Principles For Teaching Listening

[Heron Mathis]

Thedocument discusses communication skills and provides tips for teaching listening skills to students. It recommends focusing on both specific details and the big picture when listening. When teaching listening, teachers should provide a motivating text related to students' interests and needs. Students prefer authentic listening texts. Teachers should teach students strategies for listening like looking for key words, nonverbal cues, predicting purpose, associating information with background knowledge, guessing meaning from context, seeking clarification, and listening for the general idea.Read less

Academic listening is a special kind of listening. It is listening in order encounter, understand, learn, discuss, and remember new ideas. These five aspects need to be involved. No matter what your teaching situation, helping students become better academic listeners is an important part of language teaching.

Try supplementing the content with different forms of multimedia (audio tracks, video clips, web pages) and activities (tasks, games, experiments, surveys) in order to make it more engaging and more motivating for your students. (See Philp and Duchesne, 2016 for a summary on the interaction of engagement and motivation.)

In my own research tracking and interviewing learners (Rost, 2016), as well as through the research of colleagues (e.g. Vandergrift, 2007), we have identified eight recognizable categories of listening strategies.

Note-taking is widely viewed as one of the most important macro-skills in academic listening, but there is little agreement on what constitutes effective practice. Different techniques have been taught, including the Cornell Method (columns and indenting to show relationships), Mind Maps (graphic connections to show associations), and Key Words (noting only key words and phrases to show sequencing and prominence). However, no one method has been shown to be superior to others, although there is evidence that certain modalities of note-taking represent deeper levels of information processing than others (Bohay et al., 2011; Mueller and Oppenheimer, 2014).

Because accelerating academic listening involves nurturing a mindset shift, it is important to have productive outside homework assignments between classes. This will promote a more long-term change in attitudes and behavior.

If you're a teacher struggling with students who aren't writing enough, don't listen to each other, or are disengaged, bored, or even combative, you're in good company. I think I just described nearly every teacher the world over, especially now that we're struggling with remote or hybrid learning. But if you're a teacher struggling with any of these issues, you may also want to read on for the benefits of improvisation in the classroom.

I've seen improv improve student outcomes in my own classrooms. I've been a middle and high school English teacher for five years and have seen shy students start speaking up and unfocused students start to get more engaged after adding some improv exercises into the curriculum.

A caveat: just like any curriculum planning, the more thoughtful, informed, and strategic you are about how and when you add improv into the mix, the better. Just playing some random improv games can be fun, but thinking carefully about which exercises will have the biggest impact on your specific students will help unlock more benefits of improvisation in the classroom.

The improv I'm talking about here is improvisational theater. Students make scenes up from scratch by collaborating with each other. There are various improv principles or rules that help students to be more successful improvisers.

Improvisers have to listen very carefully in order to integrate each other's ideas into scenes. If my scene partner says her name is Samantha, I'd better be listening when she states that fact, so that I can call her Samantha when the time is right.

The Yes And principle, sometimes called the rule of agreement, really helps scenes grow. The whole idea is that I have to agree with my partner's reality and then add new details to that same reality. This helps scenes get fully fleshed out with lots of details about who the characters are, where they are, and what's at the heart of their relationship.

When players reject each other's ideas, scenes tend to disintegrate into conflict. If I say I'm a cobble and you disagree and tell me I'm a pilot, we have to spend time figuring out who's a liar or who's wrong or confused. This doesn't feel great while improvising because no one really knows what's true for the scene.

Improvising is collaborative. Completely. There's no star. No improv diva. When everyone onstage is doing well, the scene is doing well. So, another improv principle is to actively make your partner look good.

One of my favorite things about improvising was going around to each of my teammates before the show, patting them on the back, and literally saying, "I got your back." That's the kind of camaraderie that successful improv requires.

The improv principle that supersedes all others is that there are no mistakes. That means that if you mess up one of the other improv principles...or anything really, you don't crumble. You don't stop and apologize.

Mary DeMichele published a study that showed students wrote more words and sentences after participating in an improv workshop. She attributes this, in part, to the Yes And principle. Students practiced agreeing and adding on during improv exercises and were then able to transfer that skill to their own narrative writing.

To practice improv is to practice our listening skills. Playing games like Word at a Time Story can help students focus more closely on what their peers are saying. Many improv exercises fall apart when people aren't listening, so if you want your students to experience a crash course in listening, improv offers a fun, active way to do so.

In order to learn, we need to take some academic risks and make some mistakes. Studies are starting to show that improv helps people get more comfortable with uncertainty. This leads to decreases in anxiety and perfectionism and increases self-confidence. What all of that adds up to is a more trusting classroom where students can take some academic risks in order to learn.

Improv isn't just about listening, it's also about collaborating. When students practice Yes And, they see firsthand how powerful agreeing and adding onto each other's ideas can be. I like to play Yes And with students and then reference it when we're doing group work or having class discussions. Are you agreeing with her reality? Are you adding onto her idea or are you negating it? Did you Yes And?

Improv also helps reduce shame and self-consciousness. Shame has been shown to have an outsized impact on creativity. When we feel ashamed, we're more likely to shut down. But improv can prevent this creative suppression. Students start to feel seen and heard, and they start to experience firsthand what agreeing and adding onto each other's ideas can do. This helps them feel safe enough to get more creative in the classroom.

Another improv principle is about approaching teammates without judgment. Practicing this skill through improv can be central to helping students reduce their judgment of others in other contexts. When students practice reserving judgment while improvising, with some coaching and support, they're also better able to reserve judgment of each other in the halls, during discussions and group work, and ideally even beyond their stint in your classroom.

Finally, and this is a major part of its appeal, improv is fun. It's the spoonful of sugar that makes the medicine of learning social and emotional skills go down. Students learn better through active, embodied experiences. You can tell students until you're blue in the face that they need to listen; that doesn't help them listen better.

But when they feel what it feels like to be heard during a fun, interactive improv game, students start to make those connections (as long as the teacher gives room for thoughtful debriefs after the exercises). Students need to have a chance to transfer the skills from improv to their academic, social, and emotional toolkits. This gives you, the teacher, something to refer back to throughout the year.

It's not just a fun reward on a Friday after a quiz. Improv can be central to teaching students how to listen, collaborate, take risks, get creative, be less judgmental, have some fun, and even write more in the process.

Hello, my dear colleagues! Developing listening skills is the first step in the second language acquisition process. The learners need to listen to meaningful and comprehensible language during their silent period of language acquisition. Speaking, as a productive skill, comes after the development of basic listening skills. This article will discuss the fundamentals of speaking and listening in TEYL.

The most effective listening activities activate prior knowledge with pictures or realia, review the known vocabulary and pre-teach unknown vocabulary. It is also important to prepare students for listening by contextualizing the listening practice, giving them listening tasks to create active learning, to use TPR activities, songs and dramatizations.

Using songs, rhymes, and chants to teach speaking with TPR activities is a very motivating way of introducing a new topic or revising the content from a previous unit. Children enjoy singing, and the melody helps them remember faster, easier, and permanently.

When it comes to speaking and language production in general, mistakes cannot be avoided. Because of that, teachers should differentiate controlled, guided, and free speaking activities. In the controlled activities focus is on the language accuracy, and the errors in speaking should be positively corrected by repetition in a meaningful context, not by repeating the vocabulary or grammar structure out of context. When it comes to guided activities, errors could be corrected, but that depends on the goal of the guided activity and what the teacher wants to achieve. In the free speaking activities, the goal is on developing communication skills, group work, and social skills, so the errors should not be corrected, and the teacher should only monitor the students.

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