Job Discussion Forums

[shmooj]

Having read all the above replies, I'm a little concerned about the general suggestion that listening to something like a DVD again and again is going to help. THis is a very unnatural thing to do. I'm not sure how this is going to help someone understand conversation "live" as it were.

Can someone enlighten me?

Personally, I think the OP's experience was with a student who had been given answers like "listen, listen, listen" countless times and realised that it has not worked. I think they may have seen through the "teachers'" lack of understanding of the listening process revealed in such a simplistic answer.

If our students do not understand a listening text first time through, how many of us replay the tape? All of us. But this kind of repetition never happens in real life. If a rephrase is asked for in real life, there are huge changes in stress, body language and intonation the second, third... times. These are huge factors in listening.

Also, what you do between the first and second playing of the tape in class is very important. There are things like schema activation before you play the tape, contextual clues, linguistic and grammar clues. All these contribute a great deal to listening. It is our job not just to help students apply these skills but also to help them apply these autonomously. It is these skills which we teachers possess and use to teach learning that students need to possess for themselves so they can teach themselves listening at home.

Simply telling them to watch something over and over is going to contribute to frustration I feel. It has to be way more active than that doesn't it?

[FGT]

In agreement with Shmooj, but, with the addition:

In real life we (usually) listen for specific information - we filter out the other stuff. The best we can teach our students is to do the same. Just because they don't understand x% of the language, doesn't mean that they can't function in that environment. If they are always fretting over the bits they don't understand, they don't appreciate how much they do.

Playing things over and over may help them to understand slang, idioms, etc but how are they going to use it?

Ignoring extranious information (and finding out which that is) is good learning strategy.

[Sherri]

Perhaps a new thread is in order on promoting learner autonomy. This discussion I thought was more along the lines of a moan on getting hit up for free suggestions on improving English by strangers. How to treat your own students' questions is a different matter and how to teach skills like listening and how students can reproduce the tasks that we do in the classroom without the aid of a teacher is quite complex. In fact one of the questions we ask people in our interview is how do you respond to a student who asks "how can I improve my listening" (without the aid of a teacher). People who answer just listen, listen, listen without anything to qualify it do not get the job!

[Dr.J]

It's good to listen to the same thing over and over, because you become familiar with it and you can begin to break it down and understand things like elision and linking. It also gives you a feel for the sound of the language that you might not be able to get in a non-english speaking country.

But yeah, it won't help your communicative competence much.

[guest of Japan]

Shmooj,

The reason I recommend the DVD approach is because it helps to give a structure to truly conversational English. It's also very cheap. The studnets are provided with visual stimulation to help them conceptualize the function of the language. Students who try to listen to many different English conversations or commentary usually make little improvement at all because nothing is ever reinforced. By listening to one dvd the student has the opportunity to reinforce the language and get a better grasp of what is being said. They can begin to get the hang of stressed syllables and contracted words. They will also become familiar with many lexical phrases which are common in spoken language and will begin to move away from seeing the language through individual vocabulary words.

Of the students I've recommended this to, only one has taken my advice. He raised his TOEIC score more than 100 points in two months. That jump came almost exclusively in the listening.

I have also met many self taught English speakers who used this approach to get as high as the upper-intermediate level. After that point the tend to stagnate without a teacher and some actual conversation practice.

Yes, I agree it is unnatural, but I've been living in Japan for 3 years. I hear natural conversations in Japanese all the time but I often can't understand what is being spoken about because everything seems so random. Because of the randomness it's hard to create a base to improve apon.

Again, I recommend it as a cheap method of self-instruction to focus on listening.

[Roger]

Shmooj,
for the student type that you and I cater - the Confucian-style learner, memoriser, vocablulary hoarder, - I agree replaying a CD or DVD is not helpful enough. Unnaturalness is not even the big issue here - comprehension is. COmprehension begins not at the word level but at the text level - you understand the whole sentence first, then individual words. Better still - first the general drift of the story, then individual parts of the text.
Our students usually don't come to grips with the story of a text produced or reproduced orally. No matter how often you replay the thing, they can't seem to get it.
They do, however, understand fairly quickly when they have the words written before them. A single word can derail the whole comprehension process so long as the communication takes place orally; let's say a sentence such as "the tavelling salesman went down to the calm sea..." If students have nevr been trained in the use of the word "calm" in a sentence about "the sea", then they won't dig it. They may simply stall just because of this single word. How to overcome such a problem?
Some people would suggest spelling it; others go for translation. I go for nbone of these.
I resort to dictation, making them write down the whole story word by word. lo and behold - they seldom fail to get the gist of it. I don't even believe in the virtue of simplifying the text (already simplified English) because it's my view that without an effot on THEIR part they are never going to make it.
So, every adult class has to take dictations until they understand a story read aloud to them (or until they are capable of understanding spoken conversations between others).

