Egregious mistakes, oversimplifications & overcomplicati

[woodcutter]

The teachers who gave the rules that the students are quoting almost certainly did not have any deep semantic insights to give. Getting your head round the English tongue in abstract fashion is a fiendish task. Perhaps the best thing is to provide a light framework on which the usual subconscious mastery can grow.....

Am I the only one who thinks this? Have any of you actually met any other English language teachers? Do they generally delve deeper than the back of the Headway books? Can the students be expected to do so?

[lolwhites]

Anyone who can't develop a sensitivity to structure and meaning shouldn't be teaching languages! Whether or not you offer deep semantic insights to the students (which, I agree, needs to be done with caution), teachers need to be aware of them if only to avoid some of the crasser overgeneralisations.

Any teacher who think the back of the Headway books give sufficient information for anyone other than the student (and they don't even do that!) needs sacking for gross incompetence!

[woodcutter]

Maybe I should stop giving Andy a hard time and put my own head above the parapet. By biggest gripe about modern textbook courses is the way they often approach listening. I was flicking through the wretched Ur woman's book on the subject, and was reminded that students are always supposed to be encouraged not to grab tenaciously onto individual words are ignore the overall meaning of what they listen to on the cassettes. I have read this many times before, but I have not met any students who suffer from such strange habits. They often seem to have the same problem I used to have as a French student. They are confronted with very long, unbroken stretches of language which they scarcely understand (and can hardly grasp words from to get upset about). They are then asked multiple, rather detailed questions about this, and are supposed to answer using the "gist" they may have gained from the odd bits they did pick out.

To me, the best thing is to have short bursts, so as to not waste people's time making them listen to things they just aren't getting, and always give the students a chance to listen once or twice again after a bit of clarification. It's also quite good to grasp at words, if they are not easily understood, and make a bit of a guess - and to be hung up enough to find out if you were right!

[JuanTwoThree]

Yup, my gripe about listenings is similar.

At least writing tasks bear some passing semblance to what students might really have to write, readings ditto. Speaking is speaking and must be useful however fatuous the task, I suppose.

But what is remotely like listening to the boomings of a couple of failed actors while at the same time having to read complicated questions and tick boxes or choose between ABC and D, knowing that you can't see the said actors' faces or body language let alone get many nuances through the crackling storm of static produced by the dodgy and much abused tape/CD player neither interrupt the pair of luvvies nor let them see from your glazed expression that you can't understand a word that they are on about, not that you really care, all the time knowing that at some moment a disembodied voice, which you do understand because it's always the same, is going to intone "Now listen again" and you are going to have to do the same bizarre activity all over again?

(pause to wipe froth from mouth and spittle from screen)

I suppose it might be like doing the Open University by radio, or listening to the Archers knowing that you are going to be interrogated later about whose jam was better, or being in the French Resistance (Leesen vairy carefooly) but it's hardly got anything to do with most students' aural needs. Does their listening get better as a result of these strange rituals or is it their ability to do them that improves? Aren't speaking activities along with English language satellite tv and dvd's enough exposure nowadays except in the most farflung places ?

Another gripe is about almost every single "explanation" and ensuing practice in "Focus on First Certificate" but that's another story.

[lolwhites]

Pretty much any activity that practises listening in the classroom (apart from listening to the teacher and pairwork) is going to be artificial - exactly how it can be done better isn't entirely clear unless you have unlimited resources for TVs, language labs, DVDs, computers modern enough to handle sound and video clips etc. Of course, the UCLES exams always have this type of listening exercise so you have to train the student to jump through the hoop even if they'll never have to do it again.

In the UK, if you do an A-Level in a modern language, the listening test consists of a series of recordings which you can listen to as many times as you need to within the overall time limit. This is rather less artificial than the "you will hear each recording twice" type exercise - after all, voicemail messages don't delete themselves after two goes, and you can ask someone to reapeat themselves as many times as their patience will allow.

Publishers trying to sell one book all over the world can't count on everyone having the most modern equipment - hell, even CDs instead of tapes are a pretty recent development in EFL!

[revel]

Good morning all.

Have to agree with you all about those listening exercises. It's like getting home at 10.10 when CSI has begun at 10, and until you know who has been killed and where they were killed and how they were killed, even though you might understand the words the actors are saying, you really don't have any idea what they are talking about. So often a listening task is simply lacking in the needed universe of discourse in order to be comprehensable.

I have coleagues who use these exercises simply as time fillers. These teachers stick in a tape, or put on a "Speak Up" video and then work through the questions because they don't have the personal resources available to make better use of the time in class. These teachers are also the ones who always seem to be asking "what can I do to teach this or that?" to more experienced teachers. This type of listening exercise is just too passive for my liking, and since I firmly believe that comprehension is the fruit of production, I simply don't do this type of exercise, ever.

However, certain objectives can be met with the use of taped conversations, or songs, or movies. Students can be given certain active objectives that make them use the listening situation as a learning tool, or maybe a self-check tool. I recall an exercise I used to give to students in New York: Get on the sub way, stand or sit near two people talking, eavesdrop their conversation, then report back to the class what they were talking about. I want a short answer here "They were talking about what they were going to do on the weekend." Then I might have asked them a couple of questions, like "Did they decide? What were their plans? Did they agree or did each want to go to a different place, engage in a different activity?"

