[Learning To Listen Teacher S Book 1
Melvin Amey
How many times have you taught segmenting, lexical retrieval or parsing skills through listening? In my experience, few teachers do. Yet, in the first 400-500 milliseconds of processing aural input, our brain execute these skills at a very fast speed. Hence, extensive practice in these core micro-abilities is essential.
An evaluation of current practice is worth carrying out. To what extent do we understand the rationale and research support for activities we do? What percentage of time is spent on one-way and two way-listening? Where listening is happening, to what extent is it focused on process? How do students respond to listening lessons?
We know students enjoy meaning-focused tasks with a purpose so do we build into the Scheme of Work at all levels specific communicative tasks and games where the focus is on listening? Do we find a suitable balance of process-focused, nitty-gritty listening work with information gaps, whole class tasks and purposeful games, such as those described in Chapters 6 and 7? Do we make listening social activity whenever we can? Do we have chats at the door when students enter or leave? Do we start lessons with brief listening and speaking exchanges about likes, dislikes, what students did last weekend, last lesson or last night?
If we know that vocabulary knowledge is central to listening skill and language acquisition, how might we improve our approach? Are we doing too much isolated word learning? Could we present and practise words through chunks, sentences and paragraphs? Does our syllabus create opportunities to review vocabulary on a regular basis through tasks and texts? Do we take every opportunity to present vocabulary through the aural medium? Do we keep in mind forgetting rates and the principle of spaced learning?
Hello. I want to first say thank you for creating this book. I believe it promises to be a great contribution to the professional development of language teachers around the world. I also have a request. Would it be possible for the book to be published on Kindle with Txt-to-Speech enabled so as to be made available to those of us language teachers with visual impairment or other reading disabilities. This would be more appreciated than you realize. Thank you.
I am an international keynote speaker, professional development provider, writer of instructional materials, blogger as well as an author of books and articles on language pedagogy.A language teacher for around 30 years, I am the founder of the language learning website www.language-gym.com as well as the winner of the 2015 TES (Times Educational Supplement) best-resource-contributor award. I am the co-author with Steve Smith of the best- selling books for ML teachers 'The language teacher toolkit','Breaking the sound barrier: teaching learners how to listen' and 'Memory: what every language teacher should know (available on www.amazon.co.uk) and hold a Phd in Applied Linguistics (Metacognitive Strategies as applied to second language writing); an MA in TEFL (teaching English as a foreign language) and one in English Literature; a PGCE in MFL and P.E. and a BA in English and French Langs and Lit. I researched Language Acquisition, Essay Writing, Error Correction, Learning Strategies and Learner Training impact on L2-writing proficiency under the supervision of Professor Macaro, Head of the Oxford University Department of Education and Editor of the prestigious ' International Journal of Applied Linguistics' both on my Ph.D and on a large-scale research project in Oxford comprehensive schools (documented in Macaro, 2001's book). My previous jobs include: Head of Italian, Head of French and MFL subject leader at various secondary schools in England (at primary and secondary level). I was also an Italian lecturer at Reading University, which has recently granted me the title of Visiting Fellow, and a language education researcher at Oxford University. I enjoy blogging about language teaching and learning and creating French/Spanish/Italian teaching materials which I publish on www.tes.co.uk where, in the last 3 years, I have uploaded over 2,000 free resources which have been downloaded over 5,000,000 times by over 100,000 language teachers worldwide (my profile: ). Four years ago I co-founded www.language-gym.com, a language learning website packed with interactive self-marking activities and games and a verb conjugation trainer. The website has been recently redesigned and re-launched in a much more user-friendly and stylish form and now offers four languages.I am a keen language learner. I speak English, Italian, French, Spanish and German fluently, get by in Malay and Swedish and I have some basic knowledge of Modern Greek, Japanese, Russian, Portuguese and Farsi. I have a strong grounding in Latin and ancient Greek, two 'dead' languages that have helped me a great deal in life!Finally, I am the proud father of Catrina Jade Conti.Please note: for any bookings please contact me at: thelangu...@gmail.com.
