English Listening

Welcome to English Club English Listening, to help you learn the skill of listening in English. Listening is the 1st of the four language skills:

Skill #1: Listening Skill #2: Speaking

Skill #3: Reading Skill #4: Writing

The Wise Owl A wise old owl Sat in an oak. The more he saw, The less he spoke. The less he spoke, The more he heard. Why can’t we be like That wise old bird?

How to Hear English Everywhere
How can you hear English when you’re not in an English-speaking country? Fortunately, there are many ways of hearing English in almost all countries of the world.

Listen to English by Radio
Listen to English online with programmes from stations like the BBC or Voice of America.

Listen to the News
Listen to our monthly digest of the news in English. With this resource you can practise your listening, reading, writing and even speaking.

Reading out loud

James Houltby, Teacher, British Council, Portugal

As a teacher I had always perceived ‘reading aloud’ as a ‘taboo’ in the EFL classroom since it focuses specifically on a ‘bottom-up’ approach where learners can fall into traps of worrying about 100% comprehension or simply read aloud without understanding the text. That coupled with my own negative experiences from school meant that I never did it in my own classes, but this year that changed.

• Context
• My students’ reading habits
• Reading for pronunciation
• Getting students motivated
• Conclusion
  

Context
I was teaching three groups of young learners, ten to fourteen year-olds and the syllabus included a component using a video with an accompanying reader. Students generally respond well to video, probably because of the associations with pleasure and the visual excitement, but what about the reader? I had never had the option of using the reader alongside the video, so I really wanted to experiment with it and find out how the students would respond to different activities based on the two media, and in particular to the reader.

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My students’ reading habits
My first step was to ask students if they read for pleasure, making sure I did this in small groups or individually so as to eliminate the influence of peer pressure. After all, I thought, there might be students who really loved reading but didn’t want to say in front of their classmates. However, the only reading these groups of teenagers seemed to do was for schoolwork and preparation for tests and more tests. Reading at home, going to libraries, or swapping books with friends was definitely not part of their daily life.

We constantly hear about a new reading culture in the UK, brought about by the Harry Potter books and the wealth of other equally good books and authors for the young at heart. However, the fact that it is cool to read and to be seen reading seems to have had little impact on youngsters in many other countries.

 

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Reading for pronunciation
So, what was I going to do in class? Ideas for in-class reading seemed limited to reading alone or reading out loud. I decided to experiment as I knew my students certainly needed pronunciation input, specifically intonation. Dialogue both in the reader and the film seemed to hold lots of potential. Would it be possible to make reading aloud a ‘learning experience’?

• I decided to show the first few scenes of the video before dividing the class into small groups of 4 or 5 and asking them to read aloud together and notice any differences. A comparison with the video and book is a good strategy to keep interest going and motivates them to read. It does take planning though, as both the book and the film need to be divided into suitable time frames and themes.
• Once a suitable part was selected, the students watched the film for 15 minutes. Afterwards they wrote their own sequenced list of events, observed in the film clip. When they went onto read the book aloud, the students were given the task of listening for when the events happen in the book.
• I found that students were very good at noticing quite detailed differences. After I had given a few example exercises they preferred to write their own questions and statements.

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Getting students motivated
Acting out parts was another strategy for motivating them to read out loud from the dialogues in the book and from the script which I found at Movie-Page.com. I knew my students needed oral practice and help with pronunciation and so this really helped them.

• I was astounded by the participation and how motivated my students

Spending Committee

Jo Budden, British Council, Spain

This is a group activity where students imagine they are going to be part of the committee that will decide how money is spent in their school. They should discuss the advantages and disadvantages of a list of possible new resources for their school and try to come to a decision about the importance of the items. They should try to prioritise. If it is too difficult for them to order them all, ask them to choose the top three.

This activity was first published on the British Council’s Language Assistant website.

Preparation
Prepare a list of items and make sure your students understand them.

Example list:

• Books for the library
• New furniture for the classrooms
• A new sports centre
• More teachers
• A new computer room
• MP3 players for every student
• Laptops for every student
• Interactive whiteboards for every classroom
• A new dining area for lunchtime
• A common room for students to relax

Procedure

• Get the students to work in small groups.
• Tell them to imagine your school has been given a large sum of money to spend on new materials. They are part of the committee that will decide how to spend the money.
• Ask the students to put the items in order from the most important to the least important.
• Make sure they discuss it together and are able to defend their choices.
• After the groups have decided you might like to join two groups together so they compare and justify their choices. You could also award points to the group that has the best plan and the best justification for their choices.

Follow up
To follow this up you could ask the students to imagine the school of the future and design their own school. Offer them unlimited funds and see what they can produce.

Monitoring

Steve Darn, Izmir University of Economics, Turkey

Monitoring is a classroom management technique loosely defined as listening to the learners for their accuracy and fluency, or checking to see whether activities are going to plan and that the learners are ‘on task’. However, monitoring is often carried out as a vague listening and looking exercise by the teacher, and sometimes not done at all, whereas in fact effective monitoring is a skill that needs to be developed if learners are to benefit fully from activities, particularly those of the information gap and group interactive types.

