Understanding Oral Discourse: Key Microskills and Cognitive Abilities

Understanding Oral Discourse: Key Microskills

Inferred while listening to acoustic strings and processing them, also getting information from other sources, are verbal: the situational context and the speaker. Looking at codes accompanying nonverbal cues (gestures, movements, clothing), their attitude, and also the situation, helps us to understand the overall meaning of the speech.

Holding Information for Comprehension

Certain elements of speech that the receiver considers important are stored for a few seconds in the short-term memory (STM) to be of use in interpreting other excerpts of the speech, and also to reinterpret the speech anew. Once finished, the more general and relevant data are stored in long-term memory (LTM), which may be retained for a period of time.

Implementing Microskills for Language Comprehension

To implement these microskills, a more or less global knowledge of grammar (phonology and morphosyntax) and the lexicon of the language is needed, which allows us to recognize, segment, and interpret linguistic statements. Each individual understands oral discourse according to their personal grammar and dictionary domain. If one only knows the basic vocabulary, they will be very attentive to the speech, and it is still possible for relevant details to escape them. However, with a good linguistic base, we can understand everything in a more relaxed manner. Also, remember that these microskills do not work in a particular order, but interact at once, at various levels of language. On one hand, we anticipate and infer semantic information before and during speech comprehension, but we also discriminate the spoken sounds and the meaning we assign them according to our grammar. Both processes interact and build gradually with each listening comprehension.

Finally, it is worthwhile to note that understanding this process is intimately related to other general cognitive abilities such as attention and memory, which even determine its development. This is especially appreciable in younger pupils, who have uneducated attention and retentive capacity, and further, have limited knowledge of the world.

Microskills for Oral Comprehension

Categorizing Microskills

Microskills vary by age and level of the student. The more global aspects of the model are from comprehension. Comprehension strategies can be classified into the following microskills:

1. Recognizing: Namely, segmenting the acoustic chain into the units that compose it (sounds, words, articles, etc.); recognizing phonemes, morphemes, and words of the language; discriminating phonological contrasts of the language: stressed/unstressed vowels, bed/cane, straw/box, we/hands.
2. Selecting: Distinguishing the relevant words from a speech that are not; and learning to put together the various elements into larger and more significant units: sounds into words, words into phrases, etc.
3. Interpreting: Understanding the communicative intent and purpose, understanding the overall meaning and message, understanding the main ideas, etc. In general, understanding the content of speech.
4. Anticipating: Knowing how to activate all the information we have on a person, namely to provide the theme, language, and speech style, and learning to anticipate what is going to be said from what was said.
5. Inferring: The ability to interpret nonverbal cues; knowing how to extract reports from the communicative context; knowing how to infer data from the sender (age, sex, attitude, etc.).
6. Retaining: Remembering words, phrases, and ideas for a few seconds to interpret later, and retaining in the LTM the aspects of discourse (most relevant information and discourse structure).