Some Experiences about Listening and a little bit about Speaking

Listening might be the most difficult skill to achieve. As we know, there are many factors that make listening comprehension that difficult (Clustering, Redundancy, Reduced forms, Performance variables, Colloquial language, Rate of delivery, Stress, Rhythm, and Intonation, and Interaction). The more unfamiliar the language, the harder it is for us to understand it. See for example if you listen to a Japanese guy. Even if you have practiced Japanese for some time, you might have difficulties due to its different structure (subject-object-verb). 

I remember that one of my English teachers told me that if I wanted to increase my listening comprehension in the questions section, I should focus on the key words. That is, try to identify the words that you need in order to understand the question. For instance, say that the question is “What did sally buy at the shopping mall?  Here we should try to identify, first the type of question (in this case it’s a WH question ‘WHAT’, asking for ‘SOMETHING’), second, the verb, and third the person (if there are many people in the story). Then, if the story is something like “Sally went to the shopping mall with her sister, Diana. Sally wanted to buy a pair of boots but she didn’t have enough money so she bought a pair of sandals, whereas Diana bought the boots”. Then we are able to say that Sally bought the pair of sandals.  There have been many teachers who have said that in English it is not important to listen to every single word. If you can catch some words, the most important ones, you can understand what they are saying. Trying to understand every single word may lead us to lose focus and to be lost easier.   

It also happens to us. In the listening exams we are frustrated because we want to understand each word but sometimes we can’t. I think this strategy is very useful and is a way to make our students realize that listening can be easier than they think.  I have noticed in my experience as a teacher that when I’m asking questions to my students about a prior listening, e.g. “What color is Suzy’s skirt?” I can see how they catch the words “color” and “skirt” (because they repeat these words aloud) and rapidly they tell me the correct color. Those students are kids and I had not told them about that strategy I said before. I think our students, especially kids, can teach us lessons many times. 

As for speaking, there’s something I’d like to share with you. When I attended the “Using ICT for Teaching the Four Skills” conference at Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana, they gave us many useful websites in which we can make our students practice speaking, listening, reading, and writing. For speaking, there was a website that I didn’t know and it called my attention. It is Voxopop. This is like a kind of ‘spoken blog’, in which the teacher proposes a topic and make the students talk about it, but they don’t have to write what they think. They tape it and upload it. I think it is a useful way for, not only evaluating, but also assessing your students’ speaking abilities.  You can have a permanent observable product for speaking performance. There is formative and summative assessment and also process and product assessment because you give a final grade depending on the student’s final recordings and you can also provide an accurate feedback based on the process that the student followed. Plus, you can see if the student showed motivation and willingness to identify and avoid his/her weaknesses in the previous recordings. It is also useful for those students who are really shy when it comes to speaking in public and in a class discussion they are just too afraid to talk, but when they are in front of a computer they don’t have that anxiety and are more relaxed to speak.

The cons with this website are that it does not provide authentic speaking settings or real life communication. However, as a starter for speaking I still think it’s a good tool.

Here you can have access to the website if you want to check it.