Receptive skills are our focus for the first course and we'd like to hear your views on teaching reading and listening. These are two skills that both pose similar challenges for the teacher (and the learner). They are both 'covert' and therefore hidden from the teacher's gaze. And one of the challenges is to try to get inside learners' heads to understand what they are doing when they read or listen. Another is whether we can impact on these internal processes to make learners read or listen more effectively. The questions of the helpfulness of strategy training for learners and what should we consider when teaching strategy are also at the fore.
Lots of questions, we know. Let's start the ball rolling with this one, what do you feel are the biggest challenges you face when teaching reading and listening? And, what steps do you take to overcome these challenges? Feel free to bring in any of the above issues (and others) in your post.
If you'd like to watch something to get you thinking, here's a clip or two focusing on listening.
And here are a couple focusing on reading strategies, both of which gives ideas for dealing with unknown vocab
Just stopped by to say the other day I tried out giving the lecture myself thing that we talked about in Jon's listening session and it worked very well. Students had much more fun and they were able to answer the questions in the book pretty easily. When we were talking about it at the end of the lesson, their hunger for natural/everyday speech was clear.
Glad to hear that you've tried the 'live' lecture Simge and you felt it was a worthwhile experiment/experience. I'm sure the students enjoyed it.
One of the issues of teaching receptive skills that has come up a number of times through the TP cycle is - can you guess it? - strategy. I have been involved in some interesting and fruitful discussions on this with some of you and I felt that we were able to share ideas on effective and practical ways of going about strategy training/practice. My favourite word in describing my approach is 'subtle' (and this for me reflects how it shouldn't dominate the lesson aims). Does anyone share this view?
I agree that it should be subtle and it should not dominate lesson aims. Besides, it should not be necessary for the students to name the strategies they use. However, one concern of mine is that we may sometimes provide students with certain questionnaires to increase their metacognitive awareness. In such questionnaires published in many articles, there are lots of mention of strategies. So, we need to adapt them greatly for our use maybe.
In addition to what Simge has mentioned, I believe it would be a great idea to take the the students to some conferences or lectures where the students listen to a live lecture on a topic they are interested in and ask and answer questions. We should benefit more from being in such a university with so many of such opportunities.
Thanks for the posts Çiğdem. I, and I'm sure many others, agree with your comments on strategy and I'm curious if you (or anyone) have any general guidelines/points to keep in mind when adapting the checklists?? Also your live lecture/conference ideas sound potentially very beneficial and (importantly)engaging for learners (and teachers) and we do actually, as you say, have the resources (including technology) to do it. Why don't we? BTW. I realised I've overused brackets in my response. Sorry!
Also, to balance the strategy work in class. Instead of preparing checlists, we can ask some awareness raising questions like "why did we do that?" and the answer would be the strategy the students used.
my comments keep disappearing:) maybe the blog does not like them I do not know:) In my previous comments, I asked what kind of activities we could do in listening lessons to practice bottom-up strategies? I only do pronounciation work and guessing the meaning of a word while listening. any suggestions?
I'm not sure what happened to your comments Çiler but if the 'blog' itself is refusing comments based on quality, then mine wouldn't have appeared :) . Please persevere. Yours is a good question to ask. How DO we focus on bottom-up strategies in listening? Let's see what ideas are out there.
One idea may be to focus on syllables, which syllable is stressed or not? Or maybe listening and recognizing sentence fillers used in informal speech (students liked this one a lot in my class). or may be working on intonation pattern and how it helps us identify important information. Am I right?
As I worked on bottom-up strategies for the LSA 1, I can suggest the use of dictation. I started with word dictation and then moved on the sentence level dictation. Even if you choose random sentences (Longman CD Rom is great), there is always a teachable moment that comes out related to a problematic sound or word or grammar item. I used dictation to work with pronunciation problems as well. I noted down the pronunciation mistakes students made during oral tasks and a couple of days later I made them listen to the words and write them down. Then I told them they were mispronouncing those words and they got aware of their mistakes.
As part of my LSA 1 focus in Course 3, I worked on inferencing while reading and strategy training for inferential comprehension in this skill. To be honest,it was the first time I realized what inferencing is and what it requires. The readings I did helped me understand the importance of using bottom up and top-down processes to better comprehend a text. While observing my students struggling to answer the inferential comprehension questions, I sadly realized that they have rarely had the opportunity to read between the lines. The good news is that, after some practice, they started enjoying these kind of tasks and said they would like to have more tasks like the one I tried with them.
