George Washington University

TRED 251: SECOND LANGUAGE INSTRUCTION

  
 
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   Topic: Teaching/Assessing Listening Comprehension/Oral Communication
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Opening discussion: Teaching by Principles Chapter 16, Ex 6: What are some examples of SBI that you have observed or experienced?

See CALLA exercises & responses

Listening and Speaking Needs of ESL/FL Students

Brainstorm listening needs of ESL students
        Repeat for speaking.

Activity 1 Oral Communication: Listening and Speaking

Sit in groups of those teaching:
  • Beginning ESL
  • Intermediate ESL
  • Content Instructors

Decide in your group which learning strategies would help your students with oral communication skills (listening and speaking). Choose from the lists in Teaching by Principles, the CALLA handbook or the strategies packet from this class.

How will you model a particular strategy for listening or speaking?

Teaching Oral Communication: Listening Comprehension and Speaking

Impact Listening sample lesson & resources This link contains materials I've co-written for an ESL textbook, Impact Listening 2 (now in 2nd Edition)

Listening and Speaking Skills of Beginners and Intermediate Students

Since most classes are multilevel, it is important to understand typical skills and needs of beginning and intermediate levels. A teacher also needs to know what level students reached in the previous class (if this is not their first year), and what level will be expected the next year.

  • Beginners: First, the new language is a stream of sound and students cannot segment the sounds into words. Within a week or so of exposure to a second language (longer for foreign language), they begin to comprehend some individual words and phrases, especially if accompanied by action. TPR is excellent at this stage. They may begin to repeat words and phrases, often using gestures to make meaning clear. Some may remain silent (Krashen's Silent Period) while they are absorbing the new language. Comprehension will always be more advanced than production.
Teaching tips for beginners: Provide emotional and social support - assign a buddy, demonstrate what you want student to do, smile, praise. Provide hands-on activities or projects in which the beginner can join in with little language expected.

  • Intermediates: Oral language develops rapidly in social context in second language, while in foreign language, oral language proficiency is much slower because of limited opportunities to use the language.

Teaching tips for intermediates: ELL students need more experiences with academic language, while FL students need lots of communicative activities. Content-based and experiential activities work well. Focus on meaning and comprehensibility, rather than correcting every error or mispronunciation.

Teach discourse patterns and special words to listen for - "Today we're going to talk about…" "In other words.." "the most important thing about…" "therefore…" "first…, second…, then…., finally…"
 
Practice Idea: Record short lectures of mainstream teachers or find podcasts in iTUnesU in different content areas. Use these as listening activities - students can listen to them as many times as necessary to extract meaning.

Teaching Note-taking

Graphic Organizers

ASCD article on summarizing and note-taking

Cooperative Note-taking
 
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