Stage 1 guidelines for listening: Discourse

Here are some discourse objectives for Stage 1 for listening:

• To understand and use appropriate reference:

  • Which person a pronoun refers to, when that person has been mentioned in a previous sentence
  • What general words may be used to refer to a particular thing or person already mentioned
  • What words can be left out to answer a question if they have been mentioned in the question

• To understand and use connectors appropriately:

  • The words that are most commonly used to connect clauses in a sentence (like in English, "and", "but", and "then")

Here are some discourse strategies for Stage 1 guidelines for listening:

• Analysis

  Look at the pronoun system and conjunctions in the language. Make hypotheses about how they work.

• Practice

  In comprehension activities, work up from simple sentences to ones that require you to understand the connections between two parts of the sentence. For example, in a Total Physical Response activity, once you can understand, "Raise your right hand" and "Sit down" you can ask "the language associate (LA) to say things like, "Raise your right hand and sit down" or "Raise your right hand, but do not sit down." The LA can also work toward using pronouns more naturally in these exercises, " Take a banana, but do not eat it."

• Selective attention

  Once you identify a grammatical feature, such as a pronoun, that is used for reference, listen for it specifically in conversations.

Here are some discourse techniques for Stage 1 guidelines for listening:

• The Simple Question and Answer technique
• The Physical Response techniques
• The Look and Listen techniques

Here is a discourse activity for Stage 1 guidelines for listening:

Listen for the features you have identified, even if you cannot understand the conversations around you.

• Generic module: Stage 1 guidelines for listening: Discourse
• In overview module: Stage 1: Listening modules
• In modular book: Guidelines for a Language and Culture Learning Program, by Carol J. Orwig
• In document collection: Other Resources
• In bookshelf: Language Learning

This page is an extract from the LinguaLinks Library, Version 3.5, published on CD-ROM by SIL International, 1999. [Ordering information.]

Page content last modified: 8 December 1998

© 1999 SIL International