Live Listening quotes and links

“Live listening is where students are listening to people in a face-to-face situation – or whom they can physically see (such as in the theatre, etc). Different from listening to RECORDED EXTRACTS.” (definition from the ELT Wiki live listening page).

More extensive quotes and links, in approximate order of usefulness when researching before doing a lesson with live listening:

“…it would be helpful to give learners more opportunity to listen to ‘live’ voices – visitors to the class, if feasible, or, most obviously, the teacher. This, of course, goes against recommendations to ‘reduce teacher talking time’. But the teacher’s voice is a neglected resource in providing listening practice in which the speaker can continuously monitor the listeners’ interest, attention and apparent comprehension, adding any necessary repetitions, reformulations and explanations, and where the listeners can give the speaker signals both non-verbal (e.g. nodding, frowning) and verbal (e.g. “I see”, “So, do you mean …..?”, “I’m not sure what you mean by …..”) – so that the listener is not just a passive, more or less successful, receiver, but understanding is mutually constructed.”

from a great article by Jonathan Marks on New Ways to Teach Listening, including criticism of the old ones, on Onestopenglish.com

“More than ¾ of the world’s population do not have regular access to the internet. Learners of English in the majority of the world’s classrooms actually have very limited exposure to pre-recorded listening material of any kind. Can listening skills still be developed in these kind of contexts? Of course they can! People were successfully developing their second language listening skills a long time before the advent of the internet, and even well before the idea of coursebook cassettes came into being. In fact they have been doing so since the beginnings of human interaction, in situations where the only material used is the human voice.”

and

“Even for those learners with access to the wealth of both on and offline listening material, natural, face to face interaction with more advanced speakers, is still very highly valued as a source of language input. I was once frustrated by a learner in one of my classes who seemed to take an age to get started in the pair work activities I had set up. He always seemed to be writing things down whilst his partner waited for him. What I later discovered was that he was actually writing down bits of language that I had used to explain what they had to do. If learners are using our classroom instructions as input, it seems logical that we should also be exposing them to other, more natural, forms of teacher talk as input too. In many situations we may be the only real speaker of the language that the learners have a chance to talk to. Perhaps we should be starting to prioritise this more interactive form of listening as a positive use of class time, and moving towards setting up more extensive kinds of listening as homework activities. Extensive listening is, after all, like extensive reading, for the most part a solitary experience.”

and loads more good stuff, from Listening Unplugged by Nick Bilbrough on Humanizing Language Teaching

“The students’ responses speak for itself. Observers were generally very positive and impressed by the concentation, commitment and involvement of our students. We, the teachers concemed, have no doubt of the value of what we were doing. The atmosphere was wonderful. There was a great deal of humour, and, perhaps surprisingly for listening-orientated activities, noise and spoken communication! We were constantly delighted by how much our students were coming to understand and we feel certain that there was no adverse effects on the quality or quantity of their speaking.”

from Live Listening for Beginners by Alastair Banton, on page 7 of The International House Journal of Educational Development Volume 1. Also lots of practical ideas there. He also mentions Brown, J . M. and P almer A, . S. 1988  The Listening Approach (London, Longman), which seems relevant, if rather old.

“Live” listening: Making Listening Comprehension More Inspiring by Leo Selivan- just one lesson idea, but some discussion of advantages and disadvantages, and this related source:

Lackman, K. (2007). ‘The teacher as input’, in English Teaching Professional, Issue 48, January 2007, 52-55

“Live listening: This could be the teacher or a special guest. Students react well to listening to someone speaking especially for them. Body language assists comprehension. The speaker can moderate the speed of the language and students have the opportunity for immediate response and questioning, that is. they have an opportunity to interact with the speaker. Speech is spontaneous and therefore contains all those features of real language such as false starts, repetition, and so on.”

from Teaching English at Advanced Levels by Dan Bruce, on the British Council Portugal site. Plenty of other relevant stuff there on the problems with textbook listenings, plus these probably relevant items in the bibliography:

Field, J . Skills and strategies: towards a new methodology for listening ELT Journal – 52/2 April 1998

Field, J . Finding one’s way in the fog: listening strategies and second language learners MET – Vol 9/1 Jan 2000

White, G. Listening (OUP) 1998

“Did you know that ‘live listening’ started in the early 16th century as a described teaching methodology, but was consigned to the dustbin until the 21st?” (from this list of IH Barcelona workshops- no further information there, unfortunately)

Apparently also a whole section on live listening in Chapter 4 of How to Teach Speaking by Jeremy Harmer, or so Google tells me.

Any other good sources or comments on this approach, anyone?

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