Listenings – why bother?
A guest piece by Andy Mallory
“‘Doing a listening’ is a bit of TEFLese that has all but dropped out of my vocabulary of late. It’s still a staple of coursebooks, usually accompanied by a little cassette symbol (maybe a CD symbol nowadays).
However hard I tried they always seemed to fall a little flat. The students felt it was boring, too hard, a waste of (class) time or something else and just didn’t make the effort to engage with the material.
Here are the reasons I can think of for using recorded audio listenings in class.
Exposes students to more varieties of English than just the teacher’s.
Can listen again to exactly the same spoken text – it’s very hard to repeat yourself exactly.
Can be reused outside class for the slower students to catch up.
Is a feature of most exams and so the students need to practise.
I think they’re bad reasons but – it’s next in the book so we have to do it next…and – that’ll fill 20 minutes of class time nicely while I ogle the attractive students….
Here are the main problems I’ve had using listenings.
The audio recording itself or the playback equipment are antiquated and just too hard to hear clearly in a large classroom.
The material is often tedious and of no interest to the students.
The texts are too long and students lose the thread – spending a lot of time drifting.
The students cannot interact at all with the recording. They can’t stop it, go back, or ask it any questions.
The listening skills practised are limited to those needed to do this kind of exercise!
I do use live listenings and dictation tasks extensively. They seem to really improve students listening comprehension in real-time situations.
However, when I learned French in my late 20s, we did do a huge amount of listening exercises in class using a language lab. The usual task was gap filling. Artificial but simple to set up and very effective.
In summary – though I’ve given up using recorded audio listenings in class time but still wonder if there are reasons and ways to use them effectively. What do you think? Are they a hangover from the old days of EFL (a bit like reading aloud) or have you found ways to make them work?
Mini biog: I’m living and working in Vietnam and have also taught in Korea, Japan, the UK and France. I’ve been teaching English off and on and with varying degrees of ability/success since 1995.”
Might I also add that Andy is the first person ever to say “Don’t bothering linking to my blogs”, so obviously a genuine question as he says, rather than seeking the fame and fortune that usually come to people who guest write on TEFLtastic.
Should you also have genuine questions or indeed be seeking fame and fortune, guest pieces always desperately needed (to keep me from writing Yet Another Seven Things You Probably Didn’t Want to Know About Me)
Tags: guest writers
March 29th, 2009 at 10:14 pm
I only do textbook listenings because the students expect them. When it comes to listening in class, I do things like music videos, product commercials, youtube videos, 1-2 minute clips of tv shows… much more authentic than contrived for learning audio.
March 30th, 2009 at 9:08 am
Quite right. Cambridge University Press are the worst offender in this regard. They make much of their ‘corpus’ (where they analyse huge amounts of ‘real’ speech to detect mysterious patterns) but in fact the listenings in their books (in eg ‘Objective CAE’) are incredibly stilted, obviously scripted by a retired person.
Students frown and say ‘But nobody talks like this!’
Can someone from CUP suggest an answer to that? I’d be grateful.
March 30th, 2009 at 6:34 pm
Yes, I gave up doing those very artificial listening comp thingies from course books years ago. Now I just do personal dictations – three pages of Dostoevski, for example. The students LOVE it … really!
March 30th, 2009 at 6:34 pm
We have a cassette that goes with our book that we use in our classes. The content is rather outdated, but it usually requires the student to listen to the passage and answer questions. I often have to replay it for the students to get all the answers they need. I think it does help them with their listening skills especially for talking on the telephone. Many of the students tell us it is so much harder to understand English when they can’t see the person they are talking to. I think it gives them some practice with that. I like the idea of using clips from television shows. I might try that to spice up a class. One of my fellow teachers said that she uses the Mr Bean movies with her literacy classes because there isn’t as much dialogue in them and it is easier for the students to follow.
April 1st, 2009 at 10:01 am
I often record my voice and play that to students, it saves my voicebox fromwearing out and if they object I can always simply lip sync along to the recording.
April 7th, 2009 at 3:15 pm
The tricky thing here is the difference between “teaching” and “testing” listening … students can often answer the textbook questions using common sense and general knowledge without even listening to the audio. They have to learn to use the context and not panic when hearing a foreign language. God knows, I can barely make a sentence in Japanese but I have apretty good idea of what’s going on most of the time ; P
April 8th, 2009 at 5:34 am
I think theoretically it is better for students to listen to graded recordings, i.e. good textbook recordings (assuming such things exist or will exist). I have to keep telling my students who are under Pre-Int to avoid BBC news and stick to the CDs that accompany graded readers etc. That is because most authentic texts hit their confidence, teach them idiomatic language that they will never hear again, are British or American when they actually need to understand Indians or Malaysians, deal with local topics to the UK and US that they shouldn’t be interested in, are too difficult to understand unknown language from context in, make them overreliant on guessing etc and so not ready to think about the language as they hear it, etc.
In a similar vein, things textbooks tried along the years to make recordings more authentic like unscripted recordings and actors doing pauses and “natural” repetition have been complete disasters. For examples, see (if I remember correctly) old edition Market Leader and Natural English
April 8th, 2009 at 9:39 am
In addition to Natural English and Market Leader, does anyone remember Innovations?
I think Alex’s advice to use CDs from graded readers is very good. It’s something the students can follow and it basically supports the reading, or the other way around. This is perhaps how children learn to read and listen – by reading and listening to stories suitable for their level – not by eavesdropping on their parents conversations.
And..
While guessing and checking is a great test taking skill, it’s not necessarily a great listening skill. I hate talking to people who are convinced they already know what I’m going to tell them…
Thanks for the interesting comments. I hope there will be more.
April 8th, 2009 at 9:53 am
I’m a huge fan of prediction tasks in class, if only because it is a way of linking from the conversation and vocab preteach to listening with real interest. The problem for me is then going onto the progress test or practice exam listening and asking students to listen without the chance to discuss and predict much first, which can be a shock for them and show me how much I am improving their coping skills more than their ability to hear and comprehend (for better or worse)
April 8th, 2009 at 11:01 am
I’m not knocking prediction tasks. They give much needed practice of something realistic. We constantly need to be able to express our opinions about what will happen in the future. And if done well it can activate the vocabulary and structure which will come up in the listening or reading. Usually as a teacher, we will feed them the key vocab – though it’s exasperating how slow some students are at making the connection between one activity and the next!
The danger as Alex points out is that if they get too good at prediction/guessing, they hardly need to listen at all! I can do lots of TOEIC listening questions without hearing the recording. I can usually guess about 50% of the answers in an IELTS listening from prior knowledge or just experience with the test type.
April 10th, 2009 at 6:04 am
I actually really liked Natural English!
; )