I've been reading quite a lot about teaching listening. There are some things that I've believed for years: language in listening texts should be authentic or should approximate authentic language if it's graded for learner's level and tasks should have something to do with what learners might do in real life.
Then there are new ideas which I'm not sure about. Penny Ur says that visual materials are "essential" (Teaching Listening Comprehension p.29), but why? A picture on the board can help contextualize something and activate background knowledge, but so can a discussion... And while visual clues exist in real life, they don't exist in terms of badly drawn pictures on the board, so how does me drawing something make things more similar to how the aural input would be encountered in real life?
What I've been doing this past month is having students bring in their favorite song on CD. I'll prepare a cloze activity in advance and on the day of the class the student will say a few words about why they chose this song (that's got to be more natural than me drawing some ugly picture on the board) and then I'll give students a general question like "How does the singer feel?" After we listen students discuss how the singer might feel and when things start to wander I do a little class survey. Then I hand out the cloze and we listen again. Students check their answers, I collect the various answers and put them on the board, then we listen again to check which ones are correct.
Then students analyze the lyrics and talk about their reactions to the song in groups. At this point they usually ask about a few vocabulary words. After the discussion we sing the song together (or at least try).
I suppose its biggest strength is the discussion aspect. We've always got personally meaningful topics to discuss. I've been wondering about the value of the listening practice though. We start off with general idea stuff, top-down processing and follow it up with the cloze, bottom-up processing. That part's good.
The language is authentic and motivating, but students aren't exposed to many types of discourse. They get songs and then discussion (When students speak to each other their getting conversation-based listening practice). They never get speeches, directions, or a few other things.
I asked students recently which was better, Interactions 1, and the listenings we've done from there or the songs. The consensus was that the songs are more fun, but that the book is better for listening practice and learning how to listen.
The big differences I see are the types of input (conversations vs. songs) and the types of tasks. The book starts off with main idea tasks too, but then they have some listening for detail questions which I don't do. I suppose I could do that with the songs, before or instead of the cloze.
Posted by James Trotta at December 30, 2003 2:11 PMI know that...
Listening for the words in a song is listening for the words in a song.
Listening for something said in a conversation is something different altogether.
But both are good!
I've just read that cloze exercises aren't so great becuase they're not transferable to real world tasks. In other words, a cloze only happens in the classroom, not in real life.
The problem is what do we do with songs in real life? We just enjoy them. Maybe we pick out some details from the lyrics, but that would be real tough for my learners. I guess I'll let them try though...
Posted by: James Trotta at January 1, 2004 2:50 AMWhen I listen to a song I try to hear the words, simply because it's interesting and I'll enjoy the song more. I then see if they apply to my life in any way.
Posted by: marcus at January 1, 2004 7:12 AMmaterials on teaching listening in secondary schools needed.
Posted by: EDISON at September 23, 2004 6:02 PMESL blog is one of many Blogs for learning English & teaching English. Translation services information.