Listening activities for advanced adults?

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Ballerina
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Joined: Sun Oct 21, 2012 6:11 pm

Listening activities for advanced adults?

Post by Ballerina » Tue Oct 23, 2012 5:46 pm

I'm a private tutor working mainly with Korean students. My most challenging folks to teach are advanced adults. Why? Their spoken and listening skills are already good! I speak at native speed. We understand eachother. They go to graduate school in an English speaking program and are fine.

At least that is how I see it. Yet a few are convinced that they're not good. The only minor faults I can find are things like minor grammar glitches (but that is so occasional). Maybe they're striving for native level fluency?

Listening is a hard one to teach for me. I know there are websites that I found on this forum with lots of listening activities. But what to do during a private lesson? ideas?

As for the speaking part, I'm thinking of teaching a bit of slang/idioms, discussing news articles, using books such as "Compelling Conversations" and learning more vocab in context. Perhaps mixing in a little from the "Clear Speech" book for accent reduction.

I don't want to make the mistake of charging students for a "talk class". :?:

Sally Olsen
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Post by Sally Olsen » Wed Oct 24, 2012 12:59 pm

Sounds like you have a good plan.

You could add the news. You can get the script for the TV or radio news from the station and follow along for the ones that think they don't get it. Depending on the news station, you will get all the up-to-date slang as it changes so rapidly. Then you will also have tons of topics to talk about in discussion groups. You can teach how to have a formal debates as well - there are a lot of hints on Google.

Ballerina
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Joined: Sun Oct 21, 2012 6:11 pm

Post by Ballerina » Thu Oct 25, 2012 1:18 am

Thank you Sally. I'll look out for the news.

I met with him today. He is a graduate school student whose goal is to understand "fast" English. He's definately an advanced English speaker with excellent grammar and reading comprehension. I think his goal means keeping up with conversations and lectures going on in his graduate school program.

That's a hard one to teach.. getting him up to speed with native speakers and able to understand rapid firing professor speech in his classes. I don't know how much tutoring could help with that. Learning to be quick at listening and mastering American slang/idioms on top of that...

I can certainly try my best with listening news type activities, slang/idiomatic expressions but I don't want him to have false hopes either that tutoring will get him to that native level.
He's busy with grad school and doesn't have time to visit the websites I suggested...

In the past these types of students have been my most challenging.

magrit
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Post by magrit » Thu Oct 25, 2012 10:01 am

Will you have access to online facilities one to one during a private class? Maybe a laptop? If so, you could try BBC Learning English 6 minute talks - hardly American slang etc. though! There are a variety of topics.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learn ... ndex.shtml

Sally Olsen
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Joined: Thu Apr 08, 2004 2:24 pm
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Post by Sally Olsen » Thu Oct 25, 2012 1:05 pm

I used to get them to tape a lecture and then go through it and show him how to take notes. Get him to bring in the textbooks or articles that he has to read for the lecture first and go through them highlighting important points. I used to teach my students to read the first sentence or two of every paragraph, the beginning and especially the conclusions. Get him to look up important words for his field that perhaps he doesn't understand and begin to use them as often as possible. Show him how to construct an essay, how to do multiple choice, or whatever type of tests that has during the year. If you can show him how to read quickly, he will be forever grateful and if you can teach him to write clearly, he will do well.

There is a great deal of information in the IELTS materials for graduate students even though they don't take the test and there is a lot of listening activities that you can use as well. It would be better if he was listening again to his lectures though and you will learn something too in a different field. Having to explain it to you will help him explain it to others. Showing him how to learn the material before the lectures so that he understands more is invaluable.

You can also make of tape of his special words so he can hear them over and over and they become natural for him. The dictionaries will give you proper pronunciation or listening a few Youtube lectures on is subject.

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