TEACHING LISTENING
To start with I consider that listening is the main skill that must be developed in order to learn a language, it happened in our L1, because through listening we receive a great percentage of the input that we will use to communicate. But when I think in a second language it doesn't look the same, I find this process important but difficult because in Mexico we do not acquire English language, we learn it, I mean that students are not exposed all day to the new language and that they do not listen to authentic language.
But just talking about what makes listening difficult to me and my students I would mention clustering is one of the main weaknesses, it's really hard to figure out what the speaker means when uses chunks and students expect to listen to every single word. I have tried last year to provide my students more authentic materials for example podcasts and radio news in order to help them to increase their level of comprehension but it takes me longer, I can see now that they have improvements but not as fast as I wish.
I noticed that my listening activities are not as successful as I would like because they are not well planned at all, pre-listening tasks are missing, I used to give to my students a task and solve it while they listened to the audio but I never gave to them a context or the tools to perform the activity. How something so simple might help my students, if I give to my students activities before listening and after listening and not only the while I guess that they could do a better performance in their listening activities.
I need to focus on listening strategies for listening comprehension like looking for key words, listening for the general gist or looking for non verbal cues to meaning and I need to include student center activities in which they can interact with their peers and the audio.
It really is so fascinating how L1 listening is so basic, but L2 listening is so difficult.
ReplyDeleteThis is a really great reflection. You have so many points of application here; I can tell you're really thinking through things. What kids of things do you think you'd change first when you get back to class?
Something that I would change for my future lessons is the way I plan my listening activities. I will take into consideration the three main moments, the pre-listening task in which my students will get the basic information or context to be able to perform the task for the while-listening.
ReplyDeleteDuring the while listening I will pay special attention to the kind of task it is related to my objective and if it matches with the pre and post activities.
For the post I will close the activity but making sure that my objective was achieved and if not, I will reflect why it wasn’t successful to try again.
Something else that I will change are the activities, I need to provide my students different kinds of interaction to use the language, more centered activities.