Teaching English as a Foreign Language for Dummies (32 page)

Music, films, podcasts (a video or audio file you can download from the Internet and listen to on your computer, MP3 or other similar device) and broadcasts are very popular with students, except the odd few who prefer grammar tables and ‘serious’ work. Some broadcasting companies have websites that you can access to look through their archives of programmes and download free of charge.

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Try www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer for fairly current BBC shows first broadcast on TV and radio. I also use Channel 4 programme archives, which are free.

Access www.channel4.com and register for their 4oD service, which offers a wide variety of shows to download. Another favourite is www.lbc.co.uk offering podcasts from their London radio station. It’s a talk station that invites ordinary people to call in and discuss current affairs. You can scarcely find a more cosmopolitan bunch than the residents of London so there’s still an international feel to the programmes.

In a lesson you can only usually deal with a few minutes of listening text at a time, so select clips from longer recordings that are appropriate to the level and interesting to analyse. If your students have Internet access you can set longer listening tasks as homework. They can listen to extracts of 20 minutes or so in preparation for a class discussion the following lesson. Although students do sometimes become anxious when they hear the unfamiliar, texts downloaded from the Internet are easy for the students to access by themselves for personal study at another time.

Accommodating accents

Hearing authentic listening material designed for native speakers is very motivating for your students, but you face a serious problem where there are many accents to deal with.

When you teach pronunciation, you generally use whatever is considered to be Standard English in your country and your own accent as models.

Suddenly you realise that in the TV clip you want to use there’s a heavy Newcastle accent, some Liverpool dialect and a New Zealand speaker too.

Well, there’s a difference between recognition and imitation.

A good way to deal with unusual accents is by adapting a tape-script for your students. This means turning it into a ‘fill in the gaps’ type exercise where students can read along and just fill in certain words pronounced in a fairly regular way. Or, they have to put complete lines of the dialogue into the correct order. So even if they don’t catch every word just by listening they can still complete the task with the support of their reading skills. The accents then become incidental. In both cases you’re connecting listening and reading so that students learn to match the sound and spelling of the language.

When you model pronunciation you actually want them to speak like you or as similarly to you as possible. When you expose your students to other accents, however, you help them to get used to the reality of English as a diverse and global language.

Accents are different from dialects, which feature entirely different vocabulary and grammatical structures.

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Correctness in pronunciation is all to do with whether or not people understand you easily. By demonstrating a range of accents students become more accepting of this.

Coping with colloquial language

The extent to which you expose students to informal, colloquial speech may well depend on what they eventually intend to do with their English. For example, if you’re teaching business English to students who need to work on an international scale and not necessarily with native speakers of English, they probably won’t encounter too many colloquialisms. Compare that situation with Korean students preparing to attend a course at university in Scotland. In the second case, the students are likely to face a constant stream of colloquialisms so it’s worth them doing listening activities that get them familiar with everyday speech.

Clichés
, expressions that people use far too much so have no originality and little meaning, may be one of the first things to deal with. Footballers are great for this and here are a few classics.

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To be perfectly honest.

✓

At the end of the day.

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For the record.

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With all due respect.

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Lessons will be learned.

None of these expressions is likely to carry the main message in the sentence or dialogue. Pointing this out, and having students learn to listen out for key words and particular information, makes them feel better about knowing what they can safely ignore.

Slang words are a little different because sometimes they’re essential to understanding the message. For example, in the phrase,‘Give 20 quid to the bloke in red’, both
bloke
and
quid
are slang words essential to the meaning.

So you may want to provide a glossary:

Quid: British English meaning one pound sterling (£1).

Bloke: British, Australian and New Zealand English meaning a man.

If students are likely to need the slang words in future, teach them how to use these appropriately. If, on the other hand, the students only need the slang words to understand this text, just provide a glossary for them and leave it at that.

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Authentic listening texts give students a chance to hear how normal, natural intonation really sounds. Sometimes students make so much effort that they sound rather over the top. Or alternatively they make no effort and sound dead pan.

Films with robots such as the ‘Terminator’ series help students to hear the effect of flat intonation.

Whetting Students’ Appetites

In the real world listeners usually have a sense of purpose for listening. So before you play your text, you need to prepare your students.

Motivating students to listen

Occasionally teachers bring in a much loved reading or song and proceed with great enthusiasm, only to find that the students have no idea what all the fuss is about. This is why some initial talking up of the activity is ideal – because it raises anticipation. You may have to add some cultural background as well to aid comprehension.

Before you turn on the machine, provide some information on:

✓

Context and background:
Talk to the class about the speakers, the situations referred to, the time period, location and so on. Not only does this generate interest but it reduces the amount of work the students have to do. With some basic questions about the text already answered, they focus more on the specific task you set.

If, for example, your listening text is a Beatles number, you can begin with pictures of the Fab Four and you can find out what the students know about them. You can ask which Beatle is which? What’s so special about them? Are they still alive and if so what are they doing now?

