（英语语言文学专业论文）言语听辩与听力教学.pdf

内 容 摘 要 本文介绍了言语听辩的定义分析了言语听辩的四个过程音系过 程词汇过程句法过程和语义过程并对三种言语听辩方法作了簡单 介绍 解释了听力理解的目的和特征 并说明了听力教学的基本原则 根 据听力教学的基本原则和言语听辩理论使用三种不同的方法提出了三 种不同水平的听力练习以帮助学生提高英语听力理解水平 abstract this paper defines the speech perception, and analyses the four processes of speech perception: phonological process, lexical access process, syntactical process and semantic process, introducing the three processing strategies: top-down strategy, bottom-up strategy, and interactive strategy; and it explains the purposes of listening, the features of listening comprehension and the principles of teaching listening comprehension. according to the principles of teaching listening comprehension and the speech processing theory, it provides the suggestions which cover three practical listening levels techniques by using the three different processing strategies: top-down strategy, bottom-up strategy and interactive strategy for helping the students improve the listening skills. 1 introduction speech is one way, the most frequent and important way, in which humans use language to communicate. it is also a language- independent behavior. speech, then, is the audible manifestation of language. by a complex and still rather mysterious process called encoding, a speaker converts an idea in his mind into a stream of sounds; moving his lips, tongue, and jaws in swift, precise gestures, he transmits information in orderly audible segments. when a listener decodes the signal back into an idea in his mind-the same idea, it is hoped, that the speaker intended- the act of oral communication is completed. although the term speech may be used in the limited sense, people use the term speech in the broader sense including the covert thinking processes of language and the overt phonetic processes of speaking. because of this dual use of the term speech, the terms speaking or talking will be used to indicate the motor act of uttering speech sounds by referring to the total expression such as language, the voice, the rhythm, and inflection. this definition of speech implies several things, namely: 1. that it is learned-not instinctive 2. that it is a system -a code or sets of rules 3. that it is arbitrary- no reason exists for any word (symbol) to mean what it does, or for the system as a whole to have the characteristics that it has. 4.that it is vocal 5.that it is a function limited to human beings but how do people gather material from which interpersonal and other levels of speech communication evolve? how do people 2 know what to talk about, and whether what people talk about is worth talking about? how do people organize and use this material so that people can talk about it? the answer to this question is “perception”, the complex processes by which people select, organize, and interpret sensory stimulation into a meaningful picture of world. as people know, “sensory stimulation” can originate from either an external or an internal source. when such stimulation occurs, the incoming sensations are transformed to electrochemical impulses and transmitted that gray piece of meat between the ears commonly known as “the brain.” here, through some processes not yet wellunderstood, people select, organize, and interpret those stimuli in an attempt to categorize, interpret, and store such information as useful in making sense out of their world. this process is sometimes conscious and sometimes subconscious, sometimes rapid and sometimes relatively slow. however it happens, it happens. cognitively, it happens as people select, sort, store and retrieve the stimuli as sensed. and emotionally, people react in various ways depending on their beliefs, attitudes, values, mood and personality. although they can not explain how this all happens, they are sure it does happen. because this process depends so strongly on unique human beings, people feel justified in speaking of perception as a “ creative act.” each percept (the sound signal that is assigned a meaning), from the simplest to the most complex, is the product of a creative act. people can never encounter a stimulus before some meaning has been assigned to it by some perceiver. therefore, each perception(a process of stimulation, selecting, organizing, and interpretation)is beneficiary of all previous perceptions; in turn , each new perception leaves its mark on the common pool. a percept is thus a 3 link between the past experience which gives it its meaning and the future which it helps to interpret. on the basis of a variety of influences, people create meanings for their percepts. their past experiences with identical or similar percepts allow them to organize and interpret each new percept. this, in like fashion, allows them to organize and interpret future percepts. since each one of them is a unique individual with unique experiences and a unique system of beliefs, attitudes, and values, each of people organize and interpret objects, events, and people in a different way. an efficient but not omnipotent brain would soon overload and probably short- circuit. to prevent this information overload, people consciously and subconsciously make selections from among the stimuli available to them. the creative aspect of the perception process intensifies during the third stage-organization. once this organizational stage has taken place, in any event, people assign meaning to the new stimuli. this is the interpretation stage. people select various stimuli, and organize these percepts within their framework of beliefs, attitudes, and values on the basis of their past experiences. now people attempt to make senses out of that part of their world and assign some meaning to what they are currently experiencing until their meaning assumption is interpreted or confirmed. perception, thus, is a complex process made up of four