My teaching career began in Liverpool, way back in 1979, where I worked as a secondary school teacher of History. I taught all ages and levels, but found myself particularly intrigued by the challenges of pupils who seemed to lack motivation.
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.
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.
