Delighted to announce the arrival of a new member of the PronPack family! Connected Speech for Listeners provides background tips plus a wealth of teaching ideas and materials for dealing in class with the pronunciation of natural spoken English. The main objective is to help learners improve their listening skills.
Most of us have experienced mishearing song lyrics. For example, in Bob Dylan’s song, instead of The answer my friend is blowin’ in the wind, we might hear The ants are my friends, they’re blowin’ in the wind. It should come as no surprise that, in our listening classes, what our listeners hear is often similarly surreal! And yet many such mishearings probably go unnoticed.
The results of a short dictation, a simple and easily set up classroom activity, can offer teachers a wealth of information regarding learners’ listening needs. It also brings listening into the classroom in such a way that it’s open to inspection by the learners and teachers together.
Collecting information about students' listening abilities and needs is a relatively easy thing to do, and access to such information can be used to inform and guide classroom practice. In this talk, we'll examine some classroom listening data, and share ideas on what it suggests for an emergent classroom listening syllabus.
The Alberta Hall, Dunbarton Road, Stirling, Scotland
Extra info:
Includes handouts
Novice listeners often have a long way to go before they can enjoy the ability and agility of the expert listener. What problems do they experience and how can we nudge them in the right direction?
In this article I talk about problems encountered by students 'doing' listening. I share some results from dictation activities, which have opened windows into listeners' minds and brought the results of listening into the classroom for inspection.
Students’ transcriptions of listening texts are a rich source of information, revealing the listening processes each individual has used to understand what has been said. In this workshop, we’ll look at various examples of ‘mishearings’ and identify possible causes. Finally, we’ll exchange ideas on how such insights could help us develop students’ listening skills.
