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Non verbal responses in Listening.

The commonest forms of listening activities in the classroom are listen-and-repeat drilling, or listen then answer questions about a text. In order to begin providing a more varied, authentic input for developing listening fluency, teachers might consider other ways in which learners could respond to input. They might reflect on the ways we respond, or most often do not respond, to the talk that surrounds us every day; our commonest response is probably to ‘do’ nothing beyond memorising it in outline, or perhaps we note down useful information, do something non-verbal like drawing map or diagram or, if we happen to be soldiers or members of an aerobics class, we make some kind of physical response. Taking each of these in turn:

Minimal or no response: Teachers should not be afraid of sharing free ranging talk with their students: tell a joke, talk about their families, something interesting that has happened recently, or about their own childhood. The topic does not really matter; the point is that learners are attending to a stream of speech that is unpredictable, and therefore communicative. They should not worry if some words are not understood. If learners react with questions, so much the better. This routine need take only a very few minutes at the start of the class and could replace the current and entirely predictable ‘what’s the weather like, or what’s the date today?’ routines.

Non-verbal- respond by drawing: listeners draw an outline map, complete a graph, reproduce a cartoon, or place furniture in a room. There are good materials that exploit these two approaches, cheap and easily available in Vietnam.

Non-verbal – physical response: ask learners to respond to questions about numbers by holding up the correct number of fingers; learners can respond silently to multiple-choice items with fingers; or true/ false items by raising their hands: ‘put up your left hand if it’s true, put up your right hand if it’s false’. For young learners, play ‘Simon says’: ‘touch your nose, your left ear’, and so on. Pairs of learners can then continue with one being teacher and the other the responder, then swap roles.

Andrew Wright – a teacher trainer working in Nghe An under the VSO program gives you these useful tips

TEACHING LISTENING CHECKLIST

Tran Van Co - ELT Specilist - Binh Dinh DOET – adapted the following from
Listening in Action, Michael Rost, Prentice - Hall, 1991 for training.

When teaching Listening, do you help your students…?
1. discriminate between sounds
2. recognise words
3. identify grammatical groupings of words
4. connect linguistic cues to intonation and stress
5. use their background knowledge and context to predict and to confirm meaning
6. recall important words and ideas
7. deal realistically with the situation
8. think about their relationship to the speaker
9. get clarification
10. organize what they hear
11. plan their response
12. know their reason for listening
13. pay attention to the key content words
14. guess unknown words and expressions
15. activate what they know about the topic

Brainstorming

Ms Vo Thanh Hoa in Nghe An tried this in her teaching
When teaching a listening text about the musical career of Paul Carrack for example, you could brainstorm as a pre - listening task.

1, Draw a circle with the singer’s name in the middle, then ask students what they want to know about this person.
2, Write down what they want to know, then ask others to answer if they know so that it will be easier for them in while and post - listening tasks.

Applying the framework to a song

Ms Nguyet - a VTTN trainer from Hue gave a good demonstration of this in Nghe An.

Deliberate mistakes

Thanks to Ms Tran Thi Nga and Vu Thi Kim Thoa from Da Nang for this useful activity.

• Hand out to students a text
(Vang Trang Khuyet -they used).
• Read the text with some deliberate mistakes, then ask students to listen to the text . When hearing the different information, students say “stop” or put up their hands or underline them for correcting later on.

Dialogue Ordering

This can be used for while listening stage, developing both listening for specific information and gist skills.
Thanks to Mr Hoang Tuan from Nam Dinh for bringing this to our attention.

• First choose a dialogue relating to the topic of the lesson, then cut it up into lines.

• Divide students into groups and give each group a set of already- cut- dialogue.

• Introduce the listening and ask students order the lines into a completed dialogue while listening.

Listen for your word

a simple way to improve students' concentration during listening activities. (This activity was presented by Ms Hoai An from Nghe An to Yen Bai)

• First, choose a text or a short story that students have never heard, then, choose some words from it and write them on the board at random (at least 10 words).

• Divide the class into two teams. Ask students to choose'only one' word for each without letting the others know it; nobody knows anyone else's word. (avoid cheating, ask the students to write their chosen word down).

• Ask students to stand up. Then, tell them they will have to sit down when they hear their word otherwise they stay standing.

• Finally, read the text or play the tape. The team who all sits down first will be the winner.

(This is for specific listening and can also used to develop speaking skill after their listening. Ask students to use ten already given words to write a story).

Trying out new tips with peers in Da Nang

Methodology in Nam Dinh

Some practical tips on Teaching Listening

The concerns expressed by some teachers before the VTTN workshop was that they lack the confidence to integrate teaching listening systematically in their schools. The workshops aimed to address this challenge. Listening has always been one of the most challenging skills for students to develop and for teachers to teach. It is especially demanding in our context of resource poor conditions. We do, however, recognise the great importance of developing listening skills in Vietnam. Here are some tips for your daily teaching.

The two main types of listening tasks: Gist listening and Specific listening

Gist listening develops 'fluency listening' where students are asked to listen for general meaning of the recordings or texts, for example: identifying topic, location, situation and emotion in a dialogue, sequencing events, anticipating outcomes of the story and other engaging activities.

Another kind of listening which focus students on the details of the listening texts is Specific listening which is called 'accuracy listening' for example, labelling, drawing, following maps, form-filling and so on. Students need to develop the two above mentioned types.

Types of listening texts or what to listen to?

We as teachers need to help expose our students to different listening contexts as a variety of listening texts gives them valuable practice and increases motivation. Listening texts should come from real life situations which students often encounter. The following, then, can be exploited for teaching listening: stories, instructions, talks, problems, jokes, songs, poems, plays, announcements, radio, TV...and of course our very own teachers and students. Songs and poems are said to best serve this goal as our teenage students seem to love working with music, verses and rhythm.

A handy checklist for teaching Listening

• Use natural authentic speech.
• Always set a task - listening with a purpose.
• Always tap into students' background knowledge.
• Provide contextual 'support'.
• Practice detailed listening and general listening
• Let students compare answers in pairs before group feedback to increase confidence.
• Avoid testing listening, develop the skills.
• Ensure learners give diagnostic feedback.
• Praise the students for their efforts!

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