Helping Upper-Intermediate learners to

use listening subskills to understand

News Reports

1 |Katarzyna Malkowska – Helping Upper-Intermediate learners to use listening subskills to

understand News Reports
LSA2: Skills - Listening
Centre Number: MX026
Centre Name: International House Mexico
Candidate Name: Katarzyna Malkowska

Table of Contents

1. Introduction 3
2. Bottom Up versus Top Down 3
3. Analysis 4
3.1 Structure 4
3.2 Phonological Features 6
3.3 Grammatical Features 8
4. Problems and Solutions 9
5. Conclusion 13
6. Bibliography 13
7. Appendices 15

Word Count: 2381

1. Introduction

I have chosen to focus this assignment on helping English learners to use listening

subskills to understand news reports. News reports are authentic texts which are

easily accessible for English learners

2 |Katarzyna Malkowska – Helping Upper-Intermediate learners to use listening subskills to

understand News Reports
I chose to focus on the investigation of the skill of listening because I believe that this

receptive skill plays a fundamental role in language acquisition since knowing how to

decipher the answer successfully is just as important as being able to produce the

question (Anderson & Lynch, 1988).

I also agree with Field when he says that language teachers tend to test more than

teach the listening skills (Field, 2008), therefore, I would like to investigate the

strategies normally used by the native listeners while listening and help my learners

to utilise and adopt these strategies, and have them at their disposal whenever

needed.

Listening seems to be one of the weakest areas of my learners here in Mexico, as

well as the area not only myself, but also my colleagues find difficult to plan and

execute successfully.

My analysis will focus on structural, phonological, grammatical features of the genre

of the news reports.

2. Bottom Up versus Top Down

“Two distinct kinds of processes are involved in listening comprehension, which are

sometimes referred to as “bottom-up” and “top-down” processing (Chaudron and

Richard 1986). Bottom-up processing refers to the use of incoming data as a source

of information about the meaning of a message. From his perspective, the process of

comprehension begins with the message received, which is analysed at successive

levels of organization – sounds, words, clauses, and sentences - until the intended

meaning is arrived at. Comprehension is thus viewed as a process of decoding”

(Richards, 1990:50).

3 |Katarzyna Malkowska – Helping Upper-Intermediate learners to use listening subskills to

understand News Reports
“Top-down processing, on the other hand, refers to the use of background

knowledge in understanding the meaning of a message. Background knowledge

may take several forms. It may be previous knowledge about the topic of discourse,

it may be situational or contextual knowledge, or it may be knowledge stored in long-

term memory in the form of “schemata” and “scripts” – plans about the overall

structure of events and the relations between them.” (Richards, 1990:51).

3. Analysis
3.1 A typical structure of the News report

According to www.scales.me.uk, a typical structure of the News report is as follow:

 Begins with ‘The Hook’- first sentence/ headline contains the main

information, also as Thornbury suggests “to provide a succinct answer for the

listener, therefore it begins with an outcome first” (Thornbury, 2009:58)

 Who/ what /where / when/ how in this order is the aim of all news stories but

TV news tends to emphasise only a couple of these aspects

 Final comment at the end / summary

This can all be seen in this extract taken from BBC Afternoon News 18 Oct 2017,

Figure 1:

4 |Katarzyna Malkowska – Helping Upper-Intermediate learners to use listening subskills to

understand News Reports
“If the listener can make a guess as to the sort of thing that is going to be said next,

he will be much more likely to perceive it and understand it well” (Ur, 1984:16).

A proficient listener uses formal schemata, which is the knowledge about the

structure of a certain text type (McCarthy, 2000) which helps him/her to predict in

what order they are likely to hear different news elements. In the above example,

after hearing the ‘hook’ the listener anticipates the information about where or when

it happened: England Wales and Northern Ireland, after hearing this, they predict to

hear more details on how it happened: BBC launching an online tracker, before

hearing a collusion/ summary: waiting time for planned operations around 18 weeks.

3.2 Phonological features

a) Sentence stress

5 |Katarzyna Malkowska – Helping Upper-Intermediate learners to use listening subskills to

understand News Reports
As English is a stress-timed language (as opposed to a syllabic one) the rhythm

doesn’t follow the same pattern as in others; e.g. Spanish or Italian which are

syllable- timed languages. This means that the words that we normally stress in the

sentence are ‘content words’: nouns, verbs, adjectives, i.e. words that carry the

burden of meaning, not the grammatical words, like articles and auxiliaries

(Thornbury, 2003):

A new report is a spoken discourse and therefore these content words will be

present as can be seen in Figure 2 below:

By listening to this example, the proficient listener using his bottom-up processing

will be able to pick on the content words: performance /hospitals /slumped across/

UK/ targets /cancer /A&E /planned operations /widely missed, rather than paying

attention to every single word, understanding the meaning of the sentence which is

about hospitals in the UK not meeting their targets.

b) Weak forms

6 |Katarzyna Malkowska – Helping Upper-Intermediate learners to use listening subskills to

understand News Reports
As Field says, weak forms play a key role in decoding, too. “There is considerable

evidence from English that first language listeners exploit this association in order to

identify possible function words at an early stage of decoding” (Field,2009:175).

