Comparing Discriminative and Comprehensive Listening Skills

Question: Discriminative listening – this involves differentiating between different speech sounds. For example, being able to tell whether the language being spoken is English or your mother tongue. If what you hear sounds unfamiliar, it means you cannot understand what is being said. For example, if a Chinese-speaker walked along the streets of Durban, in South Africa, where people mainly speak isiZulu, s/he would instantly be able to tell that the language being spoken was certainly not their mother tongue. 108 Comprehension listening – comprehending or understanding meaning requires us to know the vocabulary and rules of a language. We cannot comprehend spoken language if we do not know how the system of that language is arranged, and what its words mean. This is related to the feature of language that we discussed in Unit 1, namely structure dependence, i.e., all languages being arranged in a systematic way. In the same unit, we looked at visual communication. In this regard, it is important to state that someone may find it difficult to comprehend what is being said if s/he cannot read body language. The structure of English was explored further in Unit 2, when we delved into aspects such as clauses, phrases and sentences. Our comprehension of spoken language requires an understanding of the rules of that language, including how sentences are built or structured. In four sentences, explain in your own words four features that distinguish discriminative listening from comprehensive listening.