Job Discussion Forums

[tofuman]

Anyone have any ideas or good experience teaching "Listening" to university students?

I don't believe that taped snippets are a particularly good way since there is little context in which to place the communication.

I tried a search and got back eleven pages on various subjects.




"When the student is ready, the teacher will appear"

[Roger]

My classes are called "Listening and Speaking", and clearly, these kids need a lot of LISTENING exercises and far less talk fests.

My employer is not very helpful in supplying suitable materials; all books they force upon me and the students are supposed to be used in conjunction with tapes or VCDs, which never accompany them when I get them. And many of my students don't have the textbooks either...

WHich means: you are left to your own devices; all materials are intended as token gifts to you.

In your situation I do not know what exactly you are supposed to be doing, but have you thought of tape-recording your students while they read something aloud?
This could show them a lot of what's wrong with their speaking.

As for myself, I have taken a completely new route to discharging my duty. I make them work on the phonetic aspects of English; this means I have to write a lot in the IPT (Internat. Phonetic Transcription), and to my surprise they are pretty familiar with the symbols. There simply are a lot of glaring discrepancies between their actual pronuncation and the IPT representation of some words. That is where I work on with them: the difference, say, between long vowels and short ones, the proper articulation to produce sounds represented by 'Z' or 'TH', etc.

Thus, I have reverted to a lecturing style that's not at all incompatible with my job description or my students' expectations; I force them to do research on those aspects while in class. (I do that because they would never do assignments on their own).
Of course, there must be something to lighten them up a bit too; at the end of a regular 2-period lesson I usually do games with them that involve listening; for example doing simple maths with them (and get them to laugh over their errors in confusing '14' with '40' or even '30'...).

My students are not English majors, so I have no obligation to render their English "fluent" - whatever that could mean here!

You also might consider various forms of DICTATIONS. Tell them a story in simplified English and no more than 200 words; see whether they can retell it (in most cases, the answer is NO!). Then dictate the story and see how much their writing is divergent from your utterances.
You can vary this by asking them to copy it from a print-out that you put on a wall sufficiently far away from the nearest student desk so that each and veryone has to walk up, memorise a few words and return to their desk and write it down as faithfully as possible. If you pair them up you get one of them to "dictate" the story to his or her partner. That guarantees a lot of good feelings and a sense of achievement shared by both the teacher and the students.

[Girl Scout]

There's a great lesson on about.com, Intonation and Stress: Key to Understanding and Being Understood.

http://esl.about.com/library/weekly/aa110997.htm

I have done it many times over the years and have had a lot of success.

[7969]

roger, you've posted some useful info here. i really think i might start doing some very basic pronunciation exercises in my classes, along with some dictation and other ideas you've put forth. too many students in my classes are lost and not doing anything. simplified exercises should at least get most of them doing something for some of the class.

thanks. 7969

[Spiderman Too]

I also use dictation as a means of improving students' listening AND speaking skills.

I have compiled multiple sets of 10 questions Each set of questions has a theme; past tense, third person 's', plurals, basic adjectives, basic adverbs, and more. Actually, I have several sets of questions for each theme.

At my school it was necessary for me to tell the students a week before I started the dictation exercises (now a weekly event) that they MUST buy a writing pad and bring it to every class together with a pen.

I dictate the questions to the students. I make it clear to them that they should write the questions I dictate, not answers to the questions. Upon completion I randomly swap the papers among the students (they print their names at the top of the paper) for checking and correction if necessary, while I dictate the questions a second time.

The students then write their own answers to the questions. I check the answers myself.

The students then line up in two lines facing each other and practice asking and answering the questions; four questions/answers per turn otherwise it takes too long. One line remains stationary and the other lines moves along one place. The person at the end of the moving line runs to the front of the line.

I walk up and down the line monitoring and correcting their pronunciation.

The students seem to enjoy it. Well, at the very least, I can tell you that they do the exercises without complaint.

The question-dictation activity is successful due to, I believe, two reasons. Firstly, the questions are about the students' lives, about China and about other matters that the students can relate to and/or are interested in. I put a lot of thought into the questions over an extended period of time. Secondly, each student is fully occupied, fully active, throughout the activity; there is no boredom or restlessness that occurs when the teacher is dealing with individual students or students placed in small groups.

[tofuman]

Thank you all for your replies. I'll describe what I have been doing lately and you are certainly welcome to tell me why it is not good.

I play an entire DVD with English subtitles and dialogue. I then go back to small sections and review it with English dialogue and subtitles. Then I pre teach potentially difficult vocabulary in that section and give them time to check dictionaries for words they have questions about. I then give 5 questions and play small section again with dialogue only and ask for volunteers to answer questions and then call on students.

