First of all I'd like to thank Penny and everyone here for the great discussion!

First of all I'd like to thank Penny and everyone here for the great discussion!

So far I haven't had the opportunity to try out the tips as the classes I taught the past week didn't cover listening skills.

But many of the tips given were eye-opening for me! I haven't tried storytelling at all in my classes so far, because I mostly taught listening for academic purposes, using IELTS and TOEFL iBt practice tests and even TED Talks. But I'd love to try storytelling in my General English classes. I usually just use the listening materials already included in the coursebook, which are mainly about daily conversations. I hope to see positive results after trying this out later.

Another major take-away for me is to not pre-teach the vocabulary used in the listening. I had thought that it would be an effective way to learn the language, when it actually isn't. It's more about understanding the context, taking away the gist, and so on. I think this is something that I need to shift to in my classes.

So far that's what has been on my mind! I'll come back later with more comments. Thanks everyone!

Comments

  1. Penny UrNovember 11, 2017 at 7:47 PM

    Thanks, Arimbi! Note that I think teaching vocabulary in general is VERY important! So if there are some useful items that come up in the listening, you might want to teach and review them later for students to master them well. It's just that teaching them briefly just before the listening doesn't seem to help much with the comprehension.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Arimbi AshanyNovember 11, 2017 at 10:02 PM

    Noted, thank you so much for your feedback Penny! I will try that in my upcoming classes :)

    ReplyDelete
  3. Phil BrownNovember 12, 2017 at 7:35 AM

    Likewise, I hadn't thought about NOT pre-teaching vocabulary before a listening task since textbooks tend to be designed that way, so that gave me food for thought, too.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Vasiliki TzotziouNovember 18, 2017 at 11:11 AM

    Many coursebooks actually include many pre-listening activities and I completely agree that they are not so helpful to the students, unless there is a foreign word that the teacher should by no means explain to the students in order to get the gist and understand the following listening

    ReplyDelete

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