Archive for Desember 2015

A framework for planning a listening skills lesson

By developing their ability to listen well we develop our students' ability to become more independent learners, as by hearing accurately they are much more likely to be able to reproduce accurately, refine their understanding of grammar and develop their own vocabulary.
In this article I intend to outline a framework that can be used to design a listening lesson that will develop your students' listening skills and look at some of the issues involved.
  • The basic framework
  • Pre-listening
  • While listening
  • Post-listening
  • Applying the framework to a song
  • Some conclusions

The basic framework
The basic framework on which you can construct a listening lesson can be divided into three main stages.
  • Pre-listening, during which we help our students prepare to listen.
  • While listening, during which we help to focus their attention on the listening text and guide the development of their understanding of it.
  • Post-listening, during which we help our students integrate what they have learnt from the text into their existing knowledge.

Pre-listening
There are certain goals that should be achieved before students attempt to listen to any text. These are motivation, contextualisation, and preparation.
  • Motivation
    It is enormously important that before listening students are motivated to listen, so you should try to select a text that they will find interesting and then design tasks that will arouse your students' interest and curiosity.
  • Contextualisation
    When we listen in our everyday lives we hear language within its natural environment, and that environment gives us a huge amount of information about the linguistic content we are likely to hear. Listening to a tape recording in a classroom is a very unnatural process. The text has been taken from its original environment and we need to design tasks that will help students to contextualise the listening and access their existing knowledge and expectations to help them understand the text.
  • Preparation
    To do the task we set students while they listen there could be specific vocabulary or expressions that students will need. It's vital that we cover this before they start to listen as we want the challenge within the lesson to be an act of listening not of understanding what they have to do.

While listening
When we listen to something in our everyday lives we do so for a reason. Students too need a reason to listen that will focus their attention. For our students to really develop their listening skills they will need to listen a number of times - three or four usually works quite well - as I've found that the first time many students listen to a text they are nervous and have to tune in to accents and the speed at which the people are speaking.
Ideally the listening tasks we design for them should guide them through the text and should be graded so that the first listening task they do is quite easy and helps them to get a general understanding of the text. Sometimes a single question at this stage will be enough, not putting the students under too much pressure.
The second task for the second time students listen should demand a greater and more detailed understanding of the text. Make sure though that the task doesn't demand too much of a response. Writing long responses as they listen can be very demanding and is a separate skill in itself, so keep the tasks to single words, ticking or some sort of graphical response.
The third listening task could just be a matter of checking their own answers from the second task or could lead students towards some more subtle interpretations of the text.
Listening to a foreign language is a very intensive and demanding activity and for this reason I think it's very important that students should have 'breathing' or 'thinking' space between listenings. I usually get my students to compare their answers between listenings as this gives them the chance not only to have a break from the listening, but also to check their understanding with a peer and so reconsider before listening again.

Post-listening
There are two common forms that post-listening tasks can take. These are reactions to the content of the text, and analysis of the linguistic features used to express the content.
  • Reaction to the text
    Of these two I find that tasks that focus students reaction to the content are most important. Again this is something that we naturally do in our everyday lives. Because we listen for a reason, there is generally a following reaction. This could be discussion as a response to what we've heard - do they agree or disagree or even believe what they have heard? - or it could be some kind of reuse of the information they have heard.
  • Analysis of language
    The second of these two post-listening task types involves focusing students on linguistic features of the text. This is important in terms of developing their knowledge of language, but less so in terms of developing students' listening skills. It could take the form of an analysis of verb forms from a script of the listening text or vocabulary or collocation work. This is a good time to do form focused work as the students have already developed an understanding of the text and so will find dealing with the forms that express those meanings much easier.

Applying the framework to a song
Here is an example of how you could use this framework to exploit a song:
  • Pre-listening
    • Students brainstorm kinds of songs
    • Students describe one of their favourite songs and what they like about it
    • Students predict some word or expressions that might be in a love song
  • While listening
    • Students listen and decide if the song is happy or sad
    • Students listen again and order the lines or verses of the song
    • Students listen again to check their answers or read a summary of the song with errors in and correct them.
  • Post-listening
    • Focus on content
      • Discuss what they liked / didn't like about the song
      • Decide whether they would buy it / who they would buy it for
      • Write a review of the song for a newspaper or website
      • Write another verse for the song
    • Focus on form
      • Students look at the lyrics from the song and identify the verb forms
      • Students find new words in the song and find out what they mean
      • Students make notes of common collocations within the song