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Type of listening text:
As there’s a vast array of text type to choose from, try giving the students a multiple choice task by asking them, for example, to identify whether they’re listening to a poem, story or play.

You can also talk about general features of the genre you’re dealing with so that students can pay particular attention to word play such as rhyme and alliteration. They can also listen out for the way the structure identifies the genre. For instance,
Once upon a time
followed by the past simple tense is almost certainly a fairy tale.

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✓

The language in the text:

You may want to remind them of what a particular tense sounds like with its contractions – for example,
I had done it = I’d done it
– or what form an irregular verb takes. Then there’s vocabulary. If the text contains tricky words, get them out of the way beforehand by giving the students a list of the words and a dictionary.

Another way to keep students’ motivation high is to remove the problem of trying to listen while grappling with an unclear task at the same time.

So before the listening text is played make sure that students understand exactly what they have to do and that they’ve read the relevant questions thoroughly. Allow the students to familiarise themselves with the worksheet, if there is one, and ask questions beforehand.

Of course, during the listening stage the students are fairly passive so the pre-listening stage can give them the opportunity to discuss and compare opinions with their classmates. An extended period of listening quietly is just too much for some of the more active students. Fidgety students only disrupt things if you don’t allow them to be more active for a time.

After you’ve done a few of these activities the class should be ready to tune in and listen.

Running through some pre-listening tasks

In this section, I give you some examples of what you can do in the pre-listening stage.

Predicting

When students predict the answers to specific questions or overall content it really raises their curiosity.

If students have an exercise where they need to fill in the gaps, they should first of all try to predict what kind of word is missing. For example, is the word a noun or a verb? Is it a place, a number or a name? This helps them to listen for a few words.

You have an extract from a BBC interview with Madonna. After a short class discussion about favourite pop stars you introduce the activity by saying

‘You’re going to listen to an interview with the international superstar Madonna. Predict which three of these topics the journalist asks her about:

✓

Her divorce

✓

Adoption

✓

Writing children’s books

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✓

Women in the music industry

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Living in London

Have them compare choices with a partner and say why they chose these topics.

Making predictions about the text they’re going to listen to gives students a reason to listen because they want to know if they were right.

Brainstorming

You
can give students a time limit, say two minutes, and then get them to jot down all the words they know on a particular topic. Actually, they can write them straight up on the board for you.

So, for example, before a radio weather report, ask students about weather words: ‘How many words can you think of for this kind of weather?’

You can then fill in any gaps in their knowledge by pre-teaching some extra words. You’re then at least able to see if they remember the trickier words that are to come in the text.

Discussing

Class, group or pair discussions introduce the topic and feed the imagination.

(I talk more about promoting discussion in Chapter 13.)

For instance,
before listening to a phone conversation about restaurant book-ings students can talk about their own experiences in small groups, responding to questions like:

When was the last time you ate out?

Did you book a reservation?

Did you have a good time? Why/why not?

Questioning

Students can also decide what they hope to gain from the text. I find this useful for students of academic English who may have to listen to longer lectures in the future.

You can ask students to make a personal connection to the topic. For example, if they’re going to hear a short lecture on dinosaurs, you can ask, ‘What would you personally like to know about these amazing creatures?’

If the lecture doesn’t answer what students want to know, they have a ready-made homework project to write about or give a presentation about.

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Come Again? Repeating the Text

In most cases you play listening texts twice within the lesson. The first time students get the idea of what the text is about and on the second occasion they listen for more detail.

Listening for the basic idea

A task or activity aimed at getting the gist should be relatively easy but not obvious. So if you’re presenting a Madonna interview, there’s no point asking

‘
Who is Madonna?’
It’s not even necessary to listen to the text to get the answer. However, if the students had previously predicted which questions the interview would cover, the task may be to listen to the interview and check whether they were right.

Listening and responding to a visual image is a useful way of exercising listening skills because students don’t get tangled up with reading and writing, which may create anxiety or distraction.

Listening activities should practise just that, listening. Avoid trying to test reading or writing skills at the same time by using complicated grammatical structures or unnecessarily difficult vocabulary in the questions.

Figure 14-1 is an example of a business English activity I devised along with part of the tape-script. The organisation charts in the figure accompany a listening text about the structure of a company. Students listen for gist and decide which chart best fits the description they hear.

The tape-script is here:

Mrs Smith: Have you prepared the letters?

Paul: Yes Mrs Smith, but I gave one to Mike.

Mrs Smith: Well, you’re a manager too, Paul. You should be doing your own paperwork.

Paul: I know but the client wanted a 35 per cent discount and I’m only allowed to offer 25 per cent. Only you and Mike can agree to bigger discounts so I passed it on to him.

Mrs Smith: I see. Well I’ll speak to Mike later. Don’t forget that he and I are coming to see you and John tomorrow to discuss the sales figures.

Allow students to get the point through what the speakers infer rather than what they say explicitly, as long as it’s not too subtle.

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Owner Mrs Smith

Manager Richard Taylor

Manager Paul Jones

Manager Mike Smith