because if you tried to count up all the things that affected learning in a classroom, you'd need a million million fingers (and you'd still probably fall way short )
Hi all, A big thank you to everyone for your support over the past two years. Realizing that this blog keeps growing and that the options for making it navigable with blogger are diminishing week by week, I've moved over to WordPress. I hope this doesn't cause any unnecessary inconvenience. The original article you are looking for is below this short message. After reading, if you have a moment to check out the new (and hardly changed) "The Other Things Matter", please drop in. Would love to hear from you.
In my summarizing skills building posts 1 and 2, I’ve been writing about summaries as if they are all equal.This is clearly not the case.In fact, two weeks into my summarizing classes, John Fanselow, the advisor for my school's English program asked me, “Well, why do you want your students to practice summarizing anyway?”Which seemed like a pretty valid question.So I turned it over to my students to see if they had any ideas as to why they might want to work on their summarizing skills.A number of students said it will help them with the longer readings that appear on most of the university entrance exams and standardized English tests in Japan.Two students said they thought it would help them take notes in English class.One student said he thought it would help him remember things better.I was glad to know that the students did see value in practicing summarizing skills.And all of those reasons were on my list when I was talking with John.But there was one which my students didn’t mention.I believed (and still do) that summarizing, especially when working with less advanced students, is a crucial conversation skill.When students talk to each other about the books they read in class, the movies they watch in their free time, or chat about the latest TV shows, they need to summarize.Part of the reason I wanted to get students to work on summarizing skills was to kind of push them to feel a bit more comfortable actually talking about stories as opposed to answering the question of, “How was The Secret Garden?” with pat responses like, “It was good,” or “I really liked it.”
In my class, I’ve used simplified news articles, short stories, graded readers and movie plots as material for summaries.I didn’t use any scholarly articles and most of the news articles I did use had a strong narrative thread.Which simplifies the task immeasurably.Because students are working with something that already has an identifiable beginning, middle, and end, they can hit the key points for each step in the story without spending too much time searching for where certain types of information is in the text.And at a certain level, stories are better suited for fluency activities, as it’s pretty much human nature to tell the same stories over and over again (sometimes much to the annoyance of people like my daughter who can often be heard saying, “Papa, you already told me that story!).
Fluency activities:
If you want students to get fluent at a skill, they have to use it.A lot.In a recent talk at the CLESOL conference, Paul Nation identified adding a fluency component as one of the top five changes he would recommend to improve an ESL program’s effectiveness. Like any other skill, summarizing needs to be practiced and practiced again for the skills to become automatic.With that in mind here are a few activities you can try out in class to have students engage in a lot of fluency work.
Book Critiques: I have an extensive reading program in my school.The students get two hours of actual class time a week to read.Because it’s a reading for enjoyment class, I’ve encouraged students to read texts just a little bit below their level of competence.Which usually means an intermediate or lower-intermediate students is going to be reading a starter level graded reader or level 1.And they have a huge stack of readers they have finished by now.For this activity, students grab a reader they like and summarize the story for each other.One of the best things about this activity is the students don’t have to struggle with finding the language themselves.They can talk freely about the book, but if in their summary they don’t quite know what to say, they can just refer to the book and find the language they need.After they have summarized the book for three other students, they get a new book and start again.If you want to give the students a stronger sense that summarizing has some value aside from practicing English, you can pass out future reading list worksheets.As students listen to each others summaries, they can choose to add the book to their future reading list.In this way, students get immediate feedback on if their summaries are engaging and having a positive influence on the other students in class.
What movie is it: Students write a short movie summary.You can limit the written summary to a certain number of sentences.Usually I ask the students to keep to about 10 lines.After students have written up their basic summaries, they then talk about the movie’s plot with another student.The point of the game is obviously for the students to guess the title of their partner’s movie.To make the activity a little more conversational in nature, during the second round of the game, I will ask the students to include personal opinions about the movie after every two lines or so.Here is an example of a summary a student gave about the movie Real Steel.The bolded sentences are the student’s personal opinions which were added to the written summary:
A man controlled a big steel robot and had boxing fights.
I thought the fighting was really cool.
But the man got divorced and the man had to raise his son.
His son found an old robot in a garbage dump.
I liked this part of the movie.The man and his son could know each
other.
