Hello, I work for Kentucky Adult Education in Frankfort and I have had a Director from one our counties ask if we have any lessons or curriculum on teaching adult education students "listening skills." I never really thought about that particular subject area but it really makes a lot of sense to me. Learning to listen is a skill that most of us need to work on :) I would include myself in the list on needing to improve my listening skills. If you have any information I would be very grateful. When I "googled" listening skills I recieved a lot of advertisements and no academic reference.
Comments
Yes, listening is huge! We listen more than we speak, read, or write, every day. Some resources to get started on include the following:
1. For background on listening skills - the lincs reviewed resource Facilitating Adult English Language Learners' Listening and Speaking Skills: reviewed at : http://lincs.ed.gov/professional-development/resource-collections/profile-485
download it at :http://www.cal.org/caelanetwork/pdfs/LearnerInteractionsFinalWeb.pdf
2. For more background: Applying Research Findings to Instruction for Adult English Language Students: reviewed at http://lincs.ed.gov/professional-development/resource-collections/profile-337
dowload at http://www.cal.org/caela/esl_resources/briefs/apply.pdf Of special interest is the section on the value of pair work to improve both listening and speaking skills, discussed on page 3:
""Students seem to enjoy pair work more on their own. It offered the most opportunity for off-task conversation and led them into broader topics. It gave them problem-solving opportunities with their peers because I was not interfering. Students helped each other with pronunciation, word meaning, and questions for clarification. It gave them active listening practice"
3. Another resource in the LINCS Portal is Evidence-based Student-Centered Instructional Practices. Briefly, speaking of strategies to teach, it says
"Skilled listeners make predictions while listening; listen selectively for particular words, phrases, or idea units; monitor their comprehension; and use a variety of clues to infer the meaning of unknown words"
You an dowload the brief at http://www.cal.org/caelanetwork/pdfs/EvidenceBasedFinalWeb.pdf. review is at http://lincs.ed.gov/professional-development/resource-collections/profile-486.
4. Finally, I would check out LINCs resource Promoting Learner Engagement When Working with Adult English Langauge Learners. This resource talks about the value of doing projects and having the students solve problems to build their listening skills.
So that's the theory with some practice. What do others of your recommend? What do you use in your classrooms to build your students' listening skills?
Miriam
Thank you, Miriam and Daryl for your recommendations! This is a great start for me as I go into the summer and prepare for next year's PD series with my teachers where we'll be looking at the four language skills! And thank you, Donna, for starting the group.
Donna,
Such a great question about the role of listening skills in developing reading comprehension.
Miriam's suggestions for resources make good sense. I'll offer a couple other thoughts.
First, when I checked a couple research to practice documents, I didn't find much guidance from the research literature. I'll check some other sources though too. I do recall from one of our studies that language comprehension proficiency was another route for some learners' reading comprehension. That is, we found a link between auditory working memory and language comprehension that contributed uniquely to readers' reading comprehension. This path was different from the other reading components contribution (e.g., phonemic awareness, decoding, vocabulary, and fluency).
The second point which is probably of more immediate interest is that you might look at materials that develop individuals' note taking skills. While you're not asking your learners to take notes, the note taker (e.g., in a classroom or on the job training) has the same issue of developing an understanding of the topic and organizing the information in a manner that facilitates learning and recall.
Hope that points you in a direction for your instructor. I'll do a little more checking though too. I'll bet that some of our community members have direct experience with teaching note taking skills in their study skills classes like in a community or technical college.
Here's the citation for the research that I was mentioning above regarding the alternate path to reading comprehension. Mellard, D., Fall, E., & Woods, K. (2010). A path analysis of reading comprehension for adults with low literacy. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 43(2), 154-165.
