Answer keys: 1-D, 2-MI, 3-D, 4-MI, 5-D, 6-G
4. Listen and … Objective: to help participants understand the nature of authentic listening tasks.
Time: 25 minutes
Materials: none
Interaction:pair work, plenary
Procedure:
Stage 1:
Ask participants the following question and invite them to share their responses in plenary:
- What problems do you usually have while teaching listening?
Possible answers:lack of equipment, pupils not understanding the listening passage, etc. Stage 2: Tell participants that now you will read aloud a teacher’s description of her listening class and answer the following questions (it is very important that the questions are asked before participants listen to the passage as this will help them to focus on it):
- What was the problem the teacher faced in her/his class?
In my last listening class I read aloud a story to my pupils twice. After that I asked questions to check how well pupils understood the story. Unfortunately most of them couldn’t understand it. So I distributed Handouts with the text of the story. Reading the text helped my pupils to understand the story – just listening was too difficult for them.
Answer key:The pupils couldn’t understand the story from the first listening. Tell participants that they will listen to the description once more and answer the following questions:
- What did the teacher do in her class?
- How did it work?
Read out the description the second time and elicit responses to the questions from participants in plenary.
Ask participants the following questions and elicit responses in plenary:
- You listened to the description two times. What was the reason for listening each time?
Answer key: First time – listening to understand the gist, second time – listening to understand the details. Establish that listening to the text more than once with different tasks and questions each time helps pupils understand the listening passage better.
Explain that it is very important to have questions for a listening passage in classroom tasks, as they
- focus the pupils’ attention on the passage.
- they give pupils the reason for listening.
- help pupils to listen by leading them towards the main points.
However, in real life we do not listen just to answer questions – we do different actions based on what we listened to. For example, when someone shares a problem with us we usually discuss this problem and give suggestions for solving it. In order to make our classroom listening tasks closer to real life listening we need to have these follow-ups for the listening
passages.
Tell participants that one way of making the listening task based on the above passage closer to real-life listening, that is more authentic, is to ask for suggestions about how the teacher could help pupils to listen.
Ask participants to work in pairs and answer the following question:
- What suggestions would you give to the teacher to help her pupils to listen?