IATEFL Conference 2015: A summary of listening related talks

When I was in school, I studied Irish, Spanish and French and for all three languages, I had the same problem . . . listening. The teacher only had to say the word and my heart started pounding. There was always a list of questions that we would read before we listened. By the time I read the second question, I'd forgotten what the first one was. Then, the recording was played and all I could hear were streams of sounds which I was supposed to de-code and find the answer to the questions I didn't even remember. I recall one sunny day in my last year of secondary school in Spanish class when I looked around the classroom and watched as everyone else scribbled down answers. I remember thinking, "Aha, I've got it, someone has recorded a subliminal message in English and then have mixed the two audio files together, but it's the English we're supposed to be listening out for. It's the only possible way that anyone can make any sense of what the speaker is saying." So, I understand when the learners start to groan when I say we're going to do a listening activity!

Perhaps it is because of my own experience as a learner that I have an interest in thinking of alternative ways to help our learners to make sense of what sounds like a load of nonsense. And at this year's IATEFL Conference, one of my goals was to attend different sessions on developing listening skills. Here you will find a summary of five sessions I attended that were related to listening.

Lindsey Gutt - Fun Listening
Lindsey's session was all about easing our learners into listening and finding the fun in this much dreaded skill. She expressed that we need to provide our learners with fun, interactive, varied, interesting, and beneficial activities. That sounds like a lot of work, but the ideas that Lindsey shared don't require much preparation. She recommended activities that help boost learners' confidence and joy in listening rather than jumping in and giving them a list of questions. For example, listen to different sounds, like a door creaking, traffic, someone coughing etc., and guess what they are. Or, listen and draw what you hear. My favourite was a bingo listening. So, say the theme of the lesson is my school. Ask the learners to draw a grid in their notebooks and write one word in each space that they would expect to hear when some talks about their school. Then, play the recording and the learners cross out their words as they hear them. The first to cross out all of their words shouts out Bingo! Alternatively, the students could listen to the teacher or to their classmates talking about their school.
                     
                      

Olga Sergeeva - Authentic listening: stepping from bottom-up processing to understanding
Olga's session focused on authentic videos and how to create lessons around them. Unlike Lindsey's workshop, Olga's lesson plans requires a good amount of preparation, but it would provide some excellent materials for your learners and you could also use them again and again with future classes. Olga recommended using interviews as they convey more natural interaction, appeal to human interest and the interviewers tend to ask interesting questions.
With this idea of bottom-up decoding, Olga uses a lot of references to pronunciation features. So, for example, before watching the video, give the learners a few phrases from a short section of the video and ask them to mark the features of connected speech that they would expect to happen, like linking, elision, and types of assimilation. Then, they listen and try to pick out the phrases. She also uses the transcripts a lot and directed us to the Toronto Public Library channel on YouTube where they provide the transcripts so you can jump to the specific sentence in the video you're working on. So, give the learners six or seven gapped sentences and ask them to watch the section of the video and fill in the spaces. They listen several times and then classify some of the missing phrases according to the pronunciation feature that is being produced, such as elision of final sounds, vowel reduction, and word blending. For more ideas from Olga check out her blog.

Richard Cauldwell - Listening and connected speech: untruthful rules, unruly truths
Richard uses a very clever metaphor for phonology and listening:

1. the greenhouse - where everything is separate just like in citation form
2. the garden - where items are moved out of the greenhouse and organised in arrangements as in ELT materials when pronunciation rules are explained.
3. the jungle - where there is no order and everything is unpredictable as in natural rapid speech.



 

 Richard explained that rules for connected speech are explained on paper, but in reality, we don't speak like that, we speak much faster and even some of those rules are omitted. He commented that many native speakers believe that we are in the garden in the way that we speak, but the reality for our learners in that we are in the jungle!
Richard recommended introducing this idea to learners of the greenhouse, garden and jungle, and when introducing new language, ask the learners how it might sound in each stage, or build up the language item from citation form to a real speech model. For more information on Richard's ideas and materials, go to his website Speech In Action.


Laura Patsko - The ear of the beholder: helping learners understand different accents
In this session, Laura discussed using authentic materials for listening in an ELF (English as a Lingua Franca) context. Many of our learners need English for their jobs in their own countries where they will be communicating with people from various different parts of the world, mainly from others who are speaking English as a second language, so it is essential that they are prepared for this just as much for interaction with L1 speakers of English.
Laura demonstrated a lesson that she designed around an interview with the Spanish actor Javier Bardem and recommended that using celebrities who use English as their L2 as role models. She described a five step lesson plan in the workshop and she has made the presentation and hand outs available on her blog.

Annie MacDonald - Learning listening: the challenge of unscripted listening
Annie started by mentioning the difference between scripted recordings that we find in ELT course books and unscripted recordings that we hear all around us in the real world. So what do unscripted recordings have that scripted ones don't?

• false starts, e.g. I . .I . . .Well what really matters is . .
• fillers, e.g.erm, eh, mmm
• they're very untidy
• incomplete or unfinished sentences

To help our learners understand unscripted real world speech, we need to expose them to it and show them how they can decode it. For this, you will need transcripts of unscripted speech, which is obviously a very time-consuming task, but there are resources out there, such as that which Olga mentioned (see above) or Annie's new resource pack that she wrote with Mark Hancock Authentic Listening Resource Pack by Delta Publishing.
Annie demonstrated many different exercises you can do, such as listening to a short piece of audio and mark where you hear the marker kind of or sort of in the transcript. She highlighted many different things that speakers do in unscripted speech and the importance of giving our learners as much practise as possible. For more information about Annie and her talk, go to her website.