Pedagogy and Practice in second language Teaching-Listening

Pedagogy and Practice in second language Teaching

Listening

Page207-214     

Edited by Richards – Burns

Summarized by: Saeed Mojarradi

A listening lesson conducted by an experienced teacher follows the following format:

–          Pre-listening. A brief (5 to 10 minute) introductory phase. Goals: to set the scene: to motivate the learners to listen: to turn learners, thinking toward the topic of the recording to be heard.

–          Extensive listening. First playing of the recording, followed by general questions. How many speakers? What are they talking about? Goals: to enable learners to normalize to the voices of the speakers and to orient themselves in terms of where in the recording different types of information are mentioned.

–          Preset questions or task. Introduced a head of the main listening phase to ensure that learners will listen in a focused way and to check that the questions /task have been fully understood.

–          Intensive listening: A second playing of the recording, this time to enable learners to obtain answers. The accuracy of the responses is then checked, with the teacher replaying relevant passages where comprehension levels appear to be low.

–          Language of the recording: one follow up activity is for teachers to replay sentences containing unknown lexical items, asking learners to infer their meaning from context. A second is to replay extracts in order to draw attention to the functional language they contain.

–          Final play. Done with learners following a tape script, it enables learners to deconstruct any sections of the recording that they have found difficult to match to word.