- This module is on listening.
We will be discussing a few points
that are not in your curriculum but might help you
when you're trying to teach listening skills.
First, let's talk about the different types of listening.
In your curriculum, you learned about extensive
versus intensive listening,
but also Jim Cummins, a researcher from Canada,
talks about the difference between communicative language
and academic language.
So a student listening for communicative reasons
will need much different skills
than they would in an academic or work setting.
That is something that you could be aware of as a teacher.
What are the students' needs?
Do they need communicative skills
or do they need academic skills?
Let's also talk about why listening
is often paired with reading like it is in your curriculum.
In this chart, listening is a receptive language skill,
meaning you receive it,
and it's also an oral skill or oral, a URL.
Let's think about how it looks in comparison
with the other areas.
Sometimes it is linked with reading
because reading is also a receptive skill.
So that is why your curriculum puts these two
in the same module.
But also other other programs
might link listening with speaking
because both are oral skills,
one the receptive oral skill,
and one the productive oral skill.
So keep that in mind, as we're talking about listening.
Here are a few listening difficulties
that students come across.
So these are things you can be aware of
that will cause students troubles,
and you might be able to help alleviate some of this
if you're aware of it
and allow the student to be aware of it as well.
First, let's talk about clustering.
Why clustering makes listening difficult?
Clustering means that we hear language in chunks.
Sometimes the language learners
will group their listening chunks into too large of chunks.
They will try to comprehend an entire paragraphs
worth of language at once
and it's too much, too much of an overload.
Sometimes they will cluster things too narrowly
and try to understand each individual word
rather than getting meaning
out of the whole phrase or sentence.
So clustering is one way that listening becomes difficult.
Number two is redundancy.
In oral speech,
we use a lot of words repeatedly.
For instance, "I mean", "you know", "like".
Those are words that become repeated over and over again
in oral language that a student
would not see in written language.
So that becomes another difficulty in listening.
Number three, performance variables.
So this could include hesitation, false starts,
pauses, self-correction.
Those are all very different from written language.
Number four, reduced forms.
For instance, the sentence, "Did you eat yet?"
When we say that orally, we say, "Did you eat yet?"
and that sounds like just a garble of sounds
to a language learner.
So that one becomes very problematic for language learners.
Let's move on to number five, colloquial language.
This includes idioms, slang,
reduced forms, and shared cultural knowledge.
Colloquial language is very difficult to learn
if you're not in the culture,
and this will be a problem for many students
that live abroad and don't interact with American or British
or Australian culture very often.
Number six, the rate of delivery.
When a speaker is talking,
they might use different rates of how fast do they talk
or how slow they talk.
So when you're a teacher,
you might slow down your speech
so that your students understand you
and comprehend more of what you're saying,
but also be aware that they need to be able to listen
at the same rate as normal native speakers are talking.
So you need to find that balance of giving them
the faster rate that native speakers use.
Number seven, stress, rhythm, and intonation.
English may sound like just a garble of syllables
to many non-native speakers.
So that is why you need to specifically teach stress
and rhythm and intonation and what to listen for.
Number eight, interaction.
When we are interacting orally,
we can ask for correction and ask for a repetition
that we can't do in text.
So this might actually be beneficial to students.
They can ask for clarification,
they can change topics if they don't understand the topic
and they can also end the conversation.
The interaction that is involved in listening
might help students.