• When to monitor
• Purposes of monitoring
• How to monitor
• Conclusion

When to monitor
Monitoring goes on all the time, but particularly during speaking activities when the teacher is concerned with the general assessment of learners’ performance in relation to general progress or recent language and skills development. Monitoring of individual learners takes place during written practice exercises, when the aim is to point out errors and encourage self-correction. Guided practice activities, particularly of the pairwork format, are monitored for accuracy, while less guided groupwork activities are monitored for task achievement and fluency. Monitoring may be general or multipurpose, focusing on one or more of the following aims.

Purposes of monitoring
Not all learners develop at the same rate. Monitoring offers the opportunity to assess the progress of individuals, and often provides an indication of what to re-teach or practise further. Specific aims of monitoring, depending on the stage of the lesson and the activity include:

• Being aware of the whole class. The teacher should always be aware of how the class is getting on, whether the pace is too fast or too slow, and which students may need individual attention. There is often a tendency to teach to the lesson plan and materials at the expense of teaching the learners themselves.
• Listening for errors in the target language, particularly during guided practice activities. Correction is required here, since these are usually accuracy-based activities.
• Listening to ensure that learners are on task. Some re-instruction, modelling of the activity or prompting may be required.
• Taking opportunities for micro-teaching to individuals or pairs who have clearly not grasped the target language.
• Assessing both individuals and the whole class. Monitoring provides clues to individual and group difficulties and progress. In this respect, monitoring is a kind of on-going needs analysis. All students should receive some attention, even if it is only a few words of encouragement
• Adding input. Particularly in fluency activities, learners may not be able to sustain output. The teacher’s role here is to feed in language and ideas when appropriate to keep the activity alive.
• Assessing the development of fluency. This involves monitoring from a distance, and the teachers role is often to take notes about common errors to be dealt with in a delayed correction slot, as well as mentally noting the use of target language in a freer context.
• Assessing the task. Some activities work better with one class than another, others are being tried out for the first time. Monitoring offers the teacher the opportunity to assess the success of an activity and to get feedback from the learners.
• Planning. Monitoring facilitates decision making in terms of what to do next, whether to modify the original lesson plan, planning future lessons and giving feedback to students on their performance.
• Maintaining discipline. Large groups may become restless and bored if some learners have finished a task before others. The teacher should have some short back-up activities for these learners, or could use the quicker learners as assistants to help slower groups.

How to monitor
Monitoring is an acquired skill which hopefully becomes a good habit. Less experienced teachers may feel that they need to monitor closely and maintain control of activities, while other teachers feel that they should be involved at all times, and that monitoring is the solution. In either case, there is a danger of over-monitoring, interference, and a tense rather than relaxed, student centred learning environment during less guided practice activities.

Close monitoring needs to be carried out sensitively, and an element of personal and cultural awareness is required. Some learners resent a very close physical presence, others object to the teacher crouching in front of them. Monitoring from in front of the learners is distracting and sometimes intrusive, tending to interrupt the activity and shifting the focus onto the teacher. Students then expect the teacher to provide some input, make a comment, or correct them. Unobtrusive monitoring is most effective, and is often best done from behind the learners. Some useful tips are:

• Move chairs away from walls.
• Make sure that there is a clear route around the classroom.
• Arrange seating so that all students are visible from wherever the teacher is positioned.
• Monitor pairs or groups randomly.
• Don’t spend too much time with one individual, pair or group, and make sure that all learners are monitored.
• Rather than standing or crouching, sit with pairs or groups. A chair with wheels is an ideal vehicle for moving from group to group.

Monitoring from a distance is done from any position in the classroom which offers the possibility of ‘tuning in’ on different conversations. In larger classes, the teacher may need to move around the room. It is important not to sit near one group for the whole activity, suggesting that the teacher is listening only to them. Often, the best position is behind the learners, out of their field of vision, so that they are focused on the task and each other rather than the teacher.

Learners may want to ask questions during freer practice activities. The teacher’s response will depend on the activity, but it is a useful learner-training exercise to teach the learners to note down any questions to be asked at the end of the activity.

There are possibilities for self and peer-monitoring. Self-monitoring involves training in self-correction. All learners may be involved in peer monitoring, but a useful technique is to ask learners to work in threes rather than pairs, with learners taking turns in monitoring the performance of the other two.

Conclusion
The monitoring techniques above apply to all teaching and learning situations, but monitoring also achieves the purpose of providing discipline in certain circumstances. In classes where there are less-well motivated or younger students, and often in monolingual and mixed-ability classes, the temptation for the learners may be to abandon the task, leave the task to more able students, or to lapse into the mother tongue. Sometimes the presence of the teacher in a supervisory role is enough, but careful monitoring guarantees the best performance from the learners and provides the most instructive feedback for the teacher.  

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