stages-stimulation, selection, organization and interpretation. each participant in a conversation needs to be the listener first. more specifically, people need to be able to work out what speakers mean when they use particular words in particular ways on particular occasions. and not simply to understand the words themselves. people may encounter the interpretation problem. a speaker saying you are 4 late, for example, may be wishing to convey any one of a range of meanings: simply stating the fact that the listener has arrived late, or complaining because she/he has had to wait, or expressing surprise because she/he did not expect you to arrive late. what the speaker means lies only partly in the words spoken, the listener must recognize and interpret the other factors which are used to convey the message to him or her. the main aim of the paper is to guide the teachers to teach listening comprehension more effectively, and to enable the students to participate fully and comfortably in conversations by analyzing the four processes of speech perception with the introduction of research-based theories, thus, guiding the students to solve the major problems they may encounter when learning to listen: 1) lack of control over the speed at which speakers speak many english learners believe that the greatest difficulty with listening comprehension is that they can not control how quickly a speaker speaks. they feel that the utterance disappears, as it were, before they can sort them out. it means that students can not keep up. they are so busy working out the meaning of one part of what they hear that they miss the next part. or they simply ignore a whole chunk because they fail to sort it out quickly enough. 2) the listeners limited vocabulary choice of words is in the hands of the speaker, not the listener. the listener has to do the best he can to follow, although in some circumstances it is possible to stop the speaker and ask for clarification. sometimes, listeners can deduce the meaning of a word from its context. 3) failure to recognize the markers or the signals 5 there are many ways in which a speaker can indicate that he is moving from one point to another, or give an example, or repeating a point, or whatever. they may use expressions like secondly or then. they may pause or make a gesture or move slightly. 4) no theoretical guidance the textbook and teachers book do not provide any relevant linguistic, psychological, or pedagogical principles of modern language teaching and learning, nor do they offer any advice on how to conduct a listening class. so teachers can not get the necessary methodological and pedagogical guidance they expect. 5)inability to understand colloquial english.(analyzed in chapter ii) 6) clustering in spoken language, due to memory limitations and their predisposition for “chunking, ” or clustering, people break down speech into small groups of words. clauses are common constituents, but phrases within clause are even more easily retained for comprehension. in teaching listening, the teacher needs to help students to pick out manageable clusters of words. 7) redundancy speech has a good deal of redundancy: the rephrasings, repetitions, elaborations, and little insertions of “i mean” and “ you know” here and there. such redundancy helps the hearer to process meaning by offering more time and extra information on some occasions. 8) reduced forms speech also contains many reduced forms. reduction can be phonological (“djeetyet?” for “did you eat yet?”), morphological 6 (contractions like “ill ”), syntactic(elliptical forms like “when will you be back?” “tomorrow, maybe.”) , or pragmatic( phone rings in a house, child answers, cups the telephone, and yells to another room in the house, “mom! phone!”). these reductions pose significant difficulties to the classroom learners. 9) performance variables performance variables refer to hesitations, false starts, pauses, and corrections. they also contain ungrammatical forms or dialect. all of them need students to weed them out. in the past centuries, teaching listening, the most important course, has been overlooked. listening is expected to be caught by students rather than taught by qualified teachers, despite the fact that people listen more than they read, write, or speak. today, teaching listening is receiving widespread attention and it is clearly demonstrated that listening skills can be taught not caught . 7 chapter one from sounds to meaning speech perception is the recognition and understanding of events, objects and stimuli through the use of sense of hearing, as speech is made in a very quick sound stream, and involves intricate physical and mental activities (hearing, selecting, assimilating, organizing, retaining, and covertly responding to aural and nonverbal stimuli), psycholinguists treat these speech activities as the processes of processing the sound signals phonologically, lexically, syntactically, and semantically. some people take these speech activities as psychological events in an automatic way; others treat them in an interactive way. but in fact it is more than a system that is rule- governed and shows great complexities and flexibility for the perception of speech. therefore, it is necessary to make a careful and substantial analysis from the phonological process to semantic process. 1.1 phonological process it is thought that there are three distinct stages in the aural perception of an utterance: the auditory stage, the phonetic stage and the phonological stage. 