Autonomous Listening and Speaking

Autonomous usage of language skills is the top of the mountain called “Language Learning”. When we talk about autonomous listening and speaking we mean an ability to communicate orally with other people to solve one’s problems and satisfy one’s needs (first with peers, and then outside the classroom) by means of the language, from ordering a cup of coffee to discussing work issues with a boss. Learners achieve autonomous listening and speaking when they are able to do everything, they practiced during their task-based English classes, without a teacher’s scaffolding and support.

Pre, While and Post-Listening Activities

Pre-listening activities

My favourite pre-listening activities are based on brainstorming. Actually there are dozens of ways we can use this technique in the EAL environment. Students may generate ideas on their own and then share them with others; students may work in small groups and create mind maps; students may call out ideas for the teacher to write them down on the board. It’s also interesting to use SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats), which usually reveals ideas learners may not be aware before. Adding attribute change to the brainstorming process leads to brand new ideas, for example, learners think about how they would deal with the problem, if it took place in a different time period (100 years ago) or in a different place (another country).

A great way to activate learners’ schemata is to add visuals to pre-listening stage of the lesson. Learners look at the pictures related to the listening text and try to make guesses about the main topic or about what is going on in the picture. The teacher can also use learners’ imagination and ask them to close their eyes and to create mental pictures related to the topic of the listening text, and then to share them with others.

My students always enjoy group drawing activities. They take turns to draw something on the whiteboard (usually I write down elements to draw on the slips of paper) and at the end we get a complete picture related to the topic of the text.

It is very motivating when the teacher brings realia to the class: from personal photos to soda cans. I like the idea, suggested by J.J.Wilson, to bring in objects that form part of a story for learners to guess what the listening text is about. I’d like to develop this idea: in advance, the teacher may ask each student to bring in one particular object (related to the text). Students do not know the purpose of bringing this object and they have no idea what other students will bring (the teacher may assign objects via email). During the pre-listening stage learners demonstrate their objects to the class and tell few words about in what situations people usually use them. And then they discuss how all these realia relate to the text.

There are numerous pre-listening activities based on using texts and words: various gap-filling activities; key words activities, etc. The teacher suggests a list of key words and learners in small groups make short stories using these words (it’s also a way of pre-teaching vocabulary). After listening to the text learners compare whose suggestion is the closest to the listening text. Likewise learners may be given a title of the text.

While-listening activities
 

While-listening activities vary depending on what learner’s skill or ability the teacher would like to practice. 

When students are required to listen for gist, they are asked some basic questions What? Who? Why?

When they listen for details, they practice selective listening: an ability to ignore most of what we hear and focus only on what is relevant. Among such type of activities I want to point out writing down some specific information (dates, numbers, etc.) and spotting the difference (learners look at a picture and listen to its description and spot any differences). Another activity I like is listening to directions and tracing the route on the map. Or students can complete a diagram or drawing based on what they hear.

An important and useful skill to practice while listening is inferring, a thinking skill in which we make deductions by going beyond what is actually stated. For this purpose the teacher can pause the recording from time to time and asks students what they think will come next and why. It can be quite a distracting activity though.

Post-listening activities

First of all, post-listening activities are oriented to check the degree of comprehension of the text. I think almost every teacher uses summarizing for this purpose. To add some fun to the process of summarizing the teacher can ask learners to create a group summary. 

Secondly, we need post-listening activities to arouse a discussion and make a transition to speaking activities. The teacher can ask learners to personalize the problem touched upon in the text (What would you do in this situation?), to dwell upon pros and cons, to agree or disagree with some statements related to the text, etc.

Building the Writing Habit

Harmer Jeremy pointed out a number of engaging and effective activities focused on building the writing habit. Here, I’d like to list the ideas I will definitely use with my EAL learners and I also want to add a few more activities I find interesting for this purpose (they are in cursive).

a. Sentence-Writing

- Dictating sentence for completion, this activity is also called Half Dictation: the teacher starts a sentence and learners are supposed to complete it.

