Week 3: Some listening reflections!
(2nd part)
After all the reading and very helpful, interesting and extensive material involved in this third week of the “Webskills” course, I would like to mention this particular extract I found while reading, which lead me to some reflections:
"Listening exercises are most effective if they are constructed round a task. That is to say, the students are required to do something in response to what they hear that will demonstrate their understanding." Ur (1984:25).
The very best quality of a teacher is the ability of giving his or her students the best information in a way that they won't miss a thing, leading them to assimilate and learn for life. Besides the performance of the teacher in front of their students, for them to have an adequate learning process, it is also very important that teachers have the proper material while teaching the aspect of the language they want to teach.
Teachers can use the exact material they need in their classes only after studying and evaluating closely the needs of their students which is not easy but definitely not impossible either. I think many teachers, including myself, go through the fact that we have to use the material that is somehow imposed by the workplace, and this material can be sometimes very aligned to the factual needs of our students, and some other times this material has to suffer some modifications in order to serve the best to the participants inside the classroom.
Most of the time, the students that I teach practice with books that are based on content; in the classes the students review a lesson or module which is oriented to a specific topic generally of social interest, everything they read in the lesson is inspired in that topic, and the grammar or vocabulary they have to learn is implicit in the activities the book uses to introduce and present this topic.
Teaching with material that is based on content is really useful for students; they find the idea of learning English using the language they sometimes see in other contexts like TV, internet and/or movies really interesting. Sometimes the books present topics that are taken from real everyday news which make the learners become interested while learning the language.
The use of authentic material or material that is based on content also has its cons that teachers have to take into consideration. Material about topics that are very fashionable in a moment could not be very interesting for the students when those topics are not very fashionable any more. In such case, the teacher has to be aware of this, and replace that material for new and fresh content, which requires extra time and work.
Another challenge that teachers face when they use books based on content comes up when their students are limited to the hour of class to practice their English. The authentic material or material based on content generally changes very fast throughout the book, making it harder for students to easily remember the grammar or vocabulary when they are also limited of practice time.
Once I have, or any teacher has managed to cope with the cons and taken advantage of the pros of the material mentioned before is when we all have to try and find new sources of material to use. A field that has been proven to be of great interest to most of the students is that related to technology. It would be nice to find more "techno active" material in more schools and institutions where English is taught; this could be either material that involves topics related to technology or material that is taught through technological devices. I think this would make the students more active and interested in English, even those who have low motivation or for whom English is a bit harder than the rest. Of course, teachers have to be aware of the fact that some students may be a bit more advanced in their knowledge of technology use, in this case, teachers have to give an extra effort in learning and then in teaching, and students have to be able to let the English learning process set place in their everyday life.
These first weeks of the “Webskills” course, specifically the third one in which we are and it’s about to end, has given me some things to think about and conclude after the readings and material involved in it, since it has been very helpful to improve the way we see and teach listening in the classrooms. First of all, it is always very important to identify some possible sources of listening material so we can be up-to-date with the topics we use to teach. It is also very important for teachers to understand two things: first, there are different types of listening for the variety of listeners there can be in a classroom, and second, it is necessary to evaluate the pros and cons of the listening material that is going to be used in class, especially if it is material based on content or authentic material, in such cases teachers have to apply different techniques for the also different listening genres. Last but not least, technology, multimedia, video and any other kind of device related to new resource for teaching should be very welcomed in an English learning class to offer students the opportunity of achieving their goal, which is learning English, using tools that are more common and appealing for them.
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