[Mike_2003]

I learnt a lot of Turkish by watching sport on television. When watching, let's say a football match, you can easily link the words you hear with action happening on the pitch; pick up little phrases, connect a frequently heard verb of motion with a player's movements, hear criticism and praise and many other useful structures for daily conversation. The other advantage of this is that it is generally unscripted (unlike listening to a news program, documentary or the like) so it was far more useful in terms of understanding what I was hearing on the street. Furthermore, unlike with a film or soap, if you lose touch of the conversation for a few minutes it's not going to have an adverse effect on your understanding of the rest of the program.

As far as ranting goes, the students who get up my nose are those who feel that by paying you large sums of money you will somehow open their head and insert English into it. I can understand the logic; you need to decorate but can't be bothered to do it yourself - you pay a guy to do it while you sit back and read the paper, you need your car fixed but know nothing about mechanics...pay someone to sort it out for you, you need to know English for your job...sling some teacher a bunch of lira and sit back a reap the rewards...

Sadly, some of them just don't realise that however much they pay us, THEY still have to do the work. Paying someone money isn't a substitute for pulling your finger out and trying some of the things we suggest to improve their language skills.

[Wolf]

[shmooj]

Very thoughtful and eloquent replies everyone.

I had a theory. I tested it. It worked out.

The theory was that NONE of your replies were simply about listening and listening alone. I was very glad to read that they were all what I call active- or critical- listening.

IOW, you are all suggesting listening + doing something with the language you listen to.

This + is very very important for students but many of them cannot handle it because they are not taught to take control of their own learning. Without being helped to take the reigns and carry out the + parts, students will resort to listening + nothing and thereby go nowhere.

To bring this full circle, I think the reason that naturegirl's student and others ask us questions like this is primarily because they are too teacher-dependant and have minimal autonomy. They listen and have tons of data input in this process but they have no idea what to do with these data. They get overloaded, their memory crashes, they learn nothing and go nowhere. So, the way to solve dilemmas like this for students is to give them some one-on-one practical ways to do active/critical listening and then tell them to never ask you for help again

[naturegirl321]

Don't get me wrong. I love being a teacher. SO much so, that I'm at school ten hours a day monday through friday.
I teach at a kindergarten now, so it's not my students who are coming up and asking to improve listening skills, my students want a stamp or sticker.
At my old school, I took time out to give advice. BUt it's not easy to learn a language. People think that there is some magic forumula, but there isn't.
It's the random people. And it'ss always coupled with the "I want to make friends with you so that i can improve my english"
Sorry, but i don't. I don't want to be your free English tutor. I' don't think that it's my responsiblity to do that for everyone who asks. I help a lot of peole as it is.
I"m busy too, I'm taking piano and chinese lessons.
I think from now on I will just say what another poster says and use a bike anology, of pracitising.
Seriously, lots of chinese speak the language, they dopn't hav eto speak with the foreigners

[SueH]

I'm not sure that 'uncritical' listening doesn't serve some use.

As a (rather bad) traditional musician who doesn't read music I find that just listening to some new tunes enables me to get a feel for the music, for its rythyms, pace, pulse, characteristic forms. If I was off to visit Sweden, for example I'd start just listening to Polskas and Swedish fiddle music before even attempting to learn a specific tune.

Sometimes I have found myself playing a tune, or at least the outlines of a tune which I haven't consciously learnt. I might then sit down and learn it more consciously, practice, look at the dots for confirmation (not the same as reading music!) and perhaps listen to different versions of the same tune.

Active learning is more productive, but other exposure might help some people.

[Steiner]

I listened to English uncritically for probably a year or so before I said anything at all intelligible. Maybe if I'd been more critical I would've picked it up faster. In any case, I'm perfectly fluent now and people from the Midwestern United States tell me I have no accent whatsoever.

[guest of Japan]

I have you beat steiner. I listened uncritically for two years before finally uttering a word. My parents were quite concerned, but I'm sure in hindsite they consider it to be one of the best periods in their lives.

[Sherri]

I'm with Shmooj here. Just listening without a task or purpose is not going to be as effective as "just listening". Even the people who were (jokingly I think) treating first and second language acquisition as the same, as small children a lot more is going on than just listening. I know because I have a 2-year-old at home. Even before my daughter started speaking, we repeated words and phrases, pointed things out, explained things and when she did start speaking, corrected when mistakes were made. If comprehensible input was all that was needed and if 1st and 2nd language acquisition were the same I would be speaking Japanese as well as a 13-year old.

[naturegirl321]

I forgot to mention that the old school that i used to work at promised it's intensive summer students that they would be fluent in a couple of months. The chinse partner said this to the kids mothers. of course, when their little darlings weren't fluent, the parents were livid. maybe this is one of the reasons, the American woman is breaking off the partnership with the chinese man. . . .