Assignment 3
Detailed Answers
Unique No: 149793
Due 17 June 2025
,TMS3715
Assignment 3
Unique No: 149793
DUE 17 June 2025
QUESTION 1: Teaching Listening
1.1 The Six Stages of the Listening Process
The listening process is a sophisticated cognitive and perceptual phenomenon,
traditionally delineated into six interdependent stages that collectively culminate in
profound meaning-making and retention. Each stage is critical, building upon its
predecessor to facilitate comprehensive auditory processing.
• Hearing (Physiological Audition): This foundational stage denotes the initial
physiological reception of auditory stimuli, involving the transduction of sound
waves into neural impulses. As Graham (2006) elucidates, it serves as the
indispensable biophysical prerequisite for all subsequent cognitive processing in
the listening continuum. Without accurate auditory perception, higher-order
processing is fundamentally compromised.
• Attending (Selective Auditory Focus): Following the physiological act of
hearing, the attending stage involves the cognitive deployment of selective
attention to filter salient auditory cues from extraneous noise. Rost (2011)
emphasizes that this selective focus is paramount for distinguishing relevant
linguistic input from environmental distractions, thereby optimizing the cognitive
resources allocated to message processing.
• Understanding (Semantic and Pragmatic Comprehension): This is the pivotal
stage where the listener actively constructs meaning from the perceived and
attended auditory input. This intricate process involves the integration of new
information with pre-existing schemata, linguistic competence, and contextual
knowledge, as highlighted by Anderson & Lynch (2003). It moves beyond mere
lexical recognition to grasp the semantic and pragmatic intent of the message.
• Evaluating (Critical Appraisal and Assessment): At this advanced cognitive
stage, listeners engage in a metacognitive appraisal of the message's veracity,
, salience, and underlying intent. This involves drawing upon critical literacy skills,
as mandated by the CAPS (2011) curriculum, to discern bias, assess logical
coherence, and gauge the speaker's credibility or persuasive strategies. This
stage underscores the listener's active,而非passive, engagement with the
discourse.
• Responding (Interactive Feedback and Affirmation): The responding stage
encompasses the provision of both overt and covert feedback, signaling active
cognitive and affective engagement with the discourse. This may manifest as
verbal affirmations, non-verbal cues (e.g., nodding, eye contact), or internal
cognitive acknowledgments, all serving to validate the communicative exchange
and signify comprehension.
• Remembering (Encoding and Retrieval for Application): The culmination of
the listening process, this stage involves the successful encoding and
subsequent retention of the processed information within long-term memory. The
capacity for later retrieval and effective application of the retained content is
indicative of successful listening, enabling cumulative learning and informed
decision-making.
1.2 The Three Types of Listening in CAPS (2011)
The Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement (CAPS, 2011) for Home Language
Grades 10–12 delineates a tripartite classification of listening skills, each fostering
distinct pedagogical objectives and cognitive engagements essential for holistic
language proficiency.
• Listening for Specific Information (Extracting Salient Details): This mode of
listening necessitates a highly targeted and focused auditory scan to extract
precise factual data, such as key figures, nominal entities, chronological markers,
or numerical values. For instance, within an educational context, it involves
precisely identifying the speaker’s central thesis concerning youth activism from
an audio segment (CAPS, 2011:16), thereby demonstrating granular
comprehension.