Abstract
With its engaging spectacle and discussion of key issues, the US presidential election debates draw high viewership of not only Americans but also people of other nationalities through not only US-based television channels but also other mainstream channels around the world. Since many of the viewers are likely to be the learners of English as the most widely used Lingua Franca, who listen for as well as to the content, they should be helped with their processing of what they listen to, given the listening comprehension challenges. The demanding factors of speech rate and vocabulary necessitate the use of transcripts as an aid for listening comprehension. Transcripts facilitate the required vocabulary buildup and allow for semantic mapping through frequency counts of recurrent key words or word strings uncovering linguistic patterns and laying foundation for the enriching listening practices. Therefore, this chapter focuses on using transcripts accordingly.
TopBackground
Offering a cognitive perspective Goh (2000) listed ten problems of real-time second language listening comprehension during such concurrrently occuring cognitive processing phases as perception, parsing and utilisation, all three of which are interrelated and recursive. In Goh’s work, half of the real-time cognitive constraints were reported to occur during perceptual processing such as word recognition and attention failure. The listeners were also found to be inefficient in parsing and unable to utilise a mental representation even if the input is parsed.
A number of related factors considered to possibly cause the problems were listed: “sound-script and word-referent processes were not automatised, poor sound representations of familiar words, failure to use appropriate comprehension tactics, a lack of appropriate schematic knowledge, insuficient prior knowledge, preoccupation with knowing the meaning of certain content words, limited processing capacity in short-term memory and shallow processing.” Low ability listeners’ low-level perception problems were reported to appear higher in number compared to the high ability listeners (Goh, 2000, p. 69).
Goh (1998a, b: as cited in 2000) provides strategies such as perception practice as well as listening strategy practice (cognitive, metacognitivee, social-affective tactics). One of the perception practice items is to follow along with the transcript of recording. On the other hand, according to Renandya and Farrel (2010), simply there is not enough evidence to endorse the implementation of listening strategy training in English as a foreign language classrooms.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Reversed Subtitling: The kind of subtitling in which the soundtrack/audio language and the subtitle language are different, but in this case the former is the L1 and the latter is L2. For instance, the soundtrack language is Turkish and the subtitle language is English for viewers whose L1 is Turkish.
Speech Transcription: Whether it is audio transcribing or video transcribing, transcription of speech is written/textual account of speech based on audio/visual records.
Language Learning With YouTube: Appreciated for its potential fo language learning, this Google Chrome extension provides two subtitles sets (same language subtitles plus possibly its translation.
Rhetoric: The science and art of persuasive language use. Its study has implications for benefits like communication or creative thinking.
Intralingual/Bimodal Subtitling: The kind of subtitling in which both soundtrack and the subtitle are the same language (in this case subtitles are captions).