I stick a favorite "I Love Lucy" DVD in the player and all the students have a worksheet with several boxes with ten spaces to fill in. As they are watching and listening to Lucy and Ricky argue once again that she wants to but he forbids her to, they fill in the spaces with words or fragments that they recognize. Once any student has ten, he/she shouts "ten!" and the pause button is pressed. The list is compared with other lists and for every original word that student has, that student earns $100 (and receives a counterfit photocopy of Mr Franklin's portrait).

The little kids don't understand why I want them to be more "enthusiastic" and exaggerate tonality more when they are saying things in English. So I stick the same "I Love Lucy" DVD in the player and ask them to listen to how the actors sing-song their texts. They hear an occasional word that they know, they laugh at Lucy's mugging her way through a scene and they hear that tonality that I so wish my adults had been taught in their first classes of English, that tonality that helps them sound less like robots and more like communicating people.

Stick the tape in and answer ABC is, in my opinion, an uneconomical use of class time. Setting a specific task (and using your imagination in setting that task, going beyond the already well-used over-used cloze-type fill-in-the-blank-in-this-Beatle's-song exercise) and completing that task in a reasonable length of time is more active and more productive.

peace,
revel.

[woodcutter]

While I am no fan of the cheesy fake accented voice actors or bad quality tape recorders, my point was different, and not impractical. Some textbooks generally have listening exercises which are very l--o--n--g, and at a higher level than the book, in the mistaken belief that "listening for gist" is the important thing. Students never really get a chance to pick up what they missed. In general, listenings should be short, so that teachers have a chance to work with them properly, focus, and go back if necessary. And the level, as ever, should be "L+1"ish.

[Andrew Patterson]

I'm with you here Woodcutter, of the 4 skills listening is the hardest to teach. In fact it is often said that it isn't taught, but tested. If anyone can think of ways to actually teach it, please let me know. One of the worst tapes for doing what you describe is "Natural English" which insists that speach is always delivered at the normal pace of a native speaker. Many extracts are too long, too. Ironically, it actually boasts about it's revolutionary approach to listening.

To change the subject slightly, we should remember that adult brains are far less flexible than children's brains and many phonemes that may be different in English, may be heard as the same in another language.

I can say from first hand that it is extremely difficult for an English speaker to hear the difference between the sh sounds in sheep and shop or the ch sounds in cheese and chop, yet in Polish they are completely different phonemes (in case you weren't sure the first in each pair is made with a wide mouth, the second with a narrow mouth.) If your language trains you to do distinguish these, these sounds will sound very different to each other.

This situation is reversed with the a and e sounds in pan and pen which sound the same to Polish speakers but are very different to English speakers. I often do exercises to ask which word I said to differentiate these sounds.

Both speaking and listening probably more than reading and writing need to be adapted to suit individual L1's.

[Lorikeet]

I'm with you here Woodcutter, of the 4 skills listening is the hardest to teach. In fact it is often said that it isn't taught, but tested. If anyone can think of ways to actually teach it, please let me know.

I do a lot of work teaching listening to American English. I concentrate on the way Americans link words together, as well as the rhythm used (some words are reduced). My students say it helps learn to listen better. For those of you who may not have seen this yet, it's a (yeah, still unfinished) example of what I mean: http://fog.ccsf.cc.ca.us/~lfried/activi ... ngexp.html

I can say from first hand that it is extremely difficult for an English speaker to hear the difference between the sh sounds in sheep and shop or the ch sounds in cheese and chop, yet in Polish they are completely different phonemes (in case you weren't sure the first in each pair is made with a wide mouth, the second with a narrow mouth.) If your language trains you to do distinguish these, these sounds will sound very different to each other.

This situation is reversed with the a and e sounds in pan and pen which sound the same to Polish speakers but are very different to English speakers. I often do exercises to ask which word I said to differentiate these sounds.

I don't think I agree that English speakers find it extremely difficult to different between "sh" and "ch". They are, after all, phonemes in English. A better example would be the two "L" sounds in Russian, one a more front L, and one a more back L. An English speaker has difficulty telling the difference because although those sounds can be produced, they are not separate phonemes in English.

I also do work with individual sounds and spelling, but it's less about listening, because you can often figure out the words in context. ("That boy is very bed." doesn't make much sense, but "That boy is very bad." does.)

[Andrew Patterson]

I don't think I agree that English speakers find it extremely difficult to different between "sh" and "ch". They are, after all, phonemes in English.

My fault for not writing clearly: Poles have 2 ch sounds and 2 sh sounds.

It is very difficult for a monolingual English speaker to hear the difference between the ch sounds in:
cheese and choose.
Ignore sh here it's the two ch sounds that you're comparing.

It is also very difficult to tell the difference between the sh sounds in:
sheep and shop.

Ignore ch here it's the two sh sounds that you're comparing.

It is quite easy to tell the difference between ch and sh.

I also do work on reduced forms, though probably not enough. I probably don't do enough rhythm. I one heard sth on a documentry where they electronically extracted the phonemic qualities from a piece of speach and left only the rhythm. It sounded a bit like the teacher's voice in snoopy cartoons, except somehow more naturalistic, anyway, it really made the rhythm stand out. I'd love to be able to use sth like that.

[Lorikeet]

Ah, thanks for the clarification, Andrew. Makes sense to me now .