Pictogloss: This is a variation on the dictogloss activity.First students pick a book or a movie that they would like to recommend to a friend.You could also ask students to choose from one of the articles that they have read in class.Students get a few minutes to compose a written summary.Then, while saying the summary, their partner listens and instead of writing words, draws pictures of key words.Here is an example of two movie summaries that students produced in pictogloss form.Can you guess what movies they are?The written summaries and movie titles are included at the end of this post:
Now comes the confusing part.The student who originally said the summary takes the pictogloss from their partner and uses that to help give the summary to other students.This requires the student to engage in a transformation activity, in which the images in the page are translated back into words and then serve as the base for their spoken summary practice.As a side note, you can do all sorts of activities with written summaries and pictoglosses, such as playing a matching game, having other students in class try to read the pictogloss and decide what the summary is about, etc.(Shameless promotion #1: if you’re interested in a more detailed look at pictogloss, I will haveshort article in the upcoming winter issue of the ETAS Journal in which I go through the process step by step.)
Story Flood: I have 14 short stories I’ve written for ELLs.Some are available here and here.For a story flood, I lay out a handful of stories and have the students read the first line of each paragraph until they find a story which they find interesting.Once they’ve picked a story, they read it through and write up a summary, a critique, and give the story a star rating (1-5 stars).Then they have four minutes to tell another student about the story as well as to listen to their partner’s summary.If they hear a summary which seems intriguing, they then go and take that story, read it through and produce a new summary which is then shared with another student.The activity is a bit chaotic as some students are reading while others are writing and others are talking.But I find that in a ninety-minute class, students will be able to write and practice talking about three stories.Here is an example of two students’ summaries with links to the stories upon which they were based:
Doing summary work with upper-level and lower-level students is going to be quite different.Not just because the level and types of texts will vary, but because of the sense of audience.By sense of audience in this case, I mean the idea of who will be reading or listening to the student produced summaries.For a higher-level student in a EAP class, the audience is, eventually, the scholarly community which they are hoping to join.The act of developing good summary skills is necessary for them to engage in dialogue with this community.But for lower-level students, there is always the issue of who they are producing their summaries for and just what purpose a summary actual serves in communication.I’ve tried to make these summary fluency activities as conversational as possible.I’ve also tried to get students engaged in activities which will, in some way, potential impact the other students in the class.I wish I had found a better way to emphasize these points at the beginning of this process and would really appreciate any suggestions along those lines.And while I said this was going to be a 3 part series, I am planning to write one more post on summarizing.The final post will be a look at an activity to boost student autonomy around summarizing and should be a return to a more reflective practices style of post.
Hi all, A big thank you to everyone for your support over the past two years. Realizing that this blog keeps growing and that the options for making it navigable with blogger are diminishing week by week, I've moved over to WordPress. I hope this doesn't cause any unnecessary inconvenience. The original article you are looking for is below this short message. After reading, if you have a moment to check out the new (and hardly changed) "The Other Things Matter", please drop in. Would love to hear from you.
I have recently been running a series of summarizing skills building lessons for the lower-intermdiate level students in the International Course at my school.The first post can be found here. Summarizing is a complex skill which rests on students' ability to read at a fairly high level.Not only must students read and understand what they write, they also must pinpoint the main ideas and then manage to condense those ideas into a very dense form while retaining the original focus of the article (Johns, 1985).Kirkland and Saunders (1991) posit that it is perhaps the overwhelming processing requirements needed to summarize, more than any particular lack of language ability, which results in the poor quality of summaries produced by many ESL and EFL students.If you’re curious just how difficult it is, you can try the following summary evaluation activity with your students:
1.With the entire class, pick a fairy-tale or story that all the students know well.I usually use The Tortoise and the Hare.
2.As a class, construct a 10 to 15 line story, in as simple language as possible, and write it up on the board.
3.Give the students a few minutes to read the story and if possible interact with it in some way.For example, you could do a dramatic reading in which students break into small groups, take a character each (tortoise, hare, and narrator) and read the story as if it was a play.
4.Erase the story from the board, pass out some blank papers and ask the students to write a summary of the text they have been working with.Stipulate that the summary should be no longer than half as long as the text created by the class.This should give them plenty of space to produce a decent summary that covers all the main points.
If your students are anything like mine, you will find that what seems like a simple task ends up being very difficult for them, indeed.Many of my students will simply stare at that ocean of white paper in front of them and complain that they don’t know where to start.With that in mind, my summarizing lessons have focused on giving learners the tools they need to consciously break the summarizing process down into series of less complex tasks.The following are some of the activities I’ve used in class with my students over the past few weeks.