Conclusion
Within this article I have tried to describe a framework for listening development that could be applied to any listening text. This isn't the only way to develop our students listening or to structure a listening lesson, but it is a way that I have found to be effective and motivating for my students.
Nik Peachey, teacher, trainer and materials writer, The British Council

how to lear listening

Author : Unknown Comments : 0

Teaching English To Young Learners

By Kim Ashmore, teacher and writer, UK
Introduction

Learners are often worried about pronunciation, but it is important to remember that you do not need to sound like a native English speaker for you to be able to communicate in English. There are different accents in the United Kingdom and other countries where English is spoken as a first language. English is also widely used in countries like India and Singapore and is increasingly used as a global language. There are many different varieties of English – you’ve probably discovered this yourself.
Don’t worry if your child does not speak with ‘perfect’ English pronunciation. Let your child play with and discover sounds – this is an important stage in learning languages. You could also compare sounds in English to sounds in your first language. Are the sounds similar? If so, how are they spelled? Are any sounds in English totally different to sounds in your first language? Try to help your child understand that what is important is communicating what they’d like to say.
Activities you can do with your child

There are lots of activities you can do with your child to practise pronunciation. Choose the activities that you think your child will like best. Try to make the activities as fun as possible, and stop when your child has had enough.
Here are some ideas for activities:
  • Songs and rhymes
Songs, nursery rhymes and chants are a great way to introduce younger children to the sounds of English. Many chants and nursery rhymes are repetitive and easy to remember, and your child will not need to be able to read or write English.
You’ll find some traditional songs and nursery rhymes on LearnEnglish Kids. Listen to the songs, learn them together and sing the rhymes wherever and whenever you like – in the car, on the way to school, at bathtime!
You can also read some tips for using simple rhymes with children. You’ll find some rhymes that you can listen to, or download. You’ll also find a fun resource you can try with your children called ‘Rhyme and record’.
  • Pron Pal
Download Pron Pal onto your computer. This is a guide to the pronunciation of key topic words for young learners. With Pron Pal, learners click on a button to listen to how words are pronounced, and they can also record themselves saying the words and sentences. Children love hearing themselves, and will enjoy practising saying the words.
With Pron Pal, just listen to and record the simple words if your child is beginning to learn English. If your child has a higher level of English then listen to and record the longer phrases and sentences. You could join in too!
  • Listening to stories
Listening to somebody reading aloud while following a text is a good way for children to pick up how words and sound, and also to learn what words sound like in sentences.
If you don’t feel confident enough to read aloud to your child then there are stories you can listen to on LearnEnglish Kids. You can listen to the stories together. You could also borrow books with tapes or CDs from the library if that’s possible, or buy some. Perhaps you could share books and CDs with friends and make your own library?
  • Games
Say words silently to your child. Can they guess what words you are saying? This will make them concentrate on the shapes made to make sounds. When your child has got the idea, they can silently say some words to you.
Create a character with a name of the sound you want to focus on like /dz/ which is the sound of the ‘J’ in ‘Jack’. Ask your child to draw Jack and then think of all the things that Jack likes that start with the same sound, for example, juggling, jam, Japanese food etc. Now draw these things around the picture of Jack. Here is an example using a character called ‘Harriet’ to focus on the /h/ sound:
Choose one word, for example, chair. Ask your child to draw the word, and next to the picture write (or draw) words that have the same sound for example, hair, hare, wear, pear. Here is an example:
  • Tongue twisters
Try some tongue twisters. This can be a fun way to practise sounds with older children. Here are some popular English tongue twisters.
  1. She sells sea shells on the sea shore
  2. A proper copper coffee pot
  3. Around the rugged rocks the ragged rascal ran
  4. Red lorry, yellow lorry, red lorry, yellow lorry
  5. A big black bug bit a big black bear
  6. Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers, Where’s the peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked?
You can find more tongue twisters on LearnEnglish Kids. Listen to the tongue twisters, and practise saying them. How fast can you say them? You could discuss which sounds are difficult, and not like the sounds in your first language, and the sounds that are similar to your first language.

Teaching English To Young Learners

Author : Unknown Comments : 0

- Copyright © Star-Blog-Melissa - Hentai Ouji - Powered by Blogger - Designed by Johanes Djogan -