While - Listening activities

While-Listening Activities Adapted by Peggy Marcy, Professor at Cal State Univ San Bernardino from J.J. Wilson's textbook, "How to Teach Listening" This is the second video in a three-part series about listening activities. The first video looked at some issues connected to pre-listening. This video will explore while-listening activities. Research suggests that the most effective way to learn how to listen is to do something with the information received while listening. Having a purpose for listening and needing to use the information resembles authentic listening and makes it easier for students to meet a goal. Also, it talks about not repeating the listening so often that the students get bored with it. Listening activities while-listening are important for several reasons. Probably the most significant is that when you design the activity correctly, it assists the student in their comprehension. Furthermore, it helps them learn skills for authentic listening outside the classroom -- especially helping them recognize what they need to focus on. Another huge reason is that teachers are able to diagnose where the weaker listening skills are for a student when the student is asked to do something with the listening. Instructors need some evidence of what is happening internally when a learner is listening. To get that evidence, teachers can ask for productive responses or recognition responses. Recognition usually just requires checking off topics that are heard or answering discrete item questions like multiple-choice or true-false. It could also be something like arranging pictures in the order of the story. Productive responses are more difficult because they involve more cognitive thinking and can involve other skills like writing and speaking. For example, you may ask students to listen to an anecdote and then summarize it to a partner. If there appear to be issues with their summary, the teacher needs to decide if the issue was mishearing part of the story or not having the correct vocabulary in their second language to produce a proper summary. Of course, maybe the problem is not having good memory recall. When I ask students to draw part of the story they heard, I need to assure them that I will not be grading the quality of their drawing. I am checking to see if they comprehended what they heard. So, production activities need to focus on the listening comprehension aspect of the production. Alright, this has been a short video about the importance of listening activities and the two broad types of activities. The next video will look at post-listening activities.