Discussion: Aural/oral
skill-building
The focus of this week's discussion was to explore,discuss and recommend a few websites for teaching and developing the skills of listening and speaking. The focus was on teaching listening and not
"testing" listening. As listening is a passive skill it is mostly
taken for granted and no concerted "teaching" efforts are made to
focus learners' attention on active listening. We were asked to read the following articles to update ourselves:
Developing Listening Skills with Authentic Materials (Word .doc file)
New Perspectives in Teaching Pronunciation (right-click on the link to download it)
The Employment of CALL in Teaching Second/Foreign Language Speaking Skills (right-click on the link to download it)
For teaching listening I have found Lindsay Miller's article at http://www.elthillside.com/up/files/article4.doc very useful as here she proposes a workable framework to teach listening skills
by dividing the listening experience in 3 stages viz. pre-,while- and
post-listening. These activities engage the learners with the task and make
them respond to it more fully. They are not just listening and
(mentally)responding, but actively noticing the processes and strategies which
lead to good comprehension.
And an excellent demonstration of this framework was found in Randall
Davis's http://esl-lab.com/ where he has created a large number of activities
across "easy", "medium" and "difficult" levels to
teach listening skills. The best thing is that the complexity of materials is
tuned to the proficiency levels of learners. I strongly recommend Randall's
ready-to-use resources for every teacher.
For pronunciation, Robert has given us an excellent link https://sites.google.com/site/pronunciationstuff/links which contain a very
comprehensive list of useful links. In particular, I used http://www.uiowa.edu/~acadtech/phonetics/english/frameset.html where we can not
only listen to the exact pronunciation but simultaneously also see through
video the way internal organs such as tongue, lips, teeth combine to produce
speech sounds. I think this is an excellent tool to teach pronunciation even up
to the intermediate level.
For speaking I visited http://www.bbc.co.uk/ and found the following speaking
activities quite useful for teaching disagreement and retelling stories
respectively. http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/radio/specials/1756_how_to_discuss/page4.shtml.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/radio/specials/1210_how_to_converse/page16.shtml. My students could come up with their own related anecdotes/ little stories
using past simple and past continuous tense.
(Please find links at http://www.delicious.com/rajinder26)
For me two best web links which contain a large number of useful links to
listening/speaking sites are:
During discussions with course mates two important issues arose, of teaching speaking to large classes and whether to use authentic materials with beginners. Robert said the large class issue will be taken up in week 6 and regarding authentic materials it was agreed that they could be used at advanced levels, when learners have achieved a fair degree of accuracy in language use.
Task 1: Create a Delicious page
www.delicious.com is an excellent web tool which not only helps
us save our favorite links at one place but also lets us organize them under
appropriate category tags! As teachers we can have a well organized repertoire
of resources which can be easily quickly accessed online for our own or
learners' use from anywhere. We can really develop it as our quick and
efficient reference library.Following
the website above I also created my Delicious link at: http://www.delicious.com/rajinder26/
Task 2. Discussing sample project report
The second task was to read one of the research projects submitted by Web Skills course participants and comment on it. I went through two past research reports : one by Prem Bahadur Phyak
of Nepal whose research focus was teaching online writing skills to
postgraduate students and second by Zlatka Dyankova from Bulgaria in which she
focused on activating her otherwise passive upper intermediate level learners by
introducing them to online learning through WebQuests.
I would like to proceed on similar lines
because like Dyankova, I also deal with passive upper intermediate level
learners who are pursuing a functional English course. Their mind and
imagination towards learning English can be ignited if the usual mundane
classroom teaching and learning is integrated with exciting online learning. I
think to blend online learning with offline classroom learning is though
challenging, can be really very rewarding, and like Zlatka Dyankova, I would
also like to achieve this objective.
Sam and
Egle have already presented an outline summary of her work in their posts and I
would like to add a few things here. First is that she has used the ABCD style to
state the main objective of her project:
After doing research on sports and games using given
materials/C/ the class of upper-intermediate students/A/ should be able to
write a research report of 80-100 words describing a sport/game using passive
voice and linking words/B/ at the accuracy of 80%/D/.
Secondly,
she has chosen to use WebQuests to motivate her learners. A detailed procedure of her
WebQuest was given on the
Process page to make learners
comfortable with technology use. This way classroom-based lesson was
supplemented with most of the information that students explored from the World
Wide Web.
Thirdly,
she had a clearly defined 6 week timeline where learners knew what they were
supposed to do each week. This helped her to pace her teaching inputs with
learners’ learning efforts.
The
obvious gains of this project were, as she herself points out,” Students had the opportunity to express
their ideas, feelings and experiences free of any pressure. They processed the
information and interacted with their classmates. They shared, compared and
commented on each others’ notes, worked individually, in pairs and in small
groups (think -pair - share). They were interested and enthusiastic. As a
whole, the students enjoyed working cooperatively.”
Overall,
she was able to achieve her objective of motivating her learners to use web
resources to complete their classroom tasks.
I think hers was a good attempt at integrating technology with traditional
classroom teaching to induce learners to explore and learn English
communicatively.
To conclude, week 3 has been very rewarding to me and I have started feeling confident in exploration of relevant web tools to optimize learning in my classes.
Hi Rajinderji,
ReplyDeleteAfter reading your reflection, I found myself flying through the woods of week three; closely examining every tree and little plants that grew beneath them.
Hi Rajinder,
ReplyDeleteI always like to read your blog as you are very good at describing what we did during the week in a very detailed way. I also appreciate your contribution to the Nicenet discussions.Your posts are so instructive,
Colomba
Hello Rajinderji,
ReplyDeleteIt was very interesting to go through the detailed account of the entire week. The 'reference library' on your Delicious page indicates how resourceful you are.
All the best
Kinnari
Hello Rajinder,
ReplyDeleteYou really wrote a thorough reflection about this week. Let me express my opinion about listening skills. Apologise for me, but I do not agree with you in one point. I am 100% sure that it is not a passive skill at all. And it cannot be taken granted. You mix two notions: hearing and listening. They are not the same. Those who can hear, they are blessed. But not everybody listents who can hear. I think listening is a very conscious process. One should pay careful attention for it. I can support it with my experiences. One is from my own history. When I was young I went to study to Britain to be in a native speaking country. I thought just to be there will be enough to speak a language. But the amount of words that sticked to me were just few. I had to recognise that one should listen to something deliberately to be able to recognise it, then more to be able to remember for it, and much more to be able to apply it.
I suffer a lot with my children that many of them cannot focus their ears (in reality their mind) to listen to me. I have to repeat something several times to be able to hear me. Many students cannot pay attention to their classmates, so they hardly can take part in dialogues, conversations, line reading, line counting, drop out games etc. That is why I base my teaching methods in the first year on listening skills. So I think it is a very conscious and directed work of the brain.
Regards,
Csilla
Thanks Csilla for your detailed comment. I agree that listening is not a passive skill. Perhaps the better word is "receptive" and that is what I had meant. I am aware of the difference between listening and hearing and that there are a lot of cognitive and affective processes involved in the process of listening. I think all of us have experienced difficulties when we or the other person do not listen well. In fact there is so much already written on effective listening and barriers to listening in L1 communication contexts and here's a good link to active listening http://www.explorehr.org/articles/Personal_Development/Developing_Active_Listening_Skills.html. Thanks for bringing up this little discussion on the importance of listening skills in our class rooms.
DeleteRegards,
Rajinder