CHAPTER 4. Reading and listening skills 59 DIFFERENCES BETWEEN READING AND LISTENING Two major di erences between reading and listening need to be noted, having been pointed out by Field (2008). In written forms (i.e., in reading), the spelling is standardized while in phonological forms (underlying listening comprehension), sounds vary within and between users. In reading, blank spaces, moreover, separate written forms, facilitating rapid recognition, while listeners are confronted with connected speech, impeding instant recognition. Related to this, reading is recursive, allowing readers to check and recheck in search for meaning, while speech is ephemeral: once a form is produced, it is di cult to recall the same form in search for meaning. Looking for meaning is thus even more crucial in listening versus reading tasks. Learners tend to base L2 segmentation in listening tasks on their L1 (Cutler, 2001). In the case of L2 French with a high level of connected speech (liaison) segmentation is particularly complex for L1 Dutch learners due to misalignment of word and syllable boundaries (Gustafson & Bradlow, 2016). Extensive practice and in particular encountering form-meaning pairs more frequently through high exposure has been claimed to aid listening development (Gilakjani & Ahmadi, 2011). One especially fruitful strategy appears to be to capitalize on conventionalized form-meaning mappings, also known as chunks. Tang (2013) investigated the relationship between chunks and listening ability and found a strong correlation between the number of acquired chunks and L2 listening scores. According to Lewis (1993), too, the mastery of chunks can facilitate language processing speed, as chunks are readily available as a result of repeated exposure (Gustafson & Verspoor, 2017), and, once automatized, chunks can form shortcuts in processing (Pawley & Syder, 1983; Wray & Perkins, 2000): “It seems that we use prefabricated sequences as a way of minimizing the e ects of a mismatch between our potential linguistic capabilities and our actual short-term memory capacity” (Wray & Perkins, 2000, p. 15). To summarize, both in reading and listening, lexical knowledge plays a strong role. Grammatical knowledge also plays a role in reading but seemingly less so in listening. is is not surprising as the ultimate goal of both reading and listening is to extract meaning from forms and lexical knowledge is more meaningful than grammatical knowledge. Being repeatedly exposed to most notably chunks can facilitate language comprehension. Not all L2 pedagogies o er such repeated formulaic lexical exposure to the same extent, however. EXPOSURE AND FREQUENCY IN SB VERSUS DUB PEDAGOGIES If lexical knowledge is crucial for Second Language Acquisition (SLA), learners need to be exposed to this knowledge frequently and repeatedly for language skills to develop e ectively (Ellis, 2002; DeKeyser 2007; Segalowitz & Hulstijn, 2005). Although much remains unknown about the optimal form of repetition, for instance pertaining to
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