Teaching and Assessing Listening - Week 5 - Listening in Language Acquisition

Introduction: Hello and welcome to Week 5 of the course Teaching and Assessing Listening for the master's in English teaching at ULACIT term IIICO 2022. As you remember, this course has three primary strands: understanding listening comprehension, strategies for teaching listening, frameworks for assessing listening. In today's class we will explore the final topics related to our first strand to form a detailed theoretical understanding of the psychological mechanisms of listening comprehension. This week's lesson will consider similarities and differences between listening development between first and second language learners.

Today's Goals:

• Listen to speaker interactions and identify when conversational maxims are broken and why.
• Explore differences between development of listening processes between L1 and L2 acquisition.

Guiding Questions: 

• What are the unwritten rules that allow us to cooperate during successful communication?
• What are the similiarities and differences between L1 and L2 listening development?

Warm Up: Exploring Compliments as Speech Acts

Last week we were introduced to Speech Act Theory that asserts that utterences represent speaker intentions and that they can fall into various categories. For our first activity tonight, let's take a look at one common speech act, compliments, and see how it can give us a deeper understanding of the hidden dynamics of pragmatics and social interaction. Click your group link and follow the instructions in the document.

• Group 1: CLICK HERE
• Group 2: CLICK HERE

Topic 1: Review of Pragmatic Considerations

Let's take a moment to review some key ideas from last week. Click the group link below and follow the teacher's instructions. 

• Group Link: CLICK HERE 

Topic 2: Violating Grice's Maxims

Let's explore this topic more. Click play on the embedded video and add the names of your group members when it asks for your nickname. Be sure not to include punctuation (commas or periods) since the system won't understand. 

Topic 3: Initial Thoughts about Listening and Language Acquisition

Click your group link to discuss some of the topics from your reading with your partners. Be sure to have your study guide ready in case you need to reference it.

• Group 1: CLICK HERE
• Group 2: CLICK HERE

Topic 4: Theory in Detail

Let's explore some of the main concepts from the reading in more detail. Follow along with your instructor.

 Not working?: CLICK HERE

References:

Rost, M. (2026). Teaching and Researching Listening (3rd ed.). Routledge.