Job Discussion Forums

[Sour Grape]

I teach at a high school in Japan. My lessons are supposed to be mainly listening lessons.

Do you think it's a good idea to give the students a copy of the tape script? I mean after they've done the task, of course?

Thanks for your opinions.

[spiral78]

If they are motivated enough to read the script and relate it to what they've heard, I would absolutely give it to them.

[Glenski]

Give it to them during the listening process, too. Leave some blanks and ask them to fill in what they hear. Better still, give them a choice of certain words and have them circle what they heard.

Depends on the level of your readers, but you might need the script to do comprehension questions. Don't OVERestimate the ability of your students.

[gugelhupf]

With textbooks that have the tapescript at the back such as Cutting Edge I find some weaker students have an irritating habit of going straight to that page thinking that they have found a clever way to 'cheat'. Often it just makes their task harder.

[sheeba]

As Glenski mentions level matters .Are you testing memory or Listening comprehension ?

If teaching comprehension then have you thought about a transcription/ dictation task to follow the listening exercises? That way the students would be writing down the text ,you can test their phonemic transcripts, you don't have to go to the photocopier and we start our saving trees campaign .

[gaijinalways]

Really depends on the students' levels and how much of the class is listening. But yes, I would normally give them the script later, but usually partially completed for a cloze exercise or for an information gap exercise.

[coffeedrinker]

I'd make a point of asking them not to read it beforehand, but telling them that you'll listen for gist first and then let them read along and listen. I think this is a very effective strategy for a lot of people.

One very neat activity I've used, from a Bosnian colleague: do some vocab brainstorming or eliciting or even just preteaching, and then white out those words from the tapescript. After learning the words, the students read through the tapescript (before listening) and try to fit those words in the correct place. Then the listen to check.

Not to be used every time, but it can be fun and people do tend to still listen pretty closely. I often use this with a listening I expect to be difficult.

This could be against some kind of copyright, copying a tapescript, hmm...but not so unusual in TEFL at all I think!

[Glenski]

[coffeedrinker]

Yeah, people will look, but in the books in the schools I've taught in, the tapescripts are in the back so they aren't something that the students only get if I hand them out.

If you have tapescripts elsewhere, then I agree. Don't give them out til it's time to read them, if at all!

Especially if it is an adult student though, and the kind that comes to class having read through and "prepared" the lesson already (not common but I've had a few)... they know it's there and if they want to read it they will. I personally find it more effective to discuss it (with adults) and give them my reasons why it's better not to read them (or why it's actually useful to DO the homework and not just copy it from the workbook key...) and let them know they will have a chance to read and won't be put on the spot if they are really lost (in contrast to worrying that by mentioning the tapescript I'm alerting them to its presence).

Man, the lengths we go to...

[John Hall]

I used to use a textbook series that had audioscript pages that were perforated so that they could be torn out. At the beginning of the course, I would make the students tear them out and hand them in to me. Then, as we did each listening exercise, I would hand back the pages near the end of the exercise (so that the last time they heard the audio track, they could see it in print).

Since then, I haven't come across any other texts with perforated pages for the audioscripts. I've been tempted though, to get the students to tear out the pages of the audioscripts anyway. The only thing holding me back from doing that is the fact that it would probably be quite messy.

How often do you run into a situation where the audio track is just too hard for the students to follow? It happens a lot with me in intensive courses. Recently, I have decided to ditch the typical prediction, main ideas, and details exercises that accompany these tracks, and just get the students to translate what they hear phrase-by-phrase. (I have enough fluency in the students' language to have a general idea if they are right or not, usually.) This seems to work much better because in a class of 20 or so students like I have, there is usually one or two students who can translate the more difficult words. I keep my bilingual dictionary handy for when we all get stuck.

[canuck]

When doing listening lessons, I think it's important to preteach the vocabulary. Other strategies during the listen would be, as pointed out, fill-in-the blank types of exercises or another option with the listening script would be to cut it into different pieces and have the students put it in order while they listen.

One of the important things many people don't understand about listening lessons is that there should be some sort of speaking exercises afterwards about the listening. I can't believe there are people out there who think that it's just a "press the play button for the whole lesson" type of thing.

[John Hall]

But, Canuck, they could also write answers instead of speaking.

[Malsol]

[John Hall]

Malsol, you say that you give the tapescript out in advance. But do you let the students keep it while you play the listening?

This is always my argument against letting students read while the tape or CD is playing. Reading can be done at any speed, even when the audio track is playing. Some students will read ahead; others will focus on a word they don't know and get out the dictionary. In either case, they stop listening to the audio track. Some students will follow the audio track in the text, but I have discovered that many don't.

However, I will admit that when I play movies in class, I program the DVD player to play the movie with sound and subtitles both in English. In that situation, reading the words seems to help improve listening comprehension considerably.

I guess the big difference here has to do with the fact that movie subtitles appear at the same speed as the audio track, whereas, audioscripts in textbooks don't. Because of the latter, I don't let my students read the audioscript while the audio track is playing. What do you people think? Is that the right thing to do?

[canuck]