Price List 2010/11

Imola Beata PalAssignment 4Teaching skills

Listening

Listening is one of the basic language learning skills that students need to master together with reading, writing and speaking. Listening skills serve to improve students pronunciation and speaking/writing skills, by giving them the opportunity to meet in class with the authentic and correctly spoken language1. Students need to be trained to be able to acquire information from listening and depending on the task they need to be able to get a general idea or precise pieces of information. It is important to wait and listen to the whole text, while concentrating on it, before forming a conclusion regarding the theme or the meaning of a text. It helps in understanding the context if students focus on the tone and volume of a text; also if there is a visual material (film/real life person) going with the audio material non-verbal communicative means (gestures, facial expressions, and eye-movements) can be taken into account for better understanding2.Like by reading, to increase the understanding of a given topic, there are 3 stages of listening exercise3:

Pre-listening tasks that precede the actual listening; a step to introduce the topic of the listening, giving students the opportunity to familiarise with and to organise their ideas regarding the topic4; activating/offering students general knowledge and/or vocabulary of the topic5; While-listening tasks set the purpose of listening for general ideas or for certain information; it guides students attention to certain information we would like them to reproduce, this can be in the form of short questions, filling in gaps/charts etc.; the second time the students listen to the text should be used as checking answers of the while-listening exercise and to develop a deeper understanding of the topic; these task should require short written answers in order not to distract students from the actual listening6 Post-listening tasks are mostly reactions to the content and/or analysing the language (grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation etc.); can involve more reading and/or writing about the topic; can be a creative activity personalising/reinventing the topic for students7While each step/task of listening exercises should be followed and planned carefully it is important that all three can be seen as one whole task, so we have to choose exercises, for each task, that connects to the next one8.

To demonstrate the aforementioned theory in practice I chose a song, The Beatles- Yesterday9, 10(video, lyrics). It is a piece of authentic material in form of a music video from 1965, using the internet for source of the video, pictures and the lyrics.As pre-listening task I give students a photo collage of the band with the title 60s rock! and ask them if they recognise the band, probably most do. I, then, ask the students to brainstorm, in groups or pairs depending on the number of students, about the 60s, The Beatles and their songs in general. This will help to activate their schema and to warm them up to talk about the topic. To speak about the aforementioned topics they will have to use past tenses also preparing them subconsciously for further use of the past tenses. After having the students give some main ideas about the 60s and the band I will ask them if they might know the song Yesterday. Explaining to the students that we will listen to the song in a short time, I will give hand-outs with the lyrics missing some words and the possible words that might fit in. after setting the while-listening task comes the actual listening of the song. Checking their answers at the end of the song I will ask them to underline elements that would help them identify the tens/tenses used in the song while listening to it again.

The post-listening task, at this point, would have to involve exercising present and past simple tenses11, used to phrases12, passive voice13. If I forgo asking students to underline elements of present and past simple then I can set a more creative activity. I could ask them to imagine they won a backstage ticket to a Beatle concert and they have to interview the band members in order to get the second part of their prize an original polo with autographs. I would pair student. One would play the lucky winner the other one of the members of the band. I would give out extra information about the band and their members to the students acting as band members. At the end I would ask each pair to repeat the questions they used in their interview. I would also set to a vote which pair had the best questions. As a bonus, if the time permits it, I would promise to listen to the song again at the end of the class. In the activities detailed above every step of the listening task would be covered. Students would be able to listen for certain detail with the help of the while-listening task. The pre-listening and the second task of the post-listening task would help students to develop on ideas, speak freely on certain topics and use the form of interview/dialogue to acquire information of a certain topic.In conclusion it is important to set pre-, while-, and post listening task to create a context and to exercise other skills with the help of listening task. The aforementioned steps make a complex exercise of more than one skill out of a simple listening. Bibliography:Harmer, J., The Practice of English Language Teaching, Fourth Edition, Person Education Limited 2007, p 303-322

http://www.skillsyouneed.com/ips/listening-skills.htmlRost, Michael, Listening Task and Language Acquisition, University of California, Berkeley, JALT2002 at Shizuoka, Conference Proceedings, p.16-28

http://coerll.utexas.edu/methods/modules/listening/02/http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/articles/pre-listening-activities?page=1http://esol.britishcouncil.org/methodology/framework-planning-listening-skills-lessonhttp://www.englishonline.org.cn/en/teachers/workshops/teaching-listening/teaching-tips/framework-listening-lesson#http://www.pearsonlongman.com.ar/catalogue2011/download/how_to/04_HTTL_pp_60-61.pdfhttp://www.tolearnenglish.com/exercises/exercise-english-2/exercise-english-54705.phphttp://www.tolearnenglish.com/exercises/exercise-english-2/exercise-english-6196.phphttp://www.tolearnenglish.com/exercises/exercise-english-2/exercise-english-21621.phphttp://www.beatleslyrics.eu/yesterday.phphttp://www.beatleslyrics.eu/http://materialdesigningtec.blogspot.ro/2010/03/listening-activities.htmlhttp://tefltastic.wordpress.com/worksheets/songs/past-pres-yestersday-beatles/ (tenses worksheet Beatles- Yesterday)1. Harmer, J., The Practice of English Language Teaching, Fourth Edition, Person Education Limited 2007, p 3032. http://www.skillsyouneed.com/ips/listening-skills.html3.Rost, Michael, Listening Task and Language Acquisition, University of California, Berkeley, JALT2002 at Shizuoka, Conference Proceedings, p.16-28

4. http://coerll.utexas.edu/methods/modules/listening/02/5. http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/articles/pre-listening-activities?page=16. http://esol.britishcouncil.org/methodology/framework-planning-listening-skills-lesson7. http://www.englishonline.org.cn/en/teachers/workshops/teaching-listening/teaching-tips/framework-listening-lesson#8. http://www.pearsonlongman.com.ar/catalogue2011/download/how_to/04_HTTL_pp_60-61.pdf9. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONXp-vpE9eU10. http://www.lyrics007.com/The%20Beatles%20Lyrics/Yesterday%20Lyrics.html11. http://materialdesigningtec.blogspot.ro/2010/03/listening-activities.html12. http://www.englishgrammarsecrets.com/usedto/exercise1.swf13.http://elt.oup.com/student/solutions/preint/grammar/grammar_10_012e;jsessionid=6DF7556F94E6DE2EA9870BBA5EF6C0B5?cc=ro&selLanguage=en