Tag: podcast

Podcasts for Professional Development

Marc Jones / / Links

 

Have a good summer? I hope so.

I just wanted to get back into the swing of blogging again by writing a list of podcasts for English Language Teachers. Be warned, this skews toward higher education and adult learners a lot.

General Language Teaching

TEFLology (disclaimer: the podcasters are my friends and I am a junior coworker of one TEFLologist).

We Teach Languages – A wide variety of topics. Really good interviews with regular teachers.

General Higher Education

Research in Action – sometimes has pedagogy and productivity-relevant topics.

Teaching Higher Ed – lots of generally good pedagogical advice in the episodes I have listened to.

General Linguistics

You will feel very intelligent listening to these because they are very academic but also very accessible.

Lexicon Valley – a bonus here for the use of old Broadway show songs to illustrate linguistic phenomena.

Lingthusiasm

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.