A guided approach to the development of listening skills

ENGLISH: This paper illustrates an approach to for developing and consolidating listening skills in the (University) foreign language classroom. The underlying principle is that listening strategies can and should be developed along with – rather than in alternative to – exam-taking skills, and that the former can be presented as feasible to both teachers and learners if simple guidelines are followed. More specifically, the activation and expansion of more and more accurate and thorough listening behaviour can be expected to occur with appropriate training, through which the audio-perceptive habits developed under the influence of one’s native language can be re-educated. Thus, listening practice should involve the decodification of text units of increasing syntactic-semantic complexity, which can be facilitated by the provision of visual verbal support. This allows learners to have some control over the oral input they receive, that is, to perceive it as more stable – because partly presented in written form – and also as within one’s reach – because the amount of autonomous decoding required increases slowly over time. This approach favours the gradual processing of the foreign language: it leads learners to notice and identify phonetic and phraseological patterns before automatizing and fine-tuning their decoding skills, and thus finally enriching their receptive repertoire. ITALIAN: L’abilità di ascolto in lingua straniera può essere sviluppata gradualmente, aumentando progressivamente la quantità e complessità della decodifica richiesta. L’addestramento all’ascolto sfrutta la familiarità che hanno gli studenti con il codice scritto per decodificare unità semantiche veicolate nel parlato. Dapprima viene presentato input orale accompagnato da trascrizione scritta completa per facilitarne la comprensione. Successivamente, viene presentato input orale con supporto scritto sempre più ridotto; cioè, da quest’ultimo vengono rimosse unità grammaticali-concettuali di complessità crescente (p. es. morfemi, parole, sintagmi, costituenti frasali, frasi). Infine, vengono solo presentati termini ed elementi contestuali cruciali alla comprensione del brano da ascoltare senza materiale scritto di supporto. Durante l’intero processo, gli studenti sono incoraggiati a sviluppare e consolidare il lessico.