DEVELOPING LISTENING FLUENCY

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and language performance. Rather, it appears that the development of listening fluency is both the most effective process of achieving language competence and a good indicator that language competence has been achieved. In addition, there is evidence that once the competence is acquired, transfer to the other performance skills is rapid. What the paradigm of language acquisition involves is the creation of the internal structure which then seems to guide the performance. What may be involved is the creation of a feed forward system which then guides actual performance through feedback. Mowrer indicated a similar concept many years ago.
If we now adopt the "feedback" conception of habit, which holds that behavior is
"selected" and "guided" by the positive and negative emotions which have become
conditioned to response-correlated stimuli, skill reduces to a matter of discrimination.
Evidence from many sources now suggests that the musical virtuoso, the athletic
prodigy, or the "artist" in some other type of behavior differs from the duffer mainly
in being able to make fine distinctions (discriminations) between the feedback from a
performance that isexactly right and one that is only approximately so.^{8 2} In several other studies there is evidence that a focus on the receptive skills has decided advantages over a focus on response practice; and that discrimination training can be used in place of response practice to help shorten the total learning time. For example, in one research study⁸³the researcher believed that teaching the students to observe more accurately would help them guide their own behavior. He gave pre-school children practice in discriminating well-formed numbers from those which were badly formed. It was found that these children were able to write the numbers well much sooner than those who had been given either response guidance or response practice from the beginning. Similar techniques have been used to teach machine operation. ⁸⁴By using discrimination training to show proper equipment set-up, the students first learned the proper appearance of the outcome and, thus, were able to monitor their own behavior in acquiring the skill. This same procedure has also been applied to problem-solving in mathematics.⁸⁵This technique allows the student to interact with the uniqueness of each problem and avoid the redundancy of problem solving, thus reducing long response practices and reducing overall time of learning. This stimulus-orientedapproach is the heart of the Suzuki talent education method.

The child receives a recording of the music in Volume 1. His instructions are to listen
to the recording as often as possible. This listening may take place while the child
plays, during his meals, or at bedtime as he is awaiting sleep. Absorption occurs
without static attention, and this music will soon assume the status of an old friend...
perhaps in the category of a much loved blanket or stuffed animal! As he begins to
play the music he has been listening to, he will have an oral memory to aid his
physical learning and a builtin error recognition system that should be infallible.⁸⁶ Young children often have difficulty in acquiring and executing skilled movements such as doing up buttons, shoe laces and the like. This difficulty has been attributed by Zaporozhets and his associates to the haphazard and poorly directed orientation reaction of young children. ^{8 7}
In making this analysis, Zaporozhets is equating the occurrence of the orienting reaction with what many call attention and some call anticipatory response. It is also something we are referring to as feed forward. Zaporozhets is arguing that the children have trouble responding with a motor output because they do not pay attention, they do not know what to look for, in the component steps in the skill.