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Reading and Listening Skills

Basic Skills Agency Conference

John Nissen, 8th December 2004

The BSA conference in London on 6th December had the theme of "Ideas and Innovation", with three sub-themes: "speaking and listening", "transition" and "engaging the disengaged". See the programme. It was, as usual, an extremely lively affair, with lots of audience participation

and a class being taught in front of the assembled masses (the teacher in question describing this as being like teaching in front of 500 Ofsted inspectors).

Education is going through a sea change, with the emphasis moving from knowledge acquisition towards thinking skills. Now that we know a lot more about how the brain works, we can observe the parts of the brain that are activated during the course of various tasks. We can also observe what goes wrong when parts of the brain are not functioning. For example, people missing a certain part of their brain are unable to mentally sound out a word, and therefore unable to tell that 'dear' rhymes with 'here' without actually speaking the words and comparing what they hear. Knowing more about the brain, we can train those parts of the brain that are needed to perform particular tasks.

In the reading process, there are a multiplicity of tasks, including: finding the start of the line of text, fixating centrally on the first word, recognising the individual letters and their pattern, decoding the word to sound out the word mentally, in parallel with attempting whole word recognition, and then noting the meaning of the word. Then the eye has to reposition on the middle of the next word (the 'saccadian' movement), repeating the cycle to the end of the line, when the eye has to skip to the start of the next line. There are many tasks to be mastered before fluent reading is possible, but the decoding task is the crux of the reading process.

In learning to read, it is possible to train the brain on a specific task, whilst excluding the distraction of other tasks. In particular we can train the brain for the decoding task by displaying each word by itself, in the same place on the screen. We can then gradually speed up the process, reducing the time that each word is displayed and allowing whole word recognition to kick in. This training can be supported by a computer program such as WordAloud.

A person may pretend to read, but is actually relying on guesswork and memory. All too often parents think their children have learnt to read, but actually they have just memorised the book, and are managing to guess each word as the parent points to it. By having a word-at-a-time display, the person is forced to concentrate on decoding and word recognition.

But learning to read also involves developing other skills: analysis, comprehension and memory skills. In order to understand a sentence, not only do the individual words have to be understood, but role of each word has to be understood in the context of the earlier words in the sentence, and the meanings have to be remembered and put together to comprehend the sentence as a whole.

Listening involves exactly the same analysis, comprehension and memory skills as reading, once the individual words have been recognised. However the listener has to deal with a stream of words, whereas the reader can scan to and fro on the printed page. If reading is restricted by a word-at-a-time display, then the reading becomes much more like listening. Development of listening skills can be applied in the development of reading skills.

Dyslexics may have similar problems with listening as they do with reading. They do not have the short term memory skills to retain meaning of the first words in the sentence whilst they are processing the later words in the sentence. Thus they are unable to integrate the meanings of all the words to obtain an understanding of the sentence as a whole. A common problem for dyslexics is in understanding instructions, whether written or spoken. I have observed this with my dyslexic son! Teachers and parents need to be sympathetic and patient.

Listening skills are vital in ESL/EFL, i.e. for somebody for whom English is not their first language. An initial problem is recognising words within the stream of speech sounds. This problem can be reduced by slowing the speech, and by introducing a gap between the words. Of course, speaking and repeating sentences slowly is time-consuming for the teacher, but the computer has endless patience. With a speech synthesiser in a product such as WordAloud, the user can slow the speech, step a word-at-a-time, repeat sentences and so on. Thus they can practice and develop their listening skills. And, with WordAloud, they can see the words as they are spoken, so they are learning to associate the written word with the spoken word. The same analysis, comprehension and memory skills are thus developed with the listening as with the reading.

In conclusion, there are some common skills required for listening to, and reading, a language. Lack of these skills is a common symptom of dyslexia. The skills can be developed using computer software such as WordAloud. This particular program can also help in language learning, where there are additional skills required.