Thanks for the suggestions. I guess my problem is trying to incorporate bottom-up practice into listening lessons. But, as Simge said, sentence dictation or simple vocabulry teaching can work. I need a Longman CD Rom though:) Cahit, I think I will need your ideas on reading as we will be dealing with longer texts at Pre-Faculty:)
My feeling is Cahit that even though we have the terminology to try to describe what happens during reading processes, we are still over-simplifying the process. I feel there is a lot more to inferencing that isn't being dicussed. I sent an article on academic listening a while back and the writer was claiming that inferencing occurs constantly during reading due to texts not giving all the information needed to create a full representation in our minds, which is for me a reality of reading a text. But don't we tend to see inferenicing occuring at specific moments in the processing of a text rather than constantly?
Çiler, talking about bottom-up processes and listening, I'm reading a book at the moment 'English L2 Reading: Getting to the Bottom', which claims we need to work more on bottom-up processes in reading and that there has been too much focus on developing learners' top-down processes. Interesting! Moreover, there is a chapter on the link between phonology and reading. Any comments on the links between phonology and reading?
Yesterday in my class, I realized how important "dictation activites" are. To save time, I dictated the writing prompt and to my surprise only few students were able to write down the prompt correctly. They mispelled words like important as *imported and more mistakes like that. I feel that I need to focus on bottom-up strategies more on listening. Simge, I will use your suggestions and I also need Longman CD Rom:)
I believe phonology and reading are related because when the learners read the words, they need to decode them (in terms of meaning, form and phonology). Therefore, if they cannot decode it correctly, they will fail comprehending the text.
Dictating the prompt is a great improvisation Saliha and it revealed something very interesting about your learners listening ability. Seems like there's a need for more dictation! I think we should all take a look at this fabled Longman CD Rom actually. It's building up quite a reputation :)
Can I throw a question back at you on the relationship between phonology and reading. What activities are we doing to help learners in this decoding process? How are we focusing on the phonology of reading? (if I can put it that way)
I make the students read aloud the text paragraph by paragraph (if I have time) and then focus on common pronounciation problems. Nobody gets hurt when you write the common mistakes. Also, I turn some parts of the reading into a listening activity (is there is not a CD of the book, I read. I stop at some points and ask the students what I have just said. the places where I stop contain a problematic word in terms of pronounciation and I check whether they can write the word or not. after listening, they read the text and underline the words that they have not heard during the listening.
Thanks for sharing Çiler. You've got some great ideas there. I must say I'm interested how learners feel about reading the text out loud. That's also a wonderful exploitation of the text too to turn it into a listening activity. (to complement your last activity, what about reading and listening at the same time to identify problematic items?). The more general isssue of text exploitation is relevant to what we do here. To what extent are we simply getting learners to process texts to answer questions and then moving on without exploiting the text further? Or are we using it for other aims, as you do?
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteJust stopped by to say the other day I tried out giving the lecture myself thing that we talked about in Jon's listening session and it worked very well. Students had much more fun and they were able to answer the questions in the book pretty easily. When we were talking about it at the end of the lesson, their hunger for natural/everyday speech was clear.
ReplyDeleteGlad to hear that you've tried the 'live' lecture Simge and you felt it was a worthwhile experiment/experience. I'm sure the students enjoyed it.
ReplyDeleteOne of the issues of teaching receptive skills that has come up a number of times through the TP cycle is - can you guess it? - strategy. I have been involved in some interesting and fruitful discussions on this with some of you and I felt that we were able to share ideas on effective and practical ways of going about strategy training/practice. My favourite word in describing my approach is 'subtle' (and this for me reflects how it shouldn't dominate the lesson aims). Does anyone share this view?
I agree that it should be subtle and it should not dominate lesson aims. Besides, it should not be necessary for the students to name the strategies they use. However, one concern of mine is that we may sometimes provide students with certain questionnaires to increase their metacognitive awareness. In such questionnaires published in many articles, there are lots of mention of strategies. So, we need to adapt them greatly for our use maybe.
ReplyDeleteIn addition to what Simge has mentioned, I believe it would be a great idea to take the the students to some conferences or lectures where the students listen to a live lecture on a topic they are interested in and ask and answer questions. We should benefit more from being in such a university with so many of such opportunities.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the posts Çiğdem. I, and I'm sure many others, agree with your comments on strategy and I'm curious if you (or anyone) have any general guidelines/points to keep in mind when adapting the checklists??
ReplyDeleteAlso your live lecture/conference ideas sound potentially very beneficial and (importantly)engaging for learners (and teachers) and we do actually, as you say, have the resources (including technology) to do it. Why don't we?
BTW. I realised I've overused brackets in my response. Sorry!
Also, to balance the strategy work in class. Instead of preparing checlists, we can ask some awareness raising questions like "why did we do that?" and the answer would be the strategy the students used.
