Talks by Annie McDonald

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?

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 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.

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.