Stage 3 guidelines for listening: Discourse

Here is a discourse objective for Stage 3 for listening:

• To understand the following types of discourse (in addition to those you already understand):

  • Most dialogue between mother-tongue speakers
  • Descriptions of places or things you have never seen
  • Instructions on how to make something new to you
  • Song lyrics
  • Theatrical productions or films
  • Media broadcasts
  • Some professional or scholarly speeches containing argumentation and hypothesis

Here are some discourse strategies for Stage 3 guidelines for listening:

• Analysis

  Work toward discovering the scripts for predictable communication situations. Familiarize yourself with each type of discourse (especially in a village setting), and what makes them each distinctive: proverb, folktale, hortatory, and so forth.

• Top-down processing

  Use your familiarity with the subject matter or your knowledge of what happened to help you understand stories and descriptions.

• Repeated attention

  Listen to taped stories over and over until you can understand them.

Here are some discourse techniques for Stage 3 guidelines for listening:

• The Familiar Stories technique
• The Shared Experiences technique
• The Script Analysis technique
• The Picture Descriptions technique
• The Series technique

Here are some discourse activities for Stage 3 guidelines for listening:

• The Social Visiting activity

• Any activity that exposes you to comprehensible input
• • Listen for different scripts in a wider range of social situations
  • Watch television, listen to the radio, and go to films, if available
  • Join clubs or associations where people sit and talk
  • Join a choir
  • Join a professional association

• Generic module: Stage 3 guidelines for listening: Discourse
• In overview module: Stage 3: 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