Teaching Oral Skills Communicatively | Page 12

1.1.3. Text types Beaugrande (1981:182 ff) as referred in Dirven and Oakeshott-Taylor (1985:3) makes a distinction between descriptive, argumentative, and narrative texts according to their function. Texts that belong to the same type share common grammatical features. This is very important as, according to Burgess (1996, unit 2, p.13): ‘grammatical features give uniformity and recognisability to types of communication.’ Although in real life texts do not belong exclusively to one text type, the ability of the learner to recognize text types helps her activate relevant scripts (see 2.2.2 below) and facilitates comprehension. 1. 2. How we listen While hearing is a passive skill, listening comprehension is an active process which relies heavily on the listener’s ability to go through a number of processes in order to create meaning. .According to Underwood (1989:1): ‘what the speaker means lies only partly in the words spoken and the listener must recognize the other factors which are used to convey the message.’ The factors that affect listening comprehension and the processes that are involved in listening are analyzed below. 1.2.1 Factors that affect listening comprehension Burgess (1996, unit 2) distinguishes between external factors that do not relate to the actual words of the discourse and internal factors which relate to the way our brain processes incoming information. External factors Malinowsky (1923) stresses that: ‘a statement spoken in real life is never detached from the situation in which it has been uttered’ and he coined the term ‘context of situation’ to refer to factors outside the spoken text which affect comprehension. According to Burgess (1996, unit 2, p.5) efficient understanding relies heavily on the ability of the listener to make adjustments to context .Under context he categorizes four main factors. These are the co-text (what has been spoken before the 12