Strategies for Linking Authentic Listening and Speaking

Overview of session

• Brainstorm: What are the components of airplane announcements? These are the short informative announcements we hear in flight. Take a few minutes to work with your neighbors to list what kind of information you normally hear in these announcements. Is there a structure to the announcements?
• Rationale for our approach to teaching listening strategies
  
• Making authentic material comprehensible: working with authentic materials in popular media and textbooks
  
• Textbook examples
• Expansion examples
• Discussion or Questions and Answers
  

Rationale:

We use a method of teaching language learning strategies based on CALLA:

Cognitive Academic Language Learning Approach - Theory and Practice

A. CALLA "is an instructional model that integrates current educational trends in standards, content based language instruction, learning strategies, and portfolio assessment" (Chamot, Barnhardt, El-Dinary & Robbins, 1999, p. 7).
B. CALLA provides teachers with a task-based five phase instructional design that helps them combine language, content, and learning strategies in a carefully planned lesson. 

1. Preparation - activate background knowledge of strategies
2. Presentation - teacher models the use of the new strategy for a particular task and explains how and when to use it
3. Practice - students practice the strategy in class activities
4. Evaluation - students evaluate their use of the strategy and its effectiveness for the task
5. Expansion - students extend the use of the strategy into new situations or tasks

Activating background knowledge, or Schema Activation - Prelistening Activities: Activities to be used before listening should help students to activate their background knowledge of the topic (here, the topic is the problems of foreign travel) One example is a video segment from a popular movie. Students can learn about the announcements made on airlines as an additional listening practice.

Presentation of Listening and Speaking Strategies - a simplified set of listening and speaking strategies developed by Michael Rost was used in a listening textbook written by Robbins & MacNeill, Impact Listening 2.

Practice using authentic listening extracts - Most of our 'real world listening' extracts are based on recorded conversations between college students. They were used to develop the material in this textbook.  It was scripted and re-recorded to become part of the listening textbook. However, for this particular extract, we used our actual experiences or those of our family.

Practice Activity for Low Intermediate students:
Impact Listening 2 page 28:

Vocabulary Task:

    This is part of the schema activation done in preparation for listening.

Listening Task

Listening Strategy: Predict
Students look at the pictures to guess the problem of each traveler.
Listening Strategy: Focus
Students listen to identify each person's problem
Listening Strategy: Guess
Students guess what will happen next
Listening Strategy: Respond
Students elaborate by imagining other problems.

Impact Listening 2 page 29

Real World Listening

Predict

Listening Strategy: Predict
Students are asked to predict what happened when Trevor went to Costa Rica.
They fill in the blanks on the postcard
Listening Strategy: Focus
When they listen the first time, they Focus to check on their predictions.

Listening Strategy: Focus
Students are asked to choose from possible problems and listen a second time.

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