Regards,
Daryl
Reading and Writing community moderator
Hi Donna, and all, Yes, listening skills are foundational to language learning and lead to improving speaking, reading and writing. Listening skills are what we focus on initially when learning a new language. For intermediate learners on up, I often have students keep a "listening log." They are expected to listen to something outside of class. For instance, they can listen to a TV show, a podcast, a song, a commercial, a movie, a conversation they overheard on the bus or one they participated in. They choose one word or phrase they heard and write it in their listening log. They also write an explanation for the word or expression. They can ask someone to explain the word or look it up in a dictionary. They then write a sentence using the word or expression making a personally meaningful connection.
When students come to class, they share their new expression with a partner and explain the meaning -- in essence, teaching the word to another student.. They also tell a bit about the context where they heard the word. In my experience, students have been strongly motivated to share their words/expressions with partners since they were able to choose the words from contexts that were meaningful to them. It has been really interesting to see the words that students select. They are very often idioms since we use idiomatic language so often in speaking.
I wonder if any other community members have used learning logs for listening. If so, please tell us how this has worked for you. What other techniques work well for teaching listening skills?
Cheers, Susan
Moderator, Assessment CoP
Hi Donna,
To develop listening skills among ELL students, use dictation in class, in which you read a short story and they have to write what you say.
This can be very difficult for ELL's. If they are beginners, start with individual words, then move on to phrases, then on to sentences, and
finally to a paragraph or short story. In my classes, I might start with 10 words and then, to correct them, I have students come to the board
and write what they thought I have said. Other students can offer suggestions to the one at the board, so it becomes a team effort. After
a while, the students like it because it's like a game to them and they get better and better at it.
One listening resource that may help teachers is a set of "Listening Content Standards" that can be found on the CASAS website. (CASAS is one of three adult education assessments approved by the Florida Department of Education for testing adult ESOL students. The others are BEST Plus/BEST Literacy and TABE CLAS-E.)
I see this set of listening standards as a handy tool that can be useful for teachers as they plan lessons on listening at various skill levels. The document can be found at this link on the CASAS website: https://www.casas.org/product-overviews/curriculum-management-instruction/casas-basic-skills-content-standards
It covers six skill areas and has a total of 65 statements:
L1 Phonology (7)
L2 Vocabulary (9)
L3 Grammar (14)
L4 General Discourse (12)
L5 Informational Discourse (10)
L6 Strategies and Critical Thinking (13)
Here is a sample statement from the Phonology area that CASAS has designated as ESL Levels 5/High Intermediate and 6/Advanced:
L1.6 Recognize location of stress in multi-syllable words (e.g., My áddress is 312 Date Street. vs. Please addréss this envelope.)
Here is a sample from the Grammar area that CASAS has designated as ESL Levels 3/High Beginning, 4/Low Intermediate, and 5/High Intermediate.
ACRONYMS:
BEST = Basic English Skills Test
CASAS = Complete Adult Student Assessment System
TABE CLAS-E = Tests of Adult Basic Education Comprehensive Language Assessment System - English
Phil Anderson, Adult ESOL Program Specialist, Florida Department of Education
Phil,
Thank you for connecting common assessments in our programs with the standards that are in the framework connecting the two (skills and the assessment). That's another great way to be more explicit about our intent for instruction. We can improve our outcomes if we are very deliberate about linkages among the goal setting, instructional practices, and curricular decisions and then that alignment with the assessments we use for placement and progress monitoring (formative assessment). I appreciate that you made this important connection for us.
I've pursued another resource for developing listening skills and comprehension.
I recommend that those instructors who are interested to consider the Listening and Note-taking strategy developed by Gwen Berry, Don Deshler, and Jean Schumaker. The manual (2011) provides an instructional strategy that learners use to improve their listening and note-taking and then use of their notes in preparing for a test. I imagine that the more formal the instructional setting, the more application one might find for the strategies such as in high schools, community colleges, developmental classes, and technical classes. The research evidence is pretty impressive. In the development research that Gwen conducted, students made substantial gains in their skills at identifying main ideas and key words. This research was done in a social studies class with students in general education and students with disabilities. Both groups made substantial improvements, which is even more impressive.
The Listening and Note-taking instructional manual does have a