DISCOVERY LISTENING

Improving students' word recognition through intensive exposure to authentic spoken texts

Imagine…

• A student is listening to a recording in class. • The speaker says: “I won’t go to London.”

• A student interprets this as: “I want to go to London”.

What is the source of this error?

“[This student] is making a small mistake based on phoneme discrimination. But this mistake may impact upon the interpretation of what comes next, and…the text as a whole.” (325)

“We should view the principal aim of a full-length listening session as diagnostic. It should provide us with insights into where understanding has broken down – insights which we can then follow up with small-scale remedial exercises which aim to prevent errors of interpretation (especially low-level [i.e. word recognition]) from occurring again.” (326)

(Field, John, 2003. ‘Promoting perception: lexical segmentation in L2 listening’. ELT Journal, Vol. 57/4. Emphasis added.)

A need for an approach to teaching listening which:

1. engages and challenges all students;

2. motivates students to listen multiple times;

3. gets students interested in transcript analysis;

4. and provides insight into the problems students have understanding spoken English.

Discovery Listening• “‘Discovery listening’ is a conscious reaction against the

dominant approach in recent years in both EFL theory and in practice.” (335)

• “Many published textbooks have tended to rely on practising comprehension (or simply testing it)…rather than teaching something that might improve students’ performance.” (335)

• “…in general, as long as the level of the text is appropriate, [Discovery Listening] seems to satisfy a basic human instinct towards problem solving…” (341)

(Wilson, Magnus, 2003. ‘Discovery listening – improving perceptual processing’. ELT Journal, Vol. 57/4.)

Ok, fine but can you just tell us what ‘Discovery Listening’ is?

What did the students think of the recording?

• “It was quite easy to understand except for some words – ‘aunt’ or ‘then’ even though these are not much difficult words. The topic was interesting and the interview way – son to his mother – as well.”

• “This recording is better than the usual ones with actors. Here was a real conversation between 2 native-speakers. And so we get use to the usual speed of which people are speaking.”

• “The recording in general was not so difficult to understand but as soon as we had to pay attention to the details it got more difficult. I think the mother was easier to understand than the son because she spoke more clearly.”

• “The conversation was interesting because it was a rather personal topic. For me it was a good exercise because it was real and not simplified for students.”

What did the students dislike about the activity?

• “When I try to fill the gaps, I’m thinking to make correct sentence. But sometimes they are using imperfect sentence. Then, I’m confused a little bit.”

• “Sometimes it is difficult for me to understand when they ‘swallow’ some words but otherwise it was a good exercise.”

• “Could start to be boring when the recording is too long.”

• “I didn’t like the fact that we had to wright all the text script because it’s a bit long. I think that when there is some blanks in text it’s better.”

What did the students like about the activity?

• “A positive aspect is that you really pay attention to this particular conversation and the words in detail! I like the activity, I could see where I had difficulties in understanding and where it wasn’t a problem.”

• “You really focus on the listening and not on the questions you have to answer.”

• “This exercise was good because it trained our listening capacities, and it’s really good to work in groups, because you can have opposite opinion of what you hear and discuss it.”

• “Team play was helpful as well. If I did it alone, I couldn’t have understood well or needed a lot of time.”

This is the last slide

Thanks for coming and enjoy the rest of the PD Fest!

Kelly Edwards asks her mother, Judy Allen, this question: “Describe a memory when you felt independent and empowered.”

(1:08)

(from storycorps.org)

Judy: I think the most empowered I’ve ever felt in my life was when my philandering husband told me he was going to work and I suddenly realised he had gone to be with his girlfriend. I went to where she was staying and found his car parked in front of her house, got a great big rock about as big as a bowling ball from somebody’s garden and heaved it through the back window of his car.

Intermediate level difficulties

view

organisefriendlyis going

car park ????? lockboring

Judy: I think the most empowered I’ve ever felt in my life was when my philandering husband told me he was going to work and I suddenly realised he had gone to be with his girlfriend. I went to where she was staying and found his car parked in front of her house, got a great big rock about as big as a bowling ball from somebody’s garden and heaved it through the back window of his car. That was wonderful. It felt great. And then I started divorce proceedings…Years later, he ca he sent me a message somehow and told me that he still had some stuff of mine, books and things that, if I was ever travelling in Alaska, I should stop by and pick them up. And I was doing a business trip to Alaska so I went up there, made an appointment, went to see him in his office, and he handed me a very heavy box and said, “There’s a lot of heavy stuff, books and stuff, in there.” And so I dragged it and shlepped it through airports all the way home, god it was heavy, and I got home and opened it and i nothing in it but that rock which he had saved all those years.

Higher Int/Advanced level difficultiesI ever felt

?????

he caught

sort of like hand

car park

Intermediate class

Problem area TranscriptStudents’ interpretation

Individual phonemes

rock lock

philandering friendly

bowling boring

be with view

Connected speechwork and I suddenly organised

about as big as a ????

Auxiliary verbs was going is going

Word endings car parked car park

Higher intermediate/Advanced class

Problem area TranscriptStudents’

interpretation

Connected speech

said there’s a lot of sort of like

about as big as a ????

Auxiliary verbs I’ve ever felt I ever felt

Word endings

car parked car park

he handed he hand

False starts he ca he sent he cut/he caught