ReplyDeletemy comments keep disappearing:) maybe the blog does not like them I do not know:) In my previous comments, I asked what kind of activities we could do in listening lessons to practice bottom-up strategies? I only do pronounciation work and guessing the meaning of a word while listening. any suggestions?
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure what happened to your comments Çiler but if the 'blog' itself is refusing comments based on quality, then mine wouldn't have appeared :) . Please persevere. Yours is a good question to ask. How DO we focus on bottom-up strategies in listening? Let's see what ideas are out there.
ReplyDeleteOne idea may be to focus on syllables, which syllable is stressed or not? Or maybe listening and recognizing sentence fillers used in informal speech (students liked this one a lot in my class). or may be working on intonation pattern and how it helps us identify important information. Am I right?
ReplyDeleteAs I worked on bottom-up strategies for the LSA 1, I can suggest the use of dictation. I started with word dictation and then moved on the sentence level dictation. Even if you choose random sentences (Longman CD Rom is great), there is always a teachable moment that comes out related to a problematic sound or word or grammar item. I used dictation to work with pronunciation problems as well. I noted down the pronunciation mistakes students made during oral tasks and a couple of days later I made them listen to the words and write them down. Then I told them they were mispronouncing those words and they got aware of their mistakes.
ReplyDeleteAs part of my LSA 1 focus in Course 3, I worked on inferencing while reading and strategy training for inferential comprehension in this skill. To be honest,it was the first time I realized what inferencing is and what it requires. The readings I did helped me understand the importance of using bottom up and top-down processes to better comprehend a text. While observing my students struggling to answer the inferential comprehension questions, I sadly realized that they have rarely had the opportunity to read between the lines. The good news is that, after some practice, they started enjoying these kind of tasks and said they would like to have more tasks like the one I tried with them.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the suggestions. I guess my problem is trying to incorporate bottom-up practice into listening lessons. But, as Simge said, sentence dictation or simple vocabulry teaching can work. I need a Longman CD Rom though:) Cahit, I think I will need your ideas on reading as we will be dealing with longer texts at Pre-Faculty:)
ReplyDeleteMy feeling is Cahit that even though we have the terminology to try to describe what happens during reading processes, we are still over-simplifying the process. I feel there is a lot more to inferencing that isn't being dicussed. I sent an article on academic listening a while back and the writer was claiming that inferencing occurs constantly during reading due to texts not giving all the information needed to create a full representation in our minds, which is for me a reality of reading a text. But don't we tend to see inferenicing occuring at specific moments in the processing of a text rather than constantly?
ReplyDeleteÇiler, talking about bottom-up processes and listening, I'm reading a book at the moment 'English L2 Reading: Getting to the Bottom', which claims we need to work more on bottom-up processes in reading and that there has been too much focus on developing learners' top-down processes. Interesting! Moreover, there is a chapter on the link between phonology and reading. Any comments on the links between phonology and reading?
Yesterday in my class, I realized how important "dictation activites" are. To save time, I dictated the writing prompt and to my surprise only few students were able to write down the prompt correctly. They mispelled words like important as *imported and more mistakes like that. I feel that I need to focus on bottom-up strategies more on listening. Simge, I will use your suggestions and I also need Longman CD Rom:)
ReplyDeleteI believe phonology and reading are related because when the learners read the words, they need to decode them (in terms of meaning, form and phonology). Therefore, if they cannot decode it correctly, they will fail comprehending the text.
Dictating the prompt is a great improvisation Saliha and it revealed something very interesting about your learners listening ability. Seems like there's a need for more dictation! I think we should all take a look at this fabled Longman CD Rom actually. It's building up quite a reputation :)
ReplyDeleteCan I throw a question back at you on the relationship between phonology and reading. What activities are we doing to help learners in this decoding process? How are we focusing on the phonology of reading? (if I can put it that way)
I make the students read aloud the text paragraph by paragraph (if I have time) and then focus on common pronounciation problems. Nobody gets hurt when you write the common mistakes. Also, I turn some parts of the reading into a listening activity (is there is not a CD of the book, I read. I stop at some points and ask the students what I have just said. the places where I stop contain a problematic word in terms of pronounciation and I check whether they can write the word or not. after listening, they read the text and underline the words that they have not heard during the listening.
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing Çiler. You've got some great ideas there. I must say I'm interested how learners feel about reading the text out loud. That's also a wonderful exploitation of the text too to turn it into a listening activity. (to complement your last activity, what about reading and listening at the same time to identify problematic items?).
ReplyDeleteThe more general isssue of text exploitation is relevant to what we do here. To what extent are we simply getting learners to process texts to answer questions and then moving on without exploiting the text further? Or are we using it for other aims, as you do?