(Ayça & Jon ponder the skill of listening)
Discussion is often heated in the office but is something we both feel to be necessary for making sense of our own and each other’s ideas. Our current discussion topic is the teaching and learning of the skill(s) of listening at BUSEL. And here note-taking inevitably raises its head. For us, note-taking is a key listening activity for our learners and while it is something that will ostensibly help them in their departments it is an activity that presents challenges for learning. Learners often find it difficult to develop this skill set. For one, they can have a hard time deciding what information is and isn’t important while they listen. The challenge is there for teaching too. Assisting learners to develop effective but individualised note-taking skills isn’t easy, particularly in an EAP context. Subsequently, we, as a school, have developed an approach for our teaching in which we break note-taking into its subskills and teach these as ‘strategies’ because we believe these strategies will in due course help learners in their listening. We willingly invest this energy and we strive to understand just what happens during the note-taking process in EAP. But do the gains in listening justify our efforts? Aren’t there other ways of developing listening skills? Extensive listening would enable learners to increase the quantity of listening they do and improve their processing of aural texts. With a little more teacher effort, learner listening can be personalised thus increasing the engagement. With such an approach, learners will have a clear listening purpose; they will listen because they want to listen and learn. And what’s more, extensive listening will facilitate the development of listening skills naturally and this will help lerners in their departments, which is our aim after all. As we try to make our own sense of the skill of listening and how to teach it, we’d appreciate hearing our colleagues’ views.
We’re all ears.
You might find this TED talk interesting:
ReplyDeleteIn our louder and louder world, says sound expert Julian Treasure, "We are losing our listening." In this short, fascinating talk, Treasure shares five ways to re-tune your ears for conscious listening -- to other people and the world around you.
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/julian_treasure_5_ways_to_listen_better.html
OFF-TOPIC
ReplyDeleteHow do we post to this site? Posts are put up by the blog managers, but I can't see any contact for the blog managers.
I think the extent and type of listening practice needs to vary according to the level. With beginners, the emphasis needs to be on fairly short chunks of conversation, so there's no difference from general TEFL, but in Pre-faculty I agree that extensive listening is very useful. When I was teaching at this level, I would often have students listen and take notes for half an hour, because this is what they were going to be doing in their departments (sometimes we even invited lecturers from their faculties, since at the time Pre-faculty students were grouped by faculty). In FAE, it's different again because they are already getting extensive listening practice - with around twenty hours of lectures, the last thing they need is a lot of extensive listening in class!
ReplyDeleteBarbara Clark ( a life-long listener of BBC Radio 4) said.
ReplyDeleteI don't really understand how to do this but here goes.
Have just found a nice site for getting podcasts from BBC learning English - there are '6 minute podcasts' on there. Students could be encouraged to dip in and listen to one or all of these regularly (they change)and maybe keep a log in their learning portfolios of what they've listened to and a short response to the topic discussed (one sentence, a smiley or a
frowning face). IE Extensive listening in the sense of this being not focussed on intensively listening for specific information to answer
comprehension questions or to make the notes you think will help you answer a question, but in the sense of actually listening to radio
broadcasts that are not just music or news, with the purpose of developing a listening-for-pleasure habit in the way that we'd like to develop a reading-for-pleasure habit. And the '6 minute' length of the podcasts are
not daunting even for the low level students. Who knows, students might go on to be encouraged to listen to podcasts of more BBC programmes on the World service or on Radio 4 as their competence in the language, and in particular in the listening skill, improves. I'm with Jon and Ayca - I believe listening to more will help with the listening skill. and I'm with
Robin, not more lectures (but a greater variety involving going outside of the 'academic' listening sphere?).
The website is http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/6min
And here's a quote (or a paraphrase) from "The Tao of Pooh".
"Lot's of people talk to animals," said Pooh.
Not very many people listen, though," he said.
"That's the problem," he added