Judging ease and difficulty of aural input
Reflection task 9
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What are your instinctive criteria for judging whether a listening passage is 'easy' or 'difficult' for your learners? Note down your criteria. After you have read this section, come back and compare your ideas with those developed here. |
There seem to be no hard and fast rules for distinguishing an 'easy' from a 'difficult' listening passage, since notions of 'ease' and 'difficulty' for learner will depend on
- the passage (the speakers, the language used, the structure, the content);
- the listening task;
- the learner.
For example, the task of identifying three pieces of key information, such as the date, time and place for an appointment, in a long dialogue is likely to be easier than summarizing a much shorter, but denser monologue, such as an item from a news bulletin. Listening to a recording of someone you know talking about something you know about is likely to be easier to understand, even if the speech is faster, than in a recording of someone you don't know talking about something that you know nothing about. If you have been given some idea of the possible content of a listening passage (for example, in some kind of pre-listening task), then you will find it easier to understand than without any such preparation.
Apart from opportunities for interaction, mentioned in Section 5.2.1, four factors generally contribute to comprehension ease/difficulty:
- the density and complexity of the information contained in the passage;
- the speed of delivery;
- the learner's familiarity with the topic;
- the predictability of the content and the structure of the talk.
In what follows, we review each of these points in turn.
