Activity 10 - Read and comment on the material seen in class: Key Issues in Teaching Listenings

The objective of this exercise was to provide five key issues that the teacher should bear in mind when teaching the listening skill. The following are the most important topics the teacher should pay attention to from my point of view:

(1)  The kind of input as well as the length of the recording depend on the age.

(2)  Kind of vocabulary in the listening so as to incorporate the listening activity to a whole lesson plan

(3)  Listening as a general activity or listening for specific activities

(4)  Listening activities should be catchy and interesting to motivate students

(5)  What is the aim of the listening activity? What resources are you going to use? Is the purpose clear?

This activity had a second purpose. Once the first part was carried out, we read the text and we considered other viewpoints. Here are my comments on them:

First of all, it seems to me that the best way of improving our listening skills is practising. The tip by Steve Brown and Marc Helgesen Practice, practice, practice is a key issue to take into account, since you learn to listen just by listening and this takes a lot of practice. Hence, we should provide a wide range of listening input to our students and use listening both to develop conversation and to facilitate acquisition. Secondly, I also think that teachers should always encourage learners to practice their listening skills out of class. Of course, we cannot assume that all listening should be based on authentic materials, but teachers should vary from listening to prepared texts and also from real, everyday texts. Another important point to bear in mind is that teachers should use pre-listening, while listening and post-listening activities so that students can follow the activity in a better and more efficient way. With respect to this, the concept by John Flowerdew and Lindsay Miller is crucial, as they want to give students practice in both bottom-up and top-down processing. In addition, teachers should always contextualise the listening they want to play; otherwise, students will be completely lost. What is more, I think that teachers should always integrate listening activities to other skills, such as writing or speaking. Finally, I do not think that the idea of uncover the spoken language by Michael Rost seems to be relevant, since listening almost always starts from meaning rather than from perceiving grammar of conversational speech.

I attach the .pdf file for anyone who is interested in it: http://moo.uab.cat/file.php/3784/Helgesen_and_Brown_2007.pdf