1.1.1 auditory stage at the auditory stage, the sound waves go into a sensory store (the ear) where they remain for a very short time( probably only about a second).the listener does not have very long time in which to sort out what is heard before he attempted to organize the stream of sounds into meaningful units. the listener might be further troubled by the 8 arrival of new information in the echoic memory before she/he has had sufficient opportunity to deal with that already held. the rate at which meaningful distinctions are transmitted in human speech is about 20 to 30 segments per second, that is, phonetic distinctions that differentiate meaningful words, e.g. the sounds symbolized by the notation /b t/ in the word bat, are transmitted, identified, and put together at a rate of 20 to 30segments per second. it is obvious that human listeners can not simply transmit and identify these sound distinctions as separate entities. the fastest rate at which sounds can be identified is about 7 to 9 segments per second (miller.1965).in order to perceive the sound wave, a preliminary processing based principally on frequency is performed by using vocoder speech synthesizers. this synthesizer shows synthetic spectrograms using only formant 1 and formant 2 information that produce the voiced stops before various vowels.(after delattre, liberman and cooper, 1955) . for examle, di and du are differentiated from each other by their formant 2 difference. the formant 2 of di is 2700 hz and that of du is only 600 hz. this difference, the acoustic cue, shows the way to discriminate the two phonemes. such kind of acoustic cues dependent on phonetic context apply to all consonant+vowel structure. although the d in di and du are different for the two syllables, they are heard identical as d in both syllables because they are decoded by using the acoustic pattern of prior knowledge of the articulatory gestures and anatomical apparatus. the synthetic spectrograms shows that it is impossible to piece together the formant transitions of the d of de with the vowel u to get the syllable du.it means that speech is not segmented at the acoustic level. the main task at the stage is to search for the acoustic cues 9 there are some acoustic cues independent from phonetic context: voiced and voiceless sounds, such as. /s/, /z/, / /, /zr /, / t/, and j. meanwhile another acoustic cue dependent of the phonetic context is the voice onset time of the initial consonant. the vot is presented by miller and niceley in 1955 using instrument which is sensitive enough to measure contrasts as small as milliseconds in the duration of speech sounds. it demonstrates that the most significant acoustic difference between consonants like /b/ and/p/ is the length of time it takes between the initial puff of the air that begins these sounds, the onset of voicing in the throat that initiates any vowel sound which follows the consonants such as, the time to pronounce /ba/ is the same for releasing the lips as for voicing vibration, whereas the time to release the lips in pronouncing /pa/ is 0.06 seconds slower than the time to voice vibration . it is just this distinction that makes people feel /b/ voiced and /p/ voiceless. at the same time the duration is deemed very important. for example, if there is a short silence between /s/ and /l/ in the word slit, you will hear /split/. context-sensitive allophones can serve as acoustic cue as well as a theory of speech perception in which a large set of context-dependent allophones are used to derive a phonetic representation for an unknown utterance. for each phoneme x, a set of context-dependent allophones axb were defined for all possible preceding phonemes. ( wickelgren 1969, 1976). functionally at least, an auditory image consisting of the spectrum as a function of time is held while the first stage of acoustic signals is carried out. the acoustic cues mentioned here are stored in the auditory memory and evidence has been obtained that the auditory memory stores and analyses them in a selective way. 10 1.1.2 phonetic stage the main task at the second stage is to segment the sound signals and perceive them with the help of those acoustic cues in the original organized way. for instance, the two components /d/ and / i / must be perceived with the former/d/ followed by the latter one / i /. the process of parameter perception is not so simple, for the acoustic cues differ with the change of the vowels followed by /d/. the most important feature of this stage is : all the segmental components are perceived categorically. psycholinguists have discovered through careful experimentation that people tend to categorize the minute phonetic differences in a non-continual, binary fashion and that native speakers of english listen to artificially created consonant sounds with gradually lengthening vots . when they are asked to judge whether the syllables they hear begin with a voiced consonant (like/b/ which has a short vot) or a voiceless one(like /p/ which has a vot lag of about 5o milliseconds),they rarely judge the sound to be 50% voiceless and 50% voiced, they classify it as one sound or the other. this phenomenon is called categorical perception. psycholinguists have been able to prove the presence of categorical perception in very young infants, through a series of cleverly designed experiments. and in equally ingenious research with several species of animals, they have found, by and large, that this kind of all-or-nothing acoustic information does not exist in other species. categorical perception is seemingly unique to human beings, and appears to qualify as one aspect of universal grammar (ug: an abstract set of rules and principles which govern the syntax of all languages and which many linguists believe to be innately specified in all humans.), the genetic 11 propensity for comprehending and producing language which most psycholinguists believe is a uniquely human endowment. these experiment with vot perception in human infants are one of the few solid pieces of evidence that at least part of human l