Vocabulary Check
In the previous post, I explained how I used tracing letters in place of a regular font and have students trace all the words and phrases with which they are familiar in order to check students’ vocabulary recognition of the text.When it comes to comprehension difficulties, the problems that arise from lack of basic vocabulary cannot be overstated (Masuhara, 2003, p. 344).So any work around summarizing with lower level learners should probably, by necessity, start with a way to gauge if students are having vocabulary issues.Instead of pre-teaching vocabulary, I sometimes use this part of the lesson as an opportunity to have students practice their inferencing skills.In his booklets Is a Germ Positive or Negative (n.d.a.) and Is it a bird? Is it a plane? It’s Superman! (n.d.b.) John Fanselow recommends having students highlight or underline the words and phrases they do know in a text and then to cross out, or even better completely black out, the words or phrases they do not know. This keeps students eyes focused on the parts of the text which they are familiar.By focusing on the words they know, students have a better chance at guessing the meaning of the words they do not. It’s also important to make sure students aren’t focused exclusively on individual words. If possible, try and get students thinking in larger chunks of language when engaged in this kind of work.Often it is not a particular word which is giving a student trouble, but a phrase.The other day, my students identified, “put the shapes together,” “reached out and took,” and “manage to get the job done,” as trouble spots.You can then have students compare texts and teach each other the unknown meanings, let them try and identify parts of speech and word attributes and then use their dictionaries to find the meaning, or simply tell the students the meanings yourself to save time.
Comprehension Activity
Just because a student reads a text and understands all of the words, doesn’t really prove understanding of the text.Small errors during the reading process such as misidentifying a sentence’s subject, can end up leading to large errors in overall comprehension.For lower level learners, a step to help clarify what they have read will probably be useful.You can have students read a paragraph, turn the article over, count to ten so they aren’t just relying on short term memory, and write down what they remember.They shouldn’t be overly fixated on spelling or grammar, but should just get down what stuck with them.They can repeat the process two or three times for each paragraph.As a further check, they can compare what they wrote down with a partner and see if what is leaving a strong impression with them is also what is leaving an impression with their other students in the class.It’s also a good chance for the teacher to wander around the room, check out what the students are writing, and see if or where students might be going astray.Another option is to let the students engage in a drawing transformation activity.After reading the paragraph, students can turn the paper over and draw a simple picture or two of the paragraph content.
Language Practice
When it comes to summary writing, if students don’t have a chance to work with the language in the text, chance are they will become overly-dependant on the text itself and simply lift and quote sentences.In my last post, I explained personalizing component that can be built into summarizing work.Another option is have students do some sentence manipulation work.I will often get students to simply change each statement in a paragraph into its questions form.Then, working in small groups, I will ask the students to order the questions in order of importance.In this case, importance means the question that, when answered, will provide the most amount of information contained within the target paragraph.Once students have ordered the questions, they then go around and ask their top 3 questions to other members of the class.You can repeat this step multiple times, until students have become relatively familiar with the language.Personally, I run this activity 3 times in a 4/3/2 format having students ask and answer the questions in decreasing amounts of time, each time with a different partner (Maurice, 1983.For a more in-depth look at 4/3/2 from Paul Nation, just click here) The first time through, I let the students refer to the text while answering the questions.The second time they have to produce the answers without the aid of the text.The third time, students use their cell phones to record their answers and are then directed to transcribe their answers to a piece of paper.This gives me a chance to check and see if there are any glaring errors in their production.It’s especially important as the language students used in this step of the process is going to serve as the bases for their summaries.One nice thing about this activity is that as students practice their answers to the various questions, those answers change and often times become a bit simpler than the language used in the text.Basically, they are developing the skills they will need to paraphrase parts of a text without being over-dependant on the language of the text itself.
Group Summary
Once students have the language and the basic material for their summary, they still need a chance to put the pieces together.At the lower levels, this might best be done through pair or group work.Once again, an ordering activity can be useful, in which students compare their transcripts and pick the top two sentences to use as the material for their summary of each paragraph.Another option is to have students write down the main clause of each answer and then to combine the clauses, usually reducing the number of sentences by half.
