things;
— to reach an understanding of this main information, showing speech activity and initiative;
— ignore language difficulties and obstacles.
The executive stage of perception of the sound message is completed by the birth of inference, comprehension and understanding of the sound message. In many works of domestic researchers perception and understanding of speech are considered as a single process [3]. Perception and recognition of a speech message by ear may be associated with difficulties of an objective nature, independent of the listener. The complexity of perception can be due to the linguistic complexity of speech messages, their correspondence to the speech experience and knowledge of students. Psychophysical features of students play an important role in the perception of foreign language speech by ear:
— the degree of development of speech hearing;
— improvement of memory;
— concentration of attention, etc.
Successful listening also depends on the listener's ability to transfer the skills and abilities developed in the native language to the foreign language. Of great importance are such individual characteristics of the learner as resourcefulness and ingenuity, the ability to listen and respond quickly to all kinds of signals of oral communication (pauses, logical accents, rhetorical questions), the ability to switch from one thought operation to another, quickly enter the problem of the message. Taking into account the different functions of listening in the learning process, different levels of listening comprehension, the following types of listening are distinguished:
— with full comprehension (speech of the trainer and trainee, if it does not contain unfamiliar phenomena);
— with comprehension of the main content (e.g. listening to authentic functional texts in order to determine what they are about);
— with selective comprehension (e.g., listening to an announcement);
— listening with critical appraisal.
The mechanism of inner speech plays an important role in the process of perception and understanding of speech by ear. Internal speech is realized through a universal subject code, which has a common structure for processing both verbal information and information about reality coming through different sensory perception organs.
Thus, listening comprehension can be carried out with different goals, and in many ways the goal of listening is determined by the nature of the text used for listening. The development of all listening skills implies the use of texts of different genre and stylistic affiliation. It is possible to train different listening strategies on the basis of one text, but conditions must be specially created to motivate students to extract certain information from speech.
Through authentic listening materials, students are exposed to the culture of the country of the target language. The use of culturally relevant content of students' learning activities helps prepare them to solve professional problems in an intercultural context of communication. At the initial stage of learning, because of the complexity of the semantic content, the speech should be presented many times. The first listening is important for understanding the overall situational context. After the second listening, exercises are performed to clarify the students' understanding of the text. The third listening is offered for self-check of the correctness of the tasks. Taking into account the main linguistic and psychological features of listening comprehension of foreign language speech, it seems reasonable to use some methodological techniques at each of the stages. The pre-development stage is aimed not only at removing linguistic and semantic difficulties, but also at awakening the listener's interest in the topic presented, as a result of which students develop confidence that their knowledge and skills are sufficient for the development of speech activity. Researchers in the field of psycholinguistics distinguish two main groups of theories of listening comprehension:
— perceptual theories, or theories of speech perception, which reflect the procedure of receiving and recognizing words;
— theories of speech comprehension, which describe the procedures of conceptualization and semantic processing of information in the reception of speech messages [4].
P. A. Lankyn offers a different typology of levels of perception and understanding of speech activity:
— level of fragmentary understanding;
— general / global understanding level;
— level of full / detailed understanding;
— the level of critical understanding [5].
The success of perception and understanding of the whole text is determined by the logical-meaningful and compositional-meaningful structure of the sounding text, the style of presentation and the genre of the text. The listener relies on phonological, lexical and intonational markers and pauses, which clarify the meaning of a speech statement and allow to understand the semantic content of the text. Of course, the process of perceiving and understanding a text by ear is much more complex than the process of perceiving and understanding an individual utterance. An audible speech message stimulates the activity of the listener, which manifests itself in the process of prediction, in the rejection and confirmation of hypotheses based on the comparison of the properties of the speech signal with the reference available in memory.
The level of general understanding implies, first of all, understanding of the topic of the sounding message, which is based on the recognition of key reference words. This level of understanding is characterized by the formation of perceptual-meaning skills and listening skills, knowledge of basic lexical units and grammatical structures, the ability to apply speech experience, i.e. to consider the situation of communication, additional visual information, as well as background knowledge. The formation of listening skills, providing perception of non-adapted texts of professional orientation, skills of comprehension of the general idea of the sound message, compression and writing down the text of lectures, is the ultimate goal of the formation of speech activity. To ensure that the level of formation of listening skills of foreign students at the stage of preparation meets the needs of their successful inclusion in the educational process, a methodologically correct organization of the process of speech activity training is required.
Thus, with the help of audiovisual media and by selecting a variety of interesting material and exercises is possible to make the process of learning listening enjoyable, able to maintain a high level of motivation of students and to form a lasting interest in learning a foreign language.
References:
- Eryilmaz D., Darn S. A nonverbal communication lesson // Izmir University of Economics. — 4(2). — 2005. — PP. 102–109.
- Domenech F. A., Gomez A. The relationship among students’ and teachers’ thinking styles, psychological needs and motivation // In Learning and Individual Differences. — 2(9). — 2016. — PP. 89–97.
- Morgan A. P. Peculiarities of auditing. — Oxford: Oxford press, 2018. — 26.
- Morine D. G. Verbal activity. — New York: Longman, 2005. — 93.
- Lankyn P. A. Development of speech activity. — London: Inter, 2017. — 210.
