What aspects of listening, learning and listener character traits come into play when we take authentic listening texts into our classrooms and how might they relate to tasks and activities we devise? In this workshop we’ll look at the challenges authentic listening texts present for non-expert listeners around B2 level.
Mark Hancock: I will be presenting a workshop entitled "Pronunciation for listeners: making sense of connected speech" at the conference on the Tuesday. I'm also speaking at the pronunciation sig pre-conference event.
Do you want to use more authentic listening materials with your learners? Are you looking for ideas on the kind of tasks you could design that will make the listening experience doable, develop your learners’ skills and inculcate confidence - all at the same time? And what's ambiguity and risk got to do with it all? Just some of the questions to be mulled over in this session.
In this workshop, we’ll be talking about and trying out various activities to use with authentic listening texts.
We’ll look at ways of activating different types of background knowledge, before moving on to consider the purpose and practicalities of materials design for activities which help students develop their decoding and meaning-building skills.
Annie began the workshop with a snippet taken from a BBC studio interview and participants listened and brainstormed the problems the text would present for a student approaching a B2 level in English.
Designing a listening lesson based on authentic texts poses several challenges, not least because of the qualities of the texts themselves. However, with careful task design, we can mediate the difficulty level and ‘teach’ rather than 'test' listening.
This is a fun awareness-raising activity matching correct and misheard song lyrics based on a video - see below. There is also an audio-only version available to download.
Nowadays, the internet gives us easy access to audio (and audio-visual) recordings, and, naturally, many learners of English will want / need / try to listen to some of what’s available. However, and despite the amount of time spent ‘doing’ listening in the language classroom, they will often feel frustrated when they try to follow such recordings.
Pronunciation is not only about the mouth, but also the ears. And, with English being a global language, the ears must learn to be flexible in order to make sense of all those varieties of spoken English out there. This session is about helping learners to deal with this variety.