Recently I’ve gotten quite fond of an activity I call the “human word processor.”In the Human Word Processor, one student in each group serves as the 'word processor'.The rest of the students in the group give word processor commands to the human word processor, working together to edit a text until it has been winnowed down to a more concise form. You will most likely need to write up the word processing commands on the whiteboard.These can be quite simple.I usually use, “erase ~”, “insert ~ before/after …” and “exchange ~ for …”.In my summarizing classes, one student writes down all of the answers she has transcribed during the question/answer phase of the activity on the white board and then acts as the word processor. The rest of the group works together, giving commands until they are satisfied that what has been edited on the board is an accurate summary of the original text.I find it works especially well if you have two large groups, each group using half of the white board.Then, after each of the summaries is complete, you can compare the two summaries and if possible, even combine them into one large class summary.
Students Summary: Example 1
Over the course of the past three weeks I have used a number of different texts when getting students to produce summaries.One of the texts was a short story “For One Picture” This is a picture of the final summary as produced by students after the “human word processor activity”:
It’s not perfect.Students still have some issues with pronoun use and there were a few points from the story which were left out and should probably been included in a summary.But I think the board-work does show how even intermediate level students can produce a decent summary when given the chance to break summarizing down into its component parts.
Up Next
The previous post and this post contain a lot of activities to help students understand how the process of summarizing works.But students will still need a chance to practice each of the skills a number of time in order for them to attain any kind of fluency when it comes to summarizing.I don’t really want my students to have to spend 50 minutes every time they want—or have to—summarize something.In the next post I will give some ideas from my final summary practice lessons on ways to get students to produce a few summaries within one class period.I will also have a few suggestions for how to get students working in a more autonomous fashion.If any teachers out there have done summary work with lower level students, or just have some ideas about summary activities in general, I would certainly appreciate hearing them in the comments.
References:
Johns, A. (1985). “Summary Protocols of ‘underprepared’ and ‘adept’ university students: replications and distortions of the original.” Language Learning 35 (4): 495-512.
Kirkland, M. & Saunders, M. (1991). “Maximizing student performance in summary writing: managing cognitive load.” TESOL Quarterly 25 (1): 105-121.
Fanselow, J. (n.d.h). Is a germ positive or negative: limitations of understanding isolated words
Fanselow, J. (n.d.i). Is it a bird? Is it a plane? It’s Superman!: realizing how yes/no and either or questions can reveal meanings
Masuhara, H. (2003). “Materials for Developing Reading Skills.” In Developing Materials for Language Teachers, B. Tomlinson (ed.). London: Continuum Intl Pub Group.
Hi all, A big thank you to everyone for your support over the past two years. Realizing that this blog keeps growing and that the options for making it navigable with blogger are diminishing week by week, I've moved over to WordPress. I hope this doesn't cause any unnecessary inconvenience. The original article you are looking for is below this short message. After reading, if you have a moment to check out the new (and hardly changed) "The Other Things Matter", please drop in. Would love to hear from you.
A few weeks ago, I presented at the CLESOL conference in New Zealand.My talk was on a series of micro-skills building activities to help students adjust to structural differences in English aural decoding.Which is all just a fancy way of saying that I put together a set of four very short activities, run which help students listen to English a little more accurately.
When it comes to listening activities, a lot of classroom time is spent focused on what are usually called ‘top-down’ activities, or exercises that help students activate the knowledge they already have to better understand what they are listening to (Vandergrift, 2004; p.4).This usually means helping students recognize just what kind of text they are listening to (is it a speech, a casual conversation, etc.), predicting what they might hear before they start listening (will the speaker describe a process, will the description include a list of materials used in the process, etc), or teaching students to listen for specific pieces of information (on what day is the concert going to take place, what kind of presents would Jim like for his birthday, etc).However, these types of ‘top-down’ activities require that a student be able to decode the language they are listening to at a relatively high level.Unfortunately, my first year high school students do not necessarily have the basic skills they need to even to hear discreet words.Their listening skills are not quite good enough to work on these higher-level ‘top-down’ skills.In fact, focusing on predicting, listening for the gist and schema activation exercises might end up distracting lower level students from listening to sounds and building up meaning based on what they are hearing at a more basic level.Which is especially problematic when considering that high-level errors in comprehension are often the result of lower level listening errors (Fields, 2003; p. 325) such as segmenting words in the wrong place.
The four micro-skills building activities outlined in this post work together to help students develop segmenting skills, or the ability to hear when words start in spoken conversation.The activities take a total of about 10 minutes of class time during each lesson.In my school, I ran the activities during a five-week period, twelve classes in all, for a total of just under three hours of class time.
