In the IATEFL Forum on Creating Listening Materials, I'll be presenting 'Listening in Chunks' and a technique called 'accoustic drilling'. Students find this useful as it increases their automaticity when decoding clusters of words which frequently occur together. It also impacts positively on their listening fluency and confidence.
Songs are a particularly useful resource for ELT. They have language, motivational appeal and great mnemonic power. In this presentation, we will look at different ways in which we can unlock their potential. We will try out a series of activities to use before, during and after the song.
Pictures are like silent stories. Silent because they are non-verbal. Stories, because they are pregnant with content to talk about. For these two reasons alone, they are extremely useful in English language teaching. In this talk, we explain these and more advantages of pictures, as well as demonstrating different activity types for use in the classroom.
In this talk we'll take a look at a variety of activities which could be used with a 51 second text to help learners become better listeners. See powerpoint slides below.
Learners of English living in an English speaking environment have rich exposure to the spoken language, yet, at the same time, they regularly experience frustration at not being able to understand what people say. In this workshop, we’ll look at and try out tasks which can be used with different texts to help boost confidence and develop a learner's listening skill.
It is often said that we test rather than teach listening. In this workshop, we consider the characteristics of classroom listening tasks and activities we can use with authentic audio materials. They have been designed to develop the listening skill, and simultaneously help non-native listeners become more effective, confident and autonomous.
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.
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.
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.
