Listening Skills in Reading

Birch, B. (2011). (2nd Ed.) English L2 Reading: Getting to the Bottom. New York, NY: Routledge, ch. 4

Salient Points:

Phonics (phonemic processing) is the phonemic to graphemic awareness, or the ability to match sounds and letters. Good listeners will be good readers. Earlier in life, English is acquired, but children still need to practice accurate pronunciation. They need lots of aural and oral focused lessons, so they can discriminate between two different sounds. English has twelve vowel sounds, a lot more than the assumed five. Letter identification is called decoding and forming an abstract mental image that is matched with the letters is called recoding. When a child hears a word, the child "hears" it in his or her mind.

When a child first starts to read, they go through a process known as subvocalizing, which is silently saying the words as they read them. Oral reading is not effective for comprehension. It only suffices to improving pronunciation. Children are too focused on correct pronunciation that they lose focus on the story itself.

Phones are the sounds produced in speech. An individual's speech is called his or her voice print. There are two types of sounds in letters--voiceless (no vibrations in the vocal chords) and voiced (vibration in the vocal chords). Oral sounds happen when air passes through the mouth and nasal sounds happen when air passes through the noise. Vowel sounds depend on the tongue position.

Some Facts about Words:

• A phoneme is an abstract symbol that is not produced.
• Allophones are the same as a phonemes, but are pronounced differently.
• Suprasegmental features of the word are the stress and intonation.
• When talking about suprasegmental features of a language, Spanish is syllable timed and English depends on phrasal stress.

ELLs need to be aware of the phonemes (phonemic awareness), but they do not need to pronounce them perfectly. They just need to be able to discriminate between sounds. They can acquire phonemic awareness with games, nursery songs and rhymes, Dr. Seuss, etc. They can also clap out the different syllables.

Implications:

We as ESL/EFL teachers need to know all the little details of our language, English, in order to teach it. If we know all the details and how they relate or differ to other languages, we can figure out the best ways to teach it to ELLs of various languages. For example, if we know that Spanish speakers rely on syllables, we can teach them about the phrasal components of English and about stress and intonation. If we know about voiced and voiceless sounds, we can teach pronunciation a little bit better and help struggling students. For example, Japanese speakers have trouble with the letter "r," especially when it is in a blend with another consonant like "dr." This struggle is actually similar to native English speakers, who pronounce the "r" in that blend as a "w." We can teach lessons that deal with this problem and get a lot of aural and oral practice in.

Another thing we as teachers can take out of this chapter is that we cannot assume that students know how to read if they can pronounce all the words. That is just decoding. Of course we want our students to be able to do that, but we must all teach reading comprehension. When I was an EFL teacher, I used to have my students read aloud a lot, which is fine, because in the country where I was teaching, pronunciation and the desire to speak English without a foreign accent was a priority. But this lesson did not teach reading comprehension. My employers made the incorrect assumption about decoding. Now that I know the theory, if I ever encounter a school like that again, I can teach the administration the true nature of reading.