By Heather May
Since attending the MPAEA conference last year, listening has been on my mind. We had been planning to add the listening portion of the TABE Class E as another growth measurement for our adult EL students at the Bismarck Adult Learning Center, so I attended a session about increasing rigor in the area of listening, utilizing training and lessons from LINCS to see what approach I should take to lesson planning. A fair number of educators in the room had difficulty performing the listening tasks the facilitators demonstrated! The session was a real eye-opener in terms of the listening skills our students must develop if any form of higher education is one of their goals.
However, for many of our students, their goals are to acquire English for everyday interactions in the community, at work, or in their child’s school. I reflected on my own language learning when I lived in China, how I absorbed most vocabulary related to what I cared about (food), and specifically, my listening skills. I achieved the most growth in listening during my third year, but found it frustrating that I couldn’t prove it; I was understanding far more about what I was hearing around me, but still didn’t have the vocabulary to express my understanding with a spoken response. My own experience, coupled with the majority of our students’ needs, has led me to lesson plan with rigor in mind, but with everyday language as the content.
Listening Best Practices
Reflecting and planning for listening throughout this academic year has also kept some best practices for listening foremost in mind. I’ve listed some of them below. What might you add?
- Speak slowly and clearly enunciate when delivering instruction or directions.
- Speak at a more regular pace and style during practice and conversations.
- Check for student understanding then repeat and paraphrase as needed.
- Allow adequate, possibly even uncomfortable, wait time for students to formulate answers. Valuable processing is occurring in the silences.
- Choose listening passages that are at the students’ reading level.
- Provide opportunities for students to listen to voices other than yours, whether through paired conversations, having tutors or other teachers present, or recordings.
- Provide a variety of content and interest-based listening opportunities such as songs, movie clips, news casts, and interviews.
Heather May is an instructor at the Bismarck Adult Learning Center in Bismarck, ND.