For the proficient listener, the ability to recognise the weak forms will aid the

identification of content words, which are essential for the meaning.

Seen in Figure 2, in spoken language, the words that are not stressed (articles,

prepositions, auxiliaries) become weak and they may be barely audible and rushed

through, as they are less essential information.

c) Tonic groups and tonic syllables:

Kelly (2001) explains that intonation is the way in which the voice goes up and down

in pitch while people are speaking. “It is a fundamental part of the way we express

our own thoughts and it enables us to understand those of others” (Kelly, 2001:86)

“Tonic syllable is the most stressed syllable in an utterance- it is generally longer,

louder and carries the main pitch movement in an utterance” (Kelly, 2001:72).

As the news reports are aimed at interacting with the audience (Van Dijk, 1988) and

what also can be noticed in this sentence is that sometimes the grammar words can

be given the prominence because it is the speaker’s choice of what to highlight

(Underhill 2005):

// The PERformance of HOSpitals HAS SLUMPED // aCROSS the UK with targets for

CANcer and A&E and PLAnned OPErations been widely MISSED //

7 |Katarzyna Malkowska – Helping Upper-Intermediate learners to use listening subskills to

understand News Reports
Proficient listeners can understand colloquial speech by using bottom-up processing

of its phonological features, especially tone units (Kelly,2001).

In this extract, there are two thought groups and each of them carries the most

prominent unit; has slumped and missed. The proficient listener will be able to

discriminate the main ideas in relation to tone units. From this example, knowing that

one thought group carries one main idea (first being slumped), the listener will

anticipate the second one: missed, they will connect these two together and

understand that the missed operations were the reason why the performance of

hospital has slumped.

3.3 Grammatical features

The News report makes the use of the present tenses mostly to create a sense of

urgency. Another grammatical structure, in the News Report is the active voice, used

to add drama, emphasis (www.scales.me.uk ).

Looking at the news report from Figure 1 we can easily notice typical verb forms

used:

 Present tenses

The performance of hospitals has slumped across the UK

England Wales and Northern Ireland have not hit one of their three key targets.

The findings are revealed.

 Active Voice

BBC launches its online NHS tracker.

Scotland has hit one of the targets

8 |Katarzyna Malkowska – Helping Upper-Intermediate learners to use listening subskills to
understand News Reports
“L1 listeners draw upon their knowledge of the grammar of the language and of the

most frequent syntactic patterns” (Field, 2009: 185). Proficient listeners, after hearing

‘the hook’ in the Present Perfect, will be ‘alarmed’ that this is a recent and important

news and they will anticipate hearing the what and when, where and how related to

this news: England, Wales and Northern Ireland not heating their three targets for 18

months.

4. Problems and Solutions

4.1 Problem recognising the word stress and tonic syllables

Working in England with European students whose native tongue is syllable-timed

(e.g. Italian, Spanish) is very clear to see they lack the phonological knowledge,

which results in them paying attention to every word rather than prominent words of

the utterance in order to get the general meaning of it, thus impacting on their

understanding (Underhill, 2005) as they might put a great focus on function words.

Solution: Teacher hands a script (Appendix 1) of a text and asks learners to

underline what they consider the key words. The teacher explains that key words are

normally given prominence. The teacher plays a recording of the text and asks

learners to listen out for the words they underlined, learners compare their ideas with

the script, they listen to the recording again and correct any differences and then

compare their notes. The teacher takes away the scripts and gives learners a

handout with only the content words, learners reconstruct the full sentences.

(Adapted from (Field, 2009: 197).

9 |Katarzyna Malkowska – Helping Upper-Intermediate learners to use listening subskills to

understand News Reports
Aim: To recognise the key words (tone units)

Evaluation: This activity combines both the recognition of the tone units and a

practice in reconstructing the meaning from those units. I believe this activity will be

very useful to analytical learners who will be made aware that they do not need to

pay attention to every single word to understand the meaning.

4.2 Learners focusing too much on the weak forms, missing out on the content

words.

As mentioned earlier, many European learners pay a great focus on function words,

not enough to content words that carry the most meaning.

