Question:

Submitted by Ali Abdulhussain, Iraq

What is the importance of discourse in listening comprehension? I usually notice many students that make sense of each sentence they listen to but cannot reconstruct meaning as a whole unit of discourse?

Dr. Richards responds:

The goal of teaching listening is to help students understand discourse, that is, to understand samples of authentic spoken texts. To achieve this, a listening course must gradually move from sentence-based listening, to helping understand texts.  This often involves taking learners beyond bottom up processing to make use of top down processing – listening that goes beyond the sentence level and that makes use of knowledge of the context, the topic, the setting, the participants and their purposes.