Activity 1: Loop Writing
Loop writing is an activity loosely based on some of the ideas I found on the Center for Early Language Literacy web site (http://www.earlyliteracylearning.org/index.php).The CELL activities were created for pre-literate first language learners to help them develop the skills they will need for reading and writing.I highly recommend checking out their web site, as there are quite a few ideas that I think are applicable to second language learners.In loop writing, you say a sentence at close to regular spoken speed.While listening, students draw loops for each word they hear.This is not a comprehension activity, so you will need to emphasize to students that it does not matter if they know or understand what is being said.Instead, they simple draw a loop for each word they think they hear.
Here is a short video of a student doing some loop writing:
In the video, you can see that the student is drawing very neat and even loops.It is pretty hard to convince learners to draw loops in a particular way, but I would suggest to students that they try to be as free as possible when drawing their loops.It is really not worth students using up their working memory to think about the size and shape of their loops.In fact, that is one of the underlying ideas of loop writing.It is a low stress, low cognitive load activity.Students don’t have to worry about the size and shape of letters, spacing between letters, or spacing between words、all of which take quite a bit of energy for beginning learners and make traditional dictation activities overly-stressful.And there is a certain sense of fun that goes along with drawing big loopy-loops on a piece of paper.Here is an image which is a little more in keeping with the loose feeling I was hoping the students would eventually bring to loop writing:
Now to get a taste of how it might feel for a beginning learner to try their hand at loop writing, I’ve prepared a short video of a sentence spoken in Japanese so you can try it at home yourself.
If your experience was anything like that of my students, it was probably pretty difficult. But just what makes it so difficult?Part of the problem is that Japanese sentences are not usually broken down into words, but into sentence segments. A Japanese sentence segment is a word which can stand on its own or, more typically, is a word in combination with a piece of grammar such as 'の' (pronounced ‘no’) which identifies possession.In the sentence you just heard, there were nine sentence segments.So if you managed to hear nine distinct components of the sentence, then you nailed it.In case you are wondering just what you were listening to, the sentence, translated into English is, “Ishikawa Ryo donated all of his winnings from the 2011 golf tour to the victims of the Great Tohoku Earthquake.”
If you could not here nine sentence segments, or were having trouble segmenting out any individual words at all, don’t feel bad.Here are a few images from my students’ first try at loop writing:
In fact, the mean accuracy for the first set of loop writing sentences my students did in class was 4.8 out of 11 or 43.6%.The loop writing activity serves as a pretty good, if somewhat rough, indicator of how well your learners can segment out words while listening to spoken English.During your students' first encounter with loop writing, I think it is important to explain just what makes it so difficult to hear the words that are being said.As a general rule, people listen using the skills they are trained to use when listening in their first language and make it difficult to accurately hear what is being said in a different language (Rost, p.8).The idea of sentence segments is one concrete example of structural differences in the spoken language that, when pointed out, can help students understand why they have difficulty hearing English.But any difference in structure between the L1 and English, such as stress regularly falling on a middle or last syllable, or pitch playing a prominent role in word recognition, is going to make listening to English difficult (Cutler, 1997, p.6).
Activity 2: Sense Group Identification
In the sense group identification micro-activity, I write up the number of words in a sentence as a series of numbers on the white board, one number for each word.Then I say the sentence aloud.While listening, students simply put a slash between the appropriate numbers when they hear a pause in my speech.In English, natural pauses occur once about every 12 syllables (Field, 2003, p. 327) and fall almost exclusively between sense groups.If students are actively listening for these pauses between sense groups, they are usually good at hearing them.Even during their first attempt, students in my class had a mean accuracy rate of about 75%.As opposed to developing a new skill or focusing on a new way to listen to English, this activity serves as a confidence booster by helping students to recognize that they already have an important skill they can apply when listening to English.If you look at the above image, it becomes clear that sense group recognition practice also helps students to not only hear, but to see that what sounded like a continuous line of speech, is in fact broken up into smaller chunks.By comparing the number of loops they drew with the numbers and slashes between numbers below them, students can see that they are indeed able to segment out these chunks of language without too much difficulty.