Solution: Key words gap-fill (Appendix 2). The teacher hands out a short script with

only grammar words in it. The teacher asks the learners if they can make sense of

the text. S/He then tells the learners that the important words are missing on their

scripts, listen and fill them in. Learners listen and fill in the gaps, the teacher pauses

after each sentence. When learners have completed the tasks, the teacher asks

them if they noticed anything about how they heard the words that they had on the

paper and the words they were filling the gaps with.

Aim: To make learners aware of lesser importance of the weak forms.

Evaluation: Raising awareness activities are the great tool to draw students’ attention

to the weak forms as Kelly advocates “in many cases, the simple awareness of their

existence can help enormously in enabling students to better understand the

language they hear” (Kelly, 2002:113).

10 |Katarzyna Malkowska – Helping Upper-Intermediate learners to use listening subskills to

understand News Reports
 4.3 Inability to use script to support understanding

Many learners, e.g. my Chinese University students are unaware of the fact that

different genres have a quite predictable structure, also known as the script (Brown,

2000:6) which they could use to their advantage while listening to a text. Very often

they rely on only their bottom-up processing while the top-down or better

combination of both would be much more effective “knowledge of the syntax of the

target language and real-world knowledge” (Brown, 2006) e.g. they don’t know the

hook comes fist and cannot use this to anticipate the further information.

Solution: Teacher asks learners about what kind of information we normally hear in

the news and if we hear it in any particular order. Learners are given pieces of the

news on the separate cards (Appendix 3), first they put them in the correct order,

then match them with the label cards: hook, what, when, who, how, summary.

Learners compare their answers, the teacher gives corrections if needed. Learners

then listen to another piece of news to check if the information is presented in the

same pattern.

Aim: To make learners aware of the script and structure of the news reports and how

it can help them with understanding.

Evaluation: This activity will raise learners’ awareness of prediction as well as

allowing them to focus on the structure, hopefully showing them that knowledge of

world (formal schemata) helps us to anticipate the kind of information we might hear

and when we predict our brain will be “activated” to help us better understand but

also knowing they structure of the particular genre can support the understanding of

the text.

11 |Katarzyna Malkowska – Helping Upper-Intermediate learners to use listening subskills to

understand News Reports
 4.4 Lack of Grammatical Cues to distinguish between essential and non-essential

information

A colleague of mine who works in Poland has noticed that her students find it difficult

to understand the news reports because they don't know which words they should

focus on. My students of the same nationality on the general English courses in

England struggle with it too. They can identify grammatical structures, but are unable

to use them for general understanding of the main points. E.g. when hearing the

piece of information from the news that is in the active voice: BBC launches the

online NHS tracker, they will not associate the active voice with the importance of

this info, and expect it to appear some time later again.

Solution: Teacher plays the longer version of one of the news stories (Appendix 4)

(but not a headline). Learners listen to get a general idea of who, where and what

happened.

The teacher checks the gist and if learners know anything about this story. Students

listen again, now they need to note down the main points of the story. Students are

then asked to write a dramatic headline for the story based on the ideas they

collected. Teacher plays the headline and learners compare. They then discuss the

similarities and differences. (adapted from White, 2010 :93)

Aim: To listen for the main points

Evaluation: If the learners succeeded, (they wrote the headline in the present tense,

active voice) The teacher draws their attention to the grammatical forms of the

sentences they got the main ideas from, and ask the learners to notice the

similarities between sentences and the headline. If learners failed, the teacher will

ask them to underline the present tense sentences and help them to make
12 |Katarzyna Malkowska – Helping Upper-Intermediate learners to use listening subskills to
understand News Reports
connections with the headline, since they will be the sentences with the main

information. This activity develops learners’ autonomy and activates metacognition

(student’s ability to control their own learning (Vandergrift and Goh, 2012)).

5. Conclusion:

Working on this assignment has been a real eye opener. It made me understand the

difference between teaching vs testing the listening, as well as what should be

involved in a ‘proper’ teaching listening class to make it beneficial to our learners. I

believe I am now better ‘equipped’ to help my Upper-Intermediate students develop

their listening skills, by raising awareness of genre features, such as structural,

phonological and grammatical related to bottom-up and top-down processing and to

give them metacognitive tools to continue developing them outside the classroom.

6. Bibliography:

Books

Anderson, A. & Lynch, T. (1988) Listening, Oxford University Press

Brown, S. (2006). Teaching Listening. Cambridge University Press.

Field, J. (2008). Listening in the Language Classroom, Oxford University Press.

Helgesen, M. Editor Nunan, D.2003, Listening in Practical English Language

Teaching, McGraw Hill

Kelly, G. How to Teach Pronunciation, 2002, Longman

13 |Katarzyna Malkowska – Helping Upper-Intermediate learners to use listening subskills to

understand News Reports
McCarthy, M. (2000). Discourse Analysis for Language Teachers, Cambridge

University Press.

