ENG514 Assignment 1 Spring 2021

Credit: Maha Malik

Q.1     (a) Name and define the two broad types of listening. (2*4=8 Marks)

Broad Types of Listening:

1. One-way listening
2. Two-way listening

Definitions:

1. One-way listening—typically associated with the transfer of information (transactional listening).
2. Two-way listening—typically associated with maintaining social relations (interactional listening).

(b)     Write notes on the two main Listening Processes as discussed in your course. (2*6=12 Marks)

·     Bottom-up Processes:

These are the processes that the listener employs to piece together the message from the speech stream, progressing from the parts to the whole. Bottom-up processing entails perceiving and parsing the speech stream at increasingly larger levels, beginning with auditory-phonetic, phonemic, syllabic, lexical, syntactic, semantic, propositional, pragmatic, and interpretive perception and parsing (Field, 2003: 326).

·     Top-down Processes:

Top-down processes involve the listener moving from the whole to the parts (their prior knowledge and content and rhetorical schemata). In other words, the listener uses their knowledge of the communication context to predict what the message will contain and then uses parts of the message to confirm, correct, or add to this prediction. In this case, the inference is the most important process.

Note: For guidance, consult the module no. 3.