LISTENING ACTIVITIES. CHAPTER 2 & 3

Chapter 2

Focused Listening

It was a terrible accident!
Mr. Abrams enters the classroom and starts a list on the board. He writes:

1. 2. 3. 4.

He reminds the students that they learned health vocabulary yesterday, and he writes a few of the words on the board. He then starts to tell the class a story about the previous day. He speaks at a normal pace as if students understand every word, though he knows they don't. Mr. Abrams explains that after class he was driving home when a truck cut in front of him and nearly hit him.

At this point, a few students ask him to speak more slowly but he doesn't. Other students stop listening completely. Mr. Abrams continues explaining how he put on his brakes hard to avoid the truck and another car came up from behind him and hit him sending him swerving off the road. "It was a terrible accident!" he says dramatically.

The confused students look at Mr. Abrams. They don't have any idea what he has just said. At this point, he stops and explains that today they will talk about emergency room vocabulary.

Focused listening
Focused listening is a strategy that we all acquire naturally in our native language. It is one that we employ when we are listening for specific information. We receive a message and understand it by processing specific information, not every word of the message.

Second language learners often mistakenly think that they need to understand every word a person is saying or they won't be able to understand the message. Instructors who speak at a slow pace or who consistently speak in the students' native tongue in class reinforce this notion.

Learners who try to understand every word will frequently tune out what someone is saying and claim that they can't understand anything. I call this the "light switch effect." Students who think they have to understand every word spoken will often turn off the metaphorical light switch. Ultimately, they understand none of what a speaker is saying because they are trying to understand everything.

Introducing focused listening to your learners
Instructors who teach focused listening strategies must first help students understand what they are and why they are important to learn. With focused listening, instructors should guide students to see that they should not listen for every word, but instead attempt to grasp certain information.

The listening task then has a purpose. The reason for listening in Mr. Abrams' class will eventually be to identify the four things that went wrong. In order to accomplish this...

• Mr. Abrams will first explain what focused listening is.
• He'll repeat his story and ask students to help him decide what to put for number 1 on his list.
• He'll provide vocabulary about emergency rooms.
• And finally, students will practice by listening to the entire story and completing the list.

Chapter 3

Listening for Comprehension

A classroom experience
The students are listening to the instructor lecture on economies around the world. He has written an outline on the board using Roman numerals. He periodically points to the appropriate place in the outline as he says something relevant. This helps the students recognize when to write information.

Listening for comprehension
Listening for comprehension takes many different forms. Students must utilize many different strategies to effectively understand a message both in and outside a classroom setting.

In the classroom: In academic classes, students are often required to take notes. They need to be able to identify which information is relevant and discard the rest. Outside the classroom: Listening to a news broadcast can also be defined as listening for comprehension. In this case, people listen to be informed and must make decisions about which information is important (what are the main ideas, key details, etc.).

Listening for comprehension vs. focused listening
Listening for comprehension is different than focused listening in that students are not told what they are listening for first, other than in general terms. When listening for comprehension, learners may be asked to identify the main idea or to later summarize what they have heard.

To illustrate the difference between focused listening and listening for comprehension, look at the example below. This activity can be used as a focused listening if the questions are asked first and students discuss them before the listening. The activity can also be used as a listening for comprehension exercise if the questions are used as a post-listening activity.

Script Colds and the flu are similar illnesses and have some of the same symptoms. The symptoms of a cold are a low fever, a sore throat, a headache, and a runny nose. People usually have a cold for one or two weeks. People with the flu feel tired and sick. They often have a high fever, a dry cough, a headache, and muscle aches. People can have the flu for two or three weeks. Many people get colds or the flu every year and hate them both! (Jenkins and Johnson 2002) Questions 1. How many weeks do people usually have the flu? 2. What are symptoms of the flu? 3. What are symptoms of a cold?

Making predictions before you listen
Making predictions before listening is an especially useful strategy that can help learners improve their overall comprehension as they listen. There are a variety of things that an instructor can do. For example, prior to listening to a lecture or news broadcast on a given topic, the instructor might put the title of the lecture or news segment on the board. She would then get students to discuss what they already know about the topic and make a list of some of the main ideas (and key words) they anticipate will be discussed in the lecture or broadcast.

Another way of getting learners to make predictions about what they'll hear is to use visual cues in a video, as illustrated in the example below.

The instructor writes the following questions on the board:

Who is the man? Where is he? Who is the woman in the picture? Where is the person in the picture now?

Next, he shows the video with no sound. In the video, a man is sitting in an office. All around him is clutter and construction. He looks at a picture on his desk. He says something to the picture and then puts it down.

After the video clip, the instructor asks students to discuss the answers to the questions in groups. They will have to make predictions based on the visual clues from the video. The class discusses the answers and then the instructor plays the video back with sound so that students can check to see if their predictions were correct.

This technique can also be done at a lower level. For example, the objective of a low-level class might be: By the end of the class, students will be able to identify adjectives that describe people's moods (sad, happy...). Students could be shown a television show and be asked to label each speaker as happy, sad, scared, nervous, etc.

Guessing the meaning of unfamiliar words
As part of listening instruction, teachers can show students how to guess at word meanings and to make use of clarification skills. For example, an instructor may be telling a story or lecturing on a certain topic. Throughout the course, this teacher has encouraged students to interrupt by raising their hands and asking for clarification when an unfamiliar word or phrase is used. The instructor then turns to all the students and asks for ideas, encouraging them to use the context of the discussion to guess what the meaning of the word or phrase might be.

This type of exercise can be integrated into lessons and used throughout a course. The goal is to help learners develop a comprehension strategy that they can use outside of the classroom.




Source: http://eltmedia.thomsonlearning.com