Richards, J. (1990) The Language Teaching Matrix, Cambridge University Press

Thornbury, S. Abut Language, 2003, CUP

Underhill, A. (2005), Sound Foundations: Learning and Teaching Pronunciation,

Macmillan Books for Teachers

Ur, P. (1984) Teaching Listening Comprehension, Cambridge University Press

Vandergrift, L., Goh, C. (2012). Teaching and Learning Second Language Listening.

Metacognition in Action, Routledge.

Van Dijk, Teun A. News Analysis, 1988 LEA Publishers

White, G. (2010), Listening- Resource Books for Teachers, Oxford University Press

Online articles:

Websites accessed on 5th November 2017:

https://www.slideshare.net/jonsaward/tv-news-language

https://www.thenewsmanual.net/Manuals%20Volume%202/volume2_48.htm

http://www.scales.me.uk/2010/09/structure-of-tv-news/

BBC News Sample taken from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BN-s7qkcVO0

14 |Katarzyna Malkowska – Helping Upper-Intermediate learners to use listening subskills to

understand News Reports
Appendices:

Appendix 1

Part 1

1. A state of emergency in the US state of Louisiana as heavy rains caused what's

been described as unprecedented flooding

2. He was the actor inside one of the world's most famous and best loved robots
Kenny Baker who played r2d2 in the Star Wars films has died at the age of 81

3. Hundreds of residents of the northern Syrian town of Man Bij who were used as
human shields by Islamic state militias have been freed. There’ve been scenes of joy
and relief as they celebrated their freedom in the streets.

Part 2
1. EMERGENCY, LOUISIANA, RAIN, CAUSED, FLOODING

2. ACTOR, WORLD’S, FAMOUS, ROBBOTS, KENNY BAKER, PLAYED, R2D2,

STAR, DIED, 81

3. RESIDENTS, SYRIAN, MAN BIJ, HUMAN SHELDS, MILIATIANS, FREED.

SCENES, JOY, RELIEF, CELEBRATED, FREEDOM, STREETS.

Text taken from World News Today - BBC News Channel + BBC World News Aug 13:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6-ehUzruDc

Appendix 2
Raising awareness of the weak forms

Script of the News

15 |Katarzyna Malkowska – Helping Upper-Intermediate learners to use listening subskills to

understand News Reports
Welcome to Westminster, on the day that Britain gets a new Prime Minster. The
formal handover in Downing Street will take place shortly. David Cameron will resign
and Theresa May will step into number 10. Right now, David Cameron is inside
number 10, spending the last few hours as the Prime Minister with his family. Very
soon he will be leaving for The Buckingham Palace to turn in his resignation, making
the way for Theresa May as Britain’s new Prime Minister.

Worksheet for the learners:

_________ to _______, on the____ that _____ _____ a new _________ _______.
The________ __________ in ________ _________ will ______ _______ ______.
________ _________ will ________ and ________ ________will______ into
_______- _______. _______ now,________ _________ is _______ ________
________, _________ the ____ few_____ as the _________ _________ with his
_________. _______ ______ he will be _______ for The ___________
___________ to _______ in his __________, __________ the _____ for ________
_______as ______’s new ______ ________.

Transcribed from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YX_2OuVdeIk

Appendix 3

Completing a London marathon, while

The Hook crawling on the ground in a gorilla suit,

seriously impressive
Tom Harrison aka Mr. gorilla is

Who attempting the speed in

the name of a good cause.

41-year-old Harrison from Britain has

What been crawling on all fours for days now.

His try at completing

the London Marathon

Where
while wearing an ape costume has been

How described with many adjectives,

16 |Katarzyna Malkowska – Helping Upper-Intermediate learners to use listening subskills to

understand News Reports
 including bizarre
but it's all to raise money for the gorilla

organization, a group dedicated to

Summary saving the last of the world's great apes

from extinction.

Appendix 4

Sample text used for this activity:

Woman dies as storm hits Ireland

One person has died in Ireland as a result of storm Ophelia, as gusts of more than
100mph/h are reported of the coast of Ireland. Troops have been deployed to coastal
areas in the Republic. In what’s expected to be the most severe storm to hit Ireland
in half a century. A hundred and twenty thousand customers are without power
across The Republic of Ireland and amber warning for the Northern Ireland, West
Wales, South West Scotland and Isle of Man is enforced.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_Rcn-iO2qM

17 |Katarzyna Malkowska – Helping Upper-Intermediate learners to use listening subskills to

understand News Reports