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.
In this session we’ll be trying out several listening activities. They all serve to help raise our awareness to the listening processes we employ and, simultaneously, demonstrate ways we can make the fruits of listening activities available for classroom inspection and reflection.
In this talk, we’ll see how the evidence of the ears can be influenced and thus is not as stable as we suppose. Having said that, an expert listener successfully employs a range of processes in order to understand what’s being said, but, obviously, it’s not so easy for the non-expert listener.
At the beginning of the workshop, participants will do a paused transcription activity to bring the listening processes employed by expert listeners to a level of consciousness. Expert listeners usually understand what they hear with a seemingly high degree of automaticity and lack of effort.
Findings of research into the processing of spoken language point to the constructive nature of listening. In this talk, we’ll look at how L1 listening comprehension is influenced by various elements and compare this to the L2 listening endeavour. We’ll also exchange ideas on how we could possibly exploit this information when teaching listening to adults.
This is a rhyme designed to work over the melody of the French nursery rhyme Frère Jacques. The melody is represented by the position of the words on the musical stave.
John Field, in Listening in the Language Classroom (CUP 2008) suggested that the traditional comprehension approach to listening tests the product of listening but does nothing to teach the process.
