Teaching Listening

"There are people who, instead of listening to what is being said to them, are already listening to what they are going to say themselves" 

Albert Guinon

 
 http://www.nclrc.org/essentials/listening/liindex.htm

Teaching Listening

Listening is the language modality that is used most frequently. It has been estimated that adults spend almost half their communication time listening, and students may receive as much as 90% of their in-school information through listening to instructors and to one another. Often, however, language learners do not recognize the level of effort that goes into developing listening ability.

Far from passively receiving and recording aural input, listeners actively involve themselves in the interpretation of what they hear, bringing their own background knowledge and linguistic knowledge to bear on the information contained in the aural text. Not all listening is the same; casual greetings, for example, require a different sort of listening capability than do academic lectures. Language learning requires intentional listening that employs strategies for identifying sounds and making meaning from them.

Listening involves a sender (a person, radio, television), a message, and a receiver (the listener). Listeners often must process messages as they come, even if they are still processing what they have just heard, without backtracking or looking ahead. In addition, listeners must cope with the sender's choice of vocabulary, structure, and rate of delivery. The complexity of the listening process is magnified in second language contexts, where the receiver also has incomplete control of the language.

Given the importance of listening in language learning and teaching, it is essential for language teachers to help their students become effective listeners. In the communicative approach to language teaching, this means modeling listening strategies and providing listening practice in authentic situations: those that learners are likely to encounter when they use the language outside the classroom.

Section Contents

Goals and Techniques for Teaching Listening 

Strategies for Developing Listening Skills
Developing Listening Activities
Using Textbook Listening Activities
Assessing Listening Proficiency 
Resources

Reading Big Books

Tuesday, October 2.

Hour: 16:00 – 17:30

Course: Didactics II

Teacher: Oscar Molina

The class has begun at 16:10 and at this moment eleven students have arrived. The teacher asks us if we had brought the assigned document to discuss in class. Six of us did not bring the document and the teacher gave the opportunity to copy them. Then one of the students collected the money and went to do the copies. After that, the teacher asks us for sitting forming a circle in order to follow the activity that we had not finished in the last class. It was about presenting big books; each student should present as a teacher a big book to the other partners who were acting as students. To continue the activity, the teacher gave the opportunity to star in a voluntary way, as nobody took the change; he decided to assign the order of presentations according to the contrary direction of clock’s hands. The first person to present the big book was me. What I remember of the presentation are the following aspects: I chose a big book called “A color of his own” at the beginning I was a little nervous because it was my first experience working with a big book as a teacher but soon I started to feel self-confidence and I developed the activity without problems because the teacher, acting as a student, started to do questions to encourage the other students’ participation. The aspects we had to take into account were introducing the story thought questions about the cover, creating hypothesis about the tittle and the images. Then we had to develop the story freely, proposing questions to check comprehension, allowing reading aloud by students, between others. At the end of the activity, teacher gave some recommendations and conclusions.  

Other four presentations were done during the class and all of them had similar a dynamic. The second one was about a big book called “A year in Colombia” it was a story created by one of the students. He presented his big book and received congratulations for his good work from the teacher and students. He concluded his explanation answering some questions: he explains that the objective of his big book was teaching all the mounts of the years to English student beginners and for that all the book is write in present tense. The third one was about the animals in the see. It was a big book that we read together and it was for English students in intermediate level. The fourth one was about seeds and their process of growing up. The presenter did a comparison between plants and humans beings. We shared our perceptions and reflections about humans develop. The last one presentation was a virtual big book called “I like me” we did the lecture together aloud and we discussed about some values mentioned or identified after the lecture.

During all presentations, the teacher has participated as a student, calling all presenters “teacher”, doing a lot of questions, answering the questions of each student presetting and also giving the opportunity the interaction between students.  

After presentations, it sounds two potato-bomb explosions and the teacher decided to finish the class at 17:30.

Reflection:

It was difficult to participate in the class and at same time doing the observation, maybe because this particular class had a lot of interaction and one of the objectives was to participate actively as students in the activities proposed by partners. 

In other class, the students had to create and present Big Books to the other classmates as if there were a real class. Oscar Osorio, Mauricio Arango and me created a Big Book about films and real life; it is focused on teenagers or adults.