Teaching listening skills at the start of the year is not just about how to listen, but also why we listen! It is important to teach students why we listen to teachers and why we listen to our classmates.
Partner Listening is a great break during lessons or for morning meeting. Give a question or a prompt. Then have partners share with each other their answers (great for practicing turn and talks). After everyone gets a chance to talk, then have one of the partners share out what they other partner said to the class. This encourages children to listen to their partner and remember what their partner said.
Teaching listening skills at the start of the year is important so that students learn how to show they are listening and why it is important to listen to teachers and their peers. When we break down the how and the why for students we set students up for success. Once students learn how and why we listen, then they are ready to start learning the academics you have planned for them!
If active learning is generally understood as any pedagogical approach that engages students in the learning process and requires students to do meaningful learning activities and think about what they are doing in the context of the classroom, then active listening similarly requires students to engage with and think about what they hear.[4] In other words, active listening is listening with a purpose.
Whether employed in music courses or in non-music courses, active listening does not require advanced musical training or the ability to read music, yet it can still be used with students who can read music. Even students with years of performance training may struggle when it comes to talking about music or making salient observations about what they hear. Students may be familiar with a piece, and may even know it well, but have they thought about it? Active listening, therefore, is a useful tool in both music courses and non-music courses, and can have the democratizing effect of leveling the playing field.
In order to address how active listening can be cultivated through teaching with music, I outline three types of listening that might be mapped onto different listening goals, followed by four practical techniques that can be used during any of these three types of listening.
In teaching music history, music theory, and music appreciation courses, I often think of three types or tiers of listening: 1) affective listening, 2) structural listening, and 3) dialogic listening.[5] Although these categories have been particularly effective in teaching musical examples with a level of detail appropriate for music majors, they can also be usefully applied for using musical examples in non-music courses more broadly.
[2] For more on using multimedia in classrooms, see, for example: Janice Marcuccilli Strop and Jennifer Carlson, Multimedia Text Sets: Changing the Shape of Engagement and Learning. Winnipeg: Portage & Main Press, 2010.
This article is both a story and an invitation. The story reveals how one teacher learned alongside her students and changed as a result. It also shows how young children were given the space, time, and opportunity to take charge of their learning and, in so doing, developed literacy skills and confidence as learners. The invitation is to you, the reader, to take up a question that matters to you and the children in your classroom and to begin to listen through your documentation, reflection, and actions to what you hear, see, and wonder about. As Laura reminds us, when we listen to the children in our classrooms, we discover that they have many things to teach us.
As a monolingual early childhood educator working in a diverse public school in the Midwest, I am constantly in search of strategies for supporting my young learners. A majority of the children in my classroom (14 out of 24) are dual language learners (DLLs); as they learn English at school and their home languages (Spanish [12], Vietnamese [1], and Hmong [1]) with their families, they are on a path to becoming bilingual. Admittedly, there are moments when I feel humbled and intimidated by the task of supporting these children effectively as they grow and learn.
Two of my teaching colleagues, Taty and Jenny, had experienced firsthand what it was like to immigrate to the US as preschool-age children. Both were willing to share their experiences with me over the course of three individual interview sessions each.
Taty migrated with her family to California from San Juan, Puerto Rico, just before entering kindergarten. Her first school experiences were largely negative. She felt alone, scared, and intimidated. The culture (specifically food, language, and clothing) felt so different from her experiences in Puerto Rico that it made her transition very difficult and uncomfortable.
One helpful model of second language acquisition sets forth five progressive stages: preproduction, early production, speech emergence, intermediate fluency, and advanced fluency (Krashen & Terrell 1983). Children move at their own pace, largely depending on the support they receive in their first and second languages and the availability of contextualized instruction (Lake & Pappamihiel 2003; Buyse et al. 2014).
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