- A Postcard from Somewhere: first learners fill in a small questionnaire (they name a country, an animal, a place, an adjective and so on) and after that their answers are pasted into the prepared in advance text of the letter. As a result, learners have a lot of fun (“I went to the zoo to see the rare and round Chinese cat. It was tasty!”)

- Creative writing prompts (the weirdest dream you've had; imagine you're a chef... what type of restaurant would you open and why?)

b. Using Music

- Words (write word associations while listening to music)

- Film scores (describe a film scene while listening to music)

c. Using Pictures

- Describing pictures/photos

- Suspect and objects (each learner describes a random picture, than all pictures are mixed and peers are to guess a picture by reading descriptions)

- Write the postcard (based on the picture)

- Portraits (write a letter to the person on the portrait, write day in life)

- Stories (write a story about the picture)

d. Writing Poems

- Acrostic poems (first letters of each line form a word)

- Model poems (using the same poetic forms, models)

- Poems with rhymes (each learner makes sentences ending with a certain word; these words rhyme with each other)

e. Collaborative Writing

- Writing a story sentence by sentence

- Dictogloss (write the text after listening to it)

- First lines, last lines (story writing is provoked by giving first line/last line)

- Story circle (each learner writes a sentence on the top of a sheet of paper, than folds it so that the next writer can’t read it and passes it to the next learner, who writes the second sentence of the story. )

- The story circle may be combined with “Dictating sentence for completion”. For example, the teacher may start each sentence and learners are to finish it with their ideas (Last Thursday…; But suddenly …; It turned out that …)

f. Writing in Groups and Pairs

- Pen pals, emails, live chats (interacting with native speakers or English learners all over the world)

- Learners may also choose some forums (interesting for the) or social network groups and participate in discussions there.

Teaching Reading: What, Why and How

We all know that “reading plays an important role in life. So what stands behind this phrase for adult EAL learners? Reading skills give EAL learners access to endless information encoded in written English texts and documents. And the master of the information is the master of the situation. So for adult EAL learners reading is not just one of four language modalities to be improved, it is the way to survive and to integrate successfully into Canadian society.

In order to make a reading lesson effective and meaningful the teacher should answer the following questions: what to read? why to read this? and how to read this?

What… The process of selecting reading texts should be focused on learners needs. The teacher should think about types of texts learners might need to read outside the classroom; learners’ language level and prior knowledge; learners’ interests, etc.

Why… There are dozens of reasons for reading in our life: from getting information to interacting with others, from reading for knowledge to reading for pleasure. In the EAL classroom the teacher should always know the answer to the question “Why do learners need to read this text?”, because it is a key to arousing learners’ motivation. In other words, adult learner will do only those things they find meaningful and applicable. For example, a class of newcomers will prefer reading job postings, while EAP learners will choose scientific articles.

How… Reading skills should not be limited by bottom-up reading. The teacher’s task is to show learners various ways of getting main ideas of texts. Learners should be taught not just to read, but to read fluently and to comprehend. For this purpose the EAL instructor should integrate pre-reading, while-reading and post-reading activities into reading lessons.

Pre-reading activities activate learners’ prior knowledge and allow to pre-teach vocabulary and concepts. Among pre-reading activities I’d like to point out brain-storming and mind-mapping. I think this stage must be active and noisy and somehow engage all learners. A lot of EAL games can be used to pre-teach vocabulary or to revise grammatical structures. Students in small groups can make presentations of “movie trailers”. The teacher can even organize “suggestions auction” and learners can “bid” this or that hypothesis related to the text.

While-reading activities allow learners to practice top-down reading strategies and improve their comprehending skills. By the way, the majority of tasks in the Reading section of IELTS test are based on while-reading strategies. Examples of while-reading activities may include: choosing a title for each passage, completing various charts and diagrams while reading, deciding whether the statement is true or false, filling in various forms and questionnaires, etc.

During post-reading activities learners can apply their critical thinking skills and analyze the information they have just received. The teacher can organize debates, can invite a guest speaker related to topics discussed in the text, learners may recollect main facts as a group, learners may reproduce the text from somebody’s point of view (for example, if the text was a medication specification, learners my act a role play between a pharmacist and a customer), etc.