Month: May 2015

Teaching or Testing Listening?

Marc Jones / / Listening, Materials, Textbooks

Dear Me probably in even 2010,
You get a CD in the back of your shiny book. The shiny book that has a picture of a loudspeaker to show you the track number. You ask the preset questions underneath and you play the CD and there are the lovely voices of the polite English-speaking people, all waiting to speak enthusiastically, one at a time with a handy grammar point in their throats. They are all lovely people who speak in a standard (prestige) variety with as much of their regional accent scrubbed away as possible.
Then you wonder why your students ‘cannot listen’.
Did you teach them how to listen, or did you only check their (lack of) comprehension again?
Nobody taught me how to teach listening. I doubt that the in-house trainers that trained me ever received anything other than a quick mention to ‘make sure you do some listening‘ when they were trained as teachers.
Students learn to listen by metaphorically being thrown in at the deep end. Unfortunately, like swimming, it only works the first time for a few people. Nobody learns to decode at phoneme or syllable level. Sometimes there might be word-level listening but it’s magic and accident. ‘Listen for the word “useless”. What is it used to describe?’
If we want to give students listening practice, all well and good, but don’t call it teaching. Call it listening to the CD, which could be done at home. Teach some connected speech and have students listen for examples of it. Teach some intonation patterns and have students listen for speaker attitude and intention or even how many items they are listing.
You could even ditch the stupid CD, find something online that has real conversations about something the students are interested in (such as a podcast about video games or a YouTube video about a country they want to go to) and play that instead, having them listen for words stressed in the tone units and make sense of it that way.
But don’t press play and tell the students that you’re teaching listening.
Sincerely,
You
Lots of the key ideas here are not mine. Probably most of them come from:
Field, J (2012) Listening in the Language Classroom. Cambridge: CUP.
Prince, Peter (2013) ‘Listening, remembering, writing: Exploring the dictogloss task’. Language Teaching Research: 17(4) 486–500. London: Sage. Retrieved 9 October 2014.
Other #youngerteacherself posts at Joanna Malefaki’s blog.

Reflection

Marc Jones / / Uncategorized

You can’t teach without reflecting. Apparently.
You sit in a staff room an listening to people moaning about “them” being idiots/dummies/dehumanized amorphous masses; about “them” not being capable of independent thought; about “them” not giving a monkey’s.
You chirp, “It’s because the students are not used to dealing with communicative classrooms and they don’t want to make mistakes. Why not try group work and reporting group opinions if they’re shy or unresponsive.”
You mean ‘I wouldn’t talk to you either if you carried that attitude about me. I’m putting in my two-pence worth because it’s frustrating listening to you.’
“Well, I’ll give it a try but…”
At the same institution you have had students enjoy TOEIC lessons by drawing the focus away from the book and on the thought processes behind the questions set. Students work together to produce their own TOEIC-style materials. You’ve had students give group carousel poster sessions about language study and motivation. You’ve had students survey their classmates and then reflect on whether their survey design was flawed or not. Only one of these was your own idea. Mostly everyone has been on task. Either you have remarkable classes or your students are just in a better mood for studying.
You are exploring your practice. You share ideas. You can advise what works for you and something that might be good to try. In a class full of “them”.
You can’t expect everyone to be enthusiastic all the time. You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink.
 

Various: Status Update

Marc Jones / / Uncategorized

The action research I started is in full swing and the independent study that students were asked to undertake was done by around 80% students in both the sample classes, although some students changed their independent study methods from video to songs and nobody read at all.
I did the listening with my false beginner class today and they really enjoyed it although they found it difficult.
I participated in my second ever #KELTchat on Twitter and it was very informative, especially for my university classes.
Other than that, Twitter was on fire this morning due to my previous moaning arguing moaning about how rubbish bland coursebooks don’t meet student needs but teachers are forced into using them anyway.
I have bad news in that a language school I just started working for is being bought. The new owner seems nice but I do feel uneasy in my work. Conversely, I had an interview with another agency that teaches a lot of IELTS courses. I await that with bated breath, as I do my MA TESOL and Applied Linguistics application.

Authentic Listening Material

Marc Jones / / Links, Listening, Materials

I’ve been looking out for some authentic listening material for some of the Business English courses I teach. I just found a website called Freesound which has some fantastic Creative Commons-licensed MP3 and wav files, free to download.
I downloaded some basic train and airport announcements and I am planning to have false beginner students listen for answers to the following questions:

  1. When does the announcement change to English?
  2. Which gate can you board the plane from?

In another class I’ll have some pre-intermediate students listen for answers to these questions:

  1. What is the new platform for the Penzance train?
  2. Does the Penzance train stop at Exeter St. David’s?

TBLT for Kids. Easy science lesson plan.

Marc Jones / / Lesson Plan

This is basically to go with an idea that I am trying to run with. Based on the BerlinLanguage Worker GAS group, I would like to see something similar happen in the Greater Tokyo area. There is the ETJ Workshop series, but that is sponsored by Oxford University Press and what I am really interested in is people getting together to share their ideas and producing lesson plans and/or materials together, with the materials being Creative Commons licensed so that anyone who wants to use them can do so and change them or improve them as appropriate for their setting. If you are interested, get in touch via the comments.

Level:

Pre-intermediate upward.

Lesson Aims:

  • Students write a report using sequencing language.
  • Students produce a labelled diagram.

Time:

About an hour.

Materials:

Dirt, pebbles/gravel, water, disposable plastic cups (three per group), cloth, coffee filters, a pair of compasses/corkscrew/pocketknife, paper lined one side and unlined on the other.
1. Each group needs three cups. Put holes in the bottom of one.
2. Elicit names for all of the materials.
3. Pour water into one cup for each group and add dirt.
4. Tell students to clean the water. Remind them to use English as much as possible when talking to each other because they may need to write it down later.
5. Students try to clean water. If they don’t manage it after about half an hour drop massive hints or else model it.
6. Students draw a diagram of their most successful filtration setup and label it. You might need to model it, you might not.
Labelled diagram. Spot the spelling error.
7. After diagrams are drawn, students write up what they did. Again, modelling the writing is advantageous and possibly essential depending on the level of the kids.
EXTENSION: Students evaluate their group. Who did what? Who had the most successful ideas.
MAKING IT MORE DIFFICULT: Put cooking oil or sugar in the water.

Classroom Research

Marc Jones / / Listening, Research

As part of my DipTESOL I have to do bits of Action Research in my classroom. Action Research is basically doing research to see whether action is effective. You identify a problem, research baseline data (your norm), do your action/intervention (change), record your data and make your conclusion or else repeat the cycle till you think you’re finished.
This research isn’t for my Dip, more for my own interest.
In two of my university classes, I recorded some data about baseline listening skills. Students listened for stressed words on a coursebook CD, wrote them, then tried to make sense of the message.
Class one had the following comprehension self assessments:

  • Exact: 0
  • Pretty similar: 10
  • Lacking info/minor errors: 18
  • Huh?!: 4

Class two was:

  • Exact: 0
  • Pretty similar: 6
  • Lacking info/minor errors: 18
  • Huh?!: 4

What is interesting is that I had the students tell me what they were going to do for independent study this week and the vast majority said they were going to watch videos or listen to music rather than read or use textbooks.
I want to see how this baseline data develops over the semester.