The signal and comprehension approach: decoding and meaning building

Abstract

This paper discusses Egyptian colloquial Arabic connected speech as a listening problem. The paper proposes a modified approach for teaching listening: The Signal and Comprehension Approach. It is an approach that enhances listening as a skill to attain comprehension in any listening task. The approach focuses on signals laden with linguistic phonological changes that make deciphering connected speech very difficult. By adopting the proposed approach, learners can develop not only their listening skills but also their listening strategies and meaning building. It trains the language learner to crack the code in order to construct meaning. The approach includes pedagogical listening tasks that are based on topdown or world knowledge as well as bottom-up or data driven processes. The discussed tasks use songs as a venue of connected speech. These tasks come from an online course offered through the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) that uses songs to teach Arabic language, culture and history.

Keywords

• comprehension
• signal
• decoding
• meaning
• pedagogical
• Egyptian
• colloquial
• Arabic