This method works for me but I'm not sure how effective it is for students.

I also play English language music and ask students to copy what they understand. We try to reconstruct the song. Currently using songs from the Eagle for this.

The students and I both enjoy these methods but I wonder how effective they are as real teaching techniques.

Suggestions welcome.

[Babala]

Here's a few simple ways I have used to teach listening. Your use of songs is good. I hand them a sheet with the song lyrics on it and leave out some of the words. I play the song over at least 4X and have them fill them in. Another thing I do is to tell them a story. In the story there are many colour references. While I am reading they must record all of the colours I have said. Simple but effective.

[friedrich nietzsche]

Listening is a much neglected skill, which is sad . I have found that in the process of second language acquisition, it is often through listening that we "notice" key elements of language. Good listening activities try to take advantage of this and are often followed by exercises to encourage the use of the noticed language feature(s).
I have found dictation to be especially useful in many respects. Dictation works well with large groups and can, by assigning different tasks to different students, be used well in mixed-ability situations. For more on dictation, check out Paul Davis and Mario Rinvelucri.
Jack Richard's New Interchange has an excellent set of listening exercises that stress functional competence and natural language. It has also incorporated many of the insights of the lexical approach, in that much of the target language is in collocation form or in some other chuncked form. It is particularly useful for intermediate students. However, it does teach American English and it is up to you to decide if that's the variety of Enlish you want to teach.

[Roger]

In reply to tofuman's ponderous question:

I never use a DVD! Not that I consider it wrong per se. far from it! Maybe you have got some easy-to catch, easy-to-interpret songs?
But the issue often is: there is a pile of colloquial and slangy English in songs, and the language as such is abstract and lyrical, hence unfathomable to Chinese.
They go for SIMPLE things with DIRECT meanings, no abstraction.

I go for short stories and jokes contained in texts of 200 to 250 words in what's been named "simplified English", which is apparently a protected moniker for an English variety using around 1800 recurrent vocables of the English language.

There always is a punchline to each story, so if the kids can't laugh everybody knows they are grappling with semantics. Semantics and aural reception, that is.
I never, or almost never, "pre-teach" any vocables! I assume that with up to 10 years of formal classroom English my students ought to be able to cope.

And they do - but it's a question of how you "help" them.

Don't make it TOO EASY - because a student only really absorbs new items if he makes an effort.
Thus, when they have to write it down word by word, with me giving them the puncutation marks, reading every clause twice, and never one word at a time but a cluster of words bunched into one collocation or more, they slowly form in their minds pictures that add up to a whole film sequence.
Finally, they must correct their own mistakes! That's completely new to most! And not that I point out the mistakes - I let one of them write their sentences on the blackboard for the whole class to see; if there is a mistake I ask the whole class for their opinion; there almost always is one (but rarely many!) student who corrects every mistake - grammar, spelling, punctuation.

When they get the whole picture of the story via the text, new words or expressions fall into a place in their memory, and they acquire vocabulary for far longer than if they have to memorise upfront for an event or occasion that never takes place.

And here is another variation:
You can enhance their awareness of faulty English versus good English by making them correct each other's writing! It works wonderfully! I ask them to team up with 3 to 4 classmates of their own choice, including a proportionate number of members of the opposite sex; they take dictation as individuals but in the end, they have to select their best writing, which they then copy and sign off under their names. Thus, the mistake made by one becomes a mistake made by everyone, and they want to avoid this: hence a better performance at proof-reading!
I have just corrected 8 classes' dictations - about 5 to 8 papers per class. The text had 256 words, and they had no trouble understanding it, with maybe ten percent of them understanding it at first reading (before jotting it down under dictation).
One team made 27 mistkaes - several times a comma instead of a colon; several times no punctuation mark when I said "exclamation mark", but hardly any magic changing of verbs into adjectives or transformations of one word into a totally different one.
Maybe three quarters of all papers had between 2 and 7 mistakes!
I think that was a great success!

[Jizzo T. Clown]

In my university we focus on note-taking skills when it comes to listening. What I usually do is prepare a short lecture on a given topic (could be history, biology, english, whatever) then have the students write the main points of the lecture in note form. By this, I mean

Heading
subheading 1
supporting points

subheading 2

You get the idea. My students are upper-intermediate to advanced, and they do struggle a bit, but they find it very useful.

It's of course a good idea to go over note-taking principles beforehand (this in itself can take several classes, or even a few weeks!) and some topic markers typically found in lectures ( "of course..." "as you can see..." that/this is why..." etc).

I highly recommend English for Academic Purposes by R.R Jordan (Cambridge University Press, 2000) for teaching in a university setting.