actual utterance), the speakers (referring to their identities and the way they speak),
the setting (both natural and social) and the topic of the conversation.
Internal factors
These refer to the way the human brain processes incoming information once
the person receiving it finds an interest and a purpose for doing so. Otherwise, as
Burgess and Whitehead (undated) stress, we switch off and we become hearers rather
than listeners. Having a purpose for listening makes a listener create certain
expectations about what she is going to listen to. Harmer (1983:144) emphasizes that
a listener’s expectations activate a process of prediction about what will happen next
which facilitates comprehension.
According to Burgess (1996, unit 2) the actual discourse chunk together with
lexical, grammatical and phonological features enter out Short Term Memory (STM)
for processing. These features remain into STM for as long as the brain needs to
identify them and to construct propositions which it groups together to form a
coherent message. Once incoming information has been processed all these features
are discarded and what remains to be stored in our Long Term Memory (LTM) is not
the actual words of the discourse but its meaning. As Underwood (1989:2) points out:
‘once the meaning has been grasped, the actual words are generally forgotten.’
Another factor that affects comprehension is the speed of processing as our STM has
a limited capacity and if it gets overloaded comprehension becomes problematic.
1.2.2. Listening processes
According to Richards (1990) listening comprehension involves two kinds of
processes which are referred to as “top-down” and “bottom-up” processing. Dirven
and Oakeshott-Taylor (1985) stress that these processes are not consecutive but rather
work simultaneously. Their role is analyzed below.
The top-down processing
Anderson and Pearson (1988) define comprehension as the interaction of old
knowledge with new information. This background knowledge a listener
carries with her comprises knowledge of the language and world knowledge and is
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