Task 5 - Position Paper -- Group THREE - 2011 CEI course

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Date Posted: 12:36:14 03/14/11 Mon
Author: Caroline
Subject: Task 5 - Position Paper

Task 5 – Group 3
Position Paper About Three Listening Activities
Caroline de Souza Amaral Duarte

The first listening activity I would like to talk about is the one of the following link: http://www.esl-lab.com/like1/like1.htm. I think this website (www.esl-lab.com) is really interesting. The activities contained there have a lot of strengths and few weaknesses. This activity, specifically, is called DVD Movie Rentals. Before going to the listening itself, the activity gives a Pre-Listening Exercise. This exercise helps the student to have background knowledge about the subject that is going to be broached in the listening. In the text Strategies for Developing Listening Skills, the author says that one basic step to extract meaning from a listening text is to “activate background knowledge of the topic in order to predict or anticipate content and identify appropriate listening strategies.” (http://www.nclrc.org/essentials/listening/stratlisten.htm) The topic of the listening, as mentioned above, is Renting DVDs. To anticipate the content, the first exercise proposes to write down the kinds of movies that exists and to discuss the preferences concerning them (like, don’t like, hate, can’t stand, love, etc). Doing so, the students will be more prepared to listen to the audio then. However, just one thing that we can say that was missing is to ask students to make inferences about what they were going to listen to. This is also a good way to create background knowledge (asking them to make inferences).
The second exercise proposed in this first listening activity is the listening itself. The student presses the button “play” and listens to it. There is also a multiple-choice quiz for the student to answer while listening to the audio. This exercise, in my opinion, was not so well planned. If I were the author of it, I would let the students listen to the audio first, and only then would I ask them to answer to the multiple-choices questions. As for me, I guess the person has to concentrate, in first place, in the sentences he is listening to. If he has to divide his attention, doing other exercises during the listening, the perception of it will not be as good as it could be.
The author of this listening activity also proposes some follow-up exercises. There are three: Vocabulary Activities, Post-Listening Exercises and Online Investigation. These kinds of exercises are efficient, as the text Strategies for Developing Listening Skills states: “Check comprehension while listening and when the listening task is over. Monitoring comprehension helps students detect inconsistencies and comprehension failures, directing them to use alternate strategies.” Alice Chiu (2006), another author that proposes some strategies for teaching listening, suggested that these follow-up activities could be: writing activities, role-playing, more listening, etc. The Vocabulary Activities of this site, particularly, aimed to help students dealing with the new vocabulary contained in the listening.
There are many exercises there that work in this way (Multiple-Choice and Short-Answer Questions, Mixed-Up Sentence, Sentence and Vocabulary Matching, Text Completion Quiz – this last one, includes a kind of dictation, which is a good way to work with the listening, according to Alice Chiu). In the Post-Listening exercise, the person is supposed to compare his own preferences with the ones of the person speaking in the audio (and write some sentences expressing these differences). In the Online Investigation Exercise, by its turn, the student has to research two online movie rental services and compare them in terms of price, service, movie selection, and delivery. Then the student has to discuss the findings (orally), that is, there is some speaking exercise as a follow-up activity.
I would use this first listening activity mentioned above, since it has more strengths than weaknesses (listed above).
The second listening activity chosen by me is the following: http://www.eslpod.com/website/show_podcast.php?issue_id=9963088#. The topic of the listening is Having Problems Concentrating. The first weaknesses that I found were: the text of the listening is too long (more than 17 minutes, because it includes the conversation itself and other comments about it), the student may not be prepared for this format of listening (it is a Podcast – the teacher has to work with this format before, otherwise students would get lost during the listening), and the topic is not so interesting. The student has three hyperlinks to click on: The one that goes to the written text of the listening, the one that is called “Listen” and the other one that is called “Learning Guide”. If the student chooses the first link, he will see the written text while he is listening to the audio. In my opinion, this is not a benefit, because this activity is supposed to work with the listening skill and not the reading skill. It doesn’t mean that the written text cannot be presented afterwards, but working with it at the same time of the listening could harm the students in a certain way.
Other weaknesses are: the speed and idiomatic speech. The speed of the text is very slow, whereas there are many idiomatic expressions. If it was an activity for a student of basic level, it indeed must have a slow pace. However, a student of a basic level doesn’t know many idiomatic expressions. This activity is too controversial. And these weaknesses listed can certainly interfere with the listening comprehension, in consonance with Alice Chiu (2006). Additionally, we could also say that this activity doesn’t give background knowledge to the student, that is, it doesn’t discuss the topic first, it doesn’t describe the context, it doesn’t ask the student to predict or brainstorm about it, etc. The author discusses about the topic but after the listening and not before it. As said before (about the first listening activity chosen), this kind of background knowledge is important considering that it can help overcome the difficulties related to the activity.
Concerning the follow-up activities, the person has to become a member of the site in order to download the Learning Guide of this activity. This can be an obstacle, since some students don’t have enough money to become a member of the site (it is 10 dollars per month). The teacher can do this (become a member to download the activity for the student); nevertheless, if the student wants to practice at home, accessing different activities, he will not be able, since he doesn’t have the membership. Even for the teacher, it can constitute a drawback, because many resource sites have this kind of policy if you want to download activities (if the teacher becomes a member of all of them, he has to spend a lot of money).
This activity also has strengths. One of them is that the Learning Guide must be a very good tool to learn (since you have to pay for it). Another one is that the student can access the written text. Some sites don’t give the transcription of the audio and it’s bad, because it’s important to take a look at it afterwards. Concluding, though this activity has more weaknesses than strengths, it’s not that bad to discard it. If I had the chance to become a member of this site, I would give it a try.
The third listening activity I am going to analyze is the following: http://www.manythings.org/repeat/. I would like to start saying that I would never use it with my students. For me, it cannot be considered a listening activity but a repetition activity (it’s a drill exercise and not a listening one). Here is just a little part of it:
Listen and Repeat to Learn Verb Conjugation and Pronunciation
Try listening to this podcast a few times every day for one week.

have has had had
say says said said
do does did done

see saw seen
make made made
find found found
know knew known
get got gotten
go went gone
write wrote written
think thought thought
come came come
The purpose of a listening activity is to give students the chance to encounter a real conversation, dialogue, or speech. Giving students simple verbs and their conjugation will not enable them to become better listeners or speakers of a language. The entire activity keeps giving the students some verbs, their conjugation and pronunciation. According to Alice Chui (2006), “listening is considered to involve the active selecting and interpreting of information coming from auditory clues so that a listener can identify what is happening and what is being expressed.” Repeating verbs does not give students the opportunity to interpret information, because the information is already given explicitly to them.
This listening activity doesn’t have strengths, in my conception. If it was a grammar activity, maybe it would work. I am saying “maybe” because I don’t believe that any kind of repetition can help the student in some way.
Finally, I would like to quote a Strategies for Developing Listening Skills paragraph (http://www.nclrc.org/essentials/listening/stratlisten.htm) in order to support my ideas: “Language learning depends on listening. Listening provides the aural input that serves as the basis for language acquisition and enables learners to interact in spoken communication.”

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