The role of digital video media in second language listening ...

perceiving an unknown word in the context of a familiar topic or 2) knowing a wordwithout being able to relate it to the topic. Both are thought to occur during thecomprehension-gathering phase. According to Laviosa (1991), listeners enact one offive receptive strategies to solve problems: contextual inferencing, seekingconfirmation (or rejecting a wrong hypothesis), making associations, calling upbackground knowledge or utilising cognates. Each strategy, of course, may beenacted concurrently with another.In the second ‘linguistic phase’ of comprehension, Laviosa (1991) proposed thatlisteners encounter a limited set of problems that include new words, numbers,proper names and mistranslating a known word. Listeners solve these problems byselecting particular structures of the language, visualising what a word may mean orusing cognates that suggest the meaning of a particular word.During their final ‘connecting’ phase of comprehension, Laviosa (1991) proposedthat listeners are challenged either by 1) an unknown word in a familiar topic, 2) aknown word that cannot be related to the topic at hand. Although they take placeduring the latter stages of interaction, Laviosa argues that such problems are similarto those the listeners had experienced in the initial comprehension-gathering phase.Strategies that help to solve these problems, therefore, are similar to those enacted inthe initial phase: contextual inferencing, associating, seeking confirmation ofmeaning and using background knowledge.Laviosa’s (1991) preliminary framework, it would appear, promotes a view that thereis a one-to-one correspondence from problem to solution in the listening process. Indiscussion of her study, Laviosa concluded that the serial model of Faerch andKasper (1987) “proved inadequate” (p. 94) in situations where listeners appearedto be able to identify problems and could begin to plan a solution but could not enactrelevant strategies needed to reach the required solutions. Additionally, Laviosanoted that the rapid and simultaneous nature of listening behaviour strained theboundaries of the three taxonomies that she had developed (p. 109) and as such may50