This is a video from a student during the second week of training:
You can see that the student has a lot of confidence when it comes to identifying sense groups.I especially love that little pencil flick at the end.As a side note, I would not hesitate to slightly extend the amount of time you give to your pauses.While it might seem unnatural, in actuality extended pauses, as well as including a few more pauses than usual between sense groups, is an extremely useful aid in comprehension (Rost, p. 10) and a form of foreigner speech that our students will most likely encounter often during English interactions with native speakers.Still, as learners adjust to the aural structure of English, both the number and length of pauses between sense groups can be diminished until they approach the short pauses found between every twelve or so syllables.
Activity 3: Listening for Stress
While structural differences between the L1 and L2 make lexical segmentation, or recognizing words as words, difficult in English, there is some good news.In spoken English, 90% of words are likely to start with a stressed syllable.Put a different way, "We hear six times as many lexical items beginning with strong syllables as with weak syllables. (Cutler, 1987, 1988. P. 114)"And experimental evidence shows strong support that native English speakers do in fact segment spoken English based almost entirely on recognition of stress (Cutler, 1988, 1997).John Fields has even gone so far as to state that through training students can become sensitive to, "the value of inserting word boundaries before stressed syllables. (2003, p. 329)"
But how can we help students pay more attention to stress?At first I think it is a question of just helping them recognize where stress falls within a sentence.After students have completed the sense group activity, I put a dot for each syllable in a word under the number representing the word.Students then copy the dots into their notebooks.Before saying the sentence again, I instruct the students to circle the stressed syllables in red as they listen.This is what it looks like at the end of the exercises:
Here is a video of a student during a second read of a sentence:
The students was only able to identify a few stressed syllables during the first listening and a second listening did not significantly alter her ability to identify stressed words or syllables.But while the level of accuracy at the beginning was quite low, over the course of the five weeks students were engaged in this listening practice, they did show significant improvement and there attention levels remained high.In fact, the number of non-participating students in this part of the activity was only one out of twenty-two, which is an excellent participation rate for any activity at my school, let alone an activity which is extremely challenging.In addition, even small improvements in stress recognition will potentially lead to big gains in understanding.
As you might have noticed in the video, I do overly exaggerate stress during the first few times I run this activity.While slightly unnatural, this over-stressing is in keeping with many of exercises found in AdrianUnderhill's Sound Foundations around prosody (2005).The point of the listening for stress activity, at least in the beginning, is not to train students to hear subtle levels of stress within a sentence, but simply to get them to recognize stress at all. As students become familiar with the rhythm and stress timed nature of English, you can tone down the over-stressing and speak in a more natural manner.
Activity 4: Stressed word and syllable dictation
When I started running these micro-activities, I simply wrote the sentence on the board underneath the word/syllable dots and had students copy the words from the board.As students become more comfortable writing in English and their skills developed, I decided to include a partial dictation component as a final step in the process.On the whiteboard, I wrote the unstressed syllables beneath the corresponding numbers in black and directed the students to write the missing stressed syllables or words in red.
After the exercise is complete, the black and red writing is like a stress map and a good visual aid if you want to work with your students on suprasegmentals.That is usually how I would wrap up the beginning of class.Students would say the sentences to each other, focusing on stressing the appropriate words or syllables.Sometimes, to make it a little more interesting, I would ask the students to try and stress only the words or syllables written in black.This proved to be nearly impossible and lead to a whole lot of laughter.While this post is focused on listening skills building, I think it is pretty hard to completely separate out listening from pronunciation work.One naturally leads to the next.In this case, a silly activity which gives students just a little bit of time to practice speaking with the right stress patterns can be highly beneficial.Appropriate use of stress has a major impact on word recognition ((Field, 2005) and training in prosodic features (Derwing and Rossiter, 2003) has a major impact on students English comprehensibility.
At the end of the 4 activities and 10 minutes of class time, here is what the whiteboard looks like:
Conclusion:
When I first ran these micro-activities, the students had a word recognition rate of 43.6%.During the last day when I ran the activities, the recognition rate had jumped to 96%.But I think the numbers only tell a small part of the story.Because as students confidence began to build, students general classroom behavior also began to change.Instead of ignoring instructions given in English, which was often the case before the listening training, students began to pay more attention.Sometimes I would even notice a students head bobbing up and down each time they noticed a stressed word or syllable.I think it was this change in attitude, more than any specific gains in ability, which made running these activities worthwhile for both my students and me.Because knowing how to listen is the first step towards a classroom in which each and every student is willing to put forth the effort necessary to hear what is truly being said.
Some incidental observations and points raised during the presentation:
- As I ran the activity, I once used a sentence composed of eighteen words. Almost every student in the class gave up at around the fifteen-word mark.Some of them actually set their pencils down on their desk.Perhaps there is an upper word limit for these micro-activities with beginner-level students.I would recommend watching carefully and adjusting the number of words or syllables used in the sentences so that the students, at least at the start of the training, can meet with a relatively high level of success.
- You might have noticed that the sentences I used during these activities were relatively difficult.The sentences actually come from the required course book for the English 1 class at my school.The coursebook and grammar heavy structural syllabus are both approved by the ministry of education.The students are also tested monthly on the course book material.The students must memorize large portions of the text in order to pass the tests.While I try to avoid teaching to the test, I do want to give my students a chance to pass.These micro-activities, by exposing the students sentences from the coursebook multiple times, also helped provide students with another way to interact with and memorize the material they would need in order to pass the monthly exams.
- During the third lesson, I was feeling bad about giving the students all of these difficult sentences to listen to.So for a change, I used some more basic sentences with easier vocabulary.Oddly enough, students looping ability did not improve with the simplified sentences.If fact, while the sense group results were nearly perfect, and the stress recognition level was also higher than expected, the basic looping activity was a bit lower than the previous lessons average 62% vs. 64% accuracy, even though the language was easier.Which makes me think that there might be a very real benefit to using words that are slightly above a student’s level when doing this kind of work.It has been shown that having students work with pronunciation in nonsense words or words they don't know (Hammerly, 1982) can help students avoid interference and lead to a quicker uptake of the correct pronunciation.In a similar way, perhaps working with stress patterns in sentences in which a threshold number of words are known draws too much attention to the meaning of the sentence.Students get drawn into attempting to understand what is being said and loose focus on the surface or form which is being studied.On the other hand, my advisor John Fanselow, suggested that spending a few minutes to clearly explain the meaning of the sentence before the listening activities might be another way of keeping the students focus on the structure.
Survey Results:
Over the course of the five weeks during which I ran these activities with my students, I conducted a number of surveys to gauge student interest.Below are a sampling of the students responses translated from the Japanese.
Survey 1, question 1: How did you feel about loop writing practice?
"I can't listen in time."
"I can't understand why I am doing this."
"It was very difficult"
“It was a huge pain in the ass."
Final survey, question 1: How did you feel about loop writing practice?
"I could follow along."
"It felt great.I could hear every word."
"I got better, bit by bit."
"It was a small pain in the ass."
Final survey, question 2: How did you feel about sense group recognition practice?
“It's like a game.”
“It's fun.”
"It makes it easier for me to speak, because I know I can stop talking and take a break."
Final survey, question 3: How did you feel about listening for stress?
“I still have no confidence around marking accents.”
“It's the most difficult step.”
“It helps me understand conversations sometimes when I watch an American Drama.”
“It helps me to hear the words in my head when I am reading.”
“It has really improved my pronunciation.”
REFERENCES
Center for Early Literacy Learning. 2010.Center for Early Literacy Learning. 3 July, 2012 < http://www.earlyliteracylearning.org/index.php>
Cutler, A. & Carter, D. (1987). The predominance of strong initial syllables in the English vocabulary.Computer Speech and Language, 2: 133-142.
Cutler, A. & Norris, D. (1988) The role of strong syllables in segmentation for lexical access. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 14 (1): 113-121.
Cutler, A (1997), "The comparative perspective on spoken-language processing." Speech Communication, 21: 3-15
Derwing, T. & Rossiter, M. (2003). “The effects of pronunciation instruction on the accuracy, fluency, and complexity of L2 accented speech.” Applied Language Learning 13 (1): 1-17.
Field, J. (2003).Promoting perception: lexical segmentation in L2 listening. ELT Journal, 57 (4): 325-333.
Field, J. (2004). An insight into listeners' problems: too much bottom-up or too much top-down? System, 32 (1): 363-377
Field, J. (2005). Intelligibility and the listener: the role of lexical stress. TESOL Quarterly, 39 (2): 399-423
Nation, I.S.P. & Newton, J. (2009). Teaching ESL/EFL Listening and Speaking. Routledge: New York.
Rost, M. (2001) "Listening." In R. Carter & D. Nunan (Eds.), The Cambridge Guide to Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (pp. 7-13).Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press
Underhill, A. (2005). Sound Foundations. Oxford: Macmillan.
Vandergrift, L. (2004) "Listening to Learn or Learning to Listen?" Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 24 pp. 3-25
