How can listening comprehension in beginning foreign language instruction as well as in regards to learning a foreign language in higher education be promoted as a basic skill and applied to learning the language?
Schmid-Schönbein allocates holistic understanding of content to the learning goal of listening comprehension and postulates that there are two subskills that must be taught: "Sound discrimination," i.e., the students must learn to recognized and discriminate between the various sound qualities of the English language (zwei Bücher are two books, but zwei Taschen are two bags), and "Word discrimination," i.e., the students must isolate individual lexical units (words or structures) in the sound stream, understand their meaning and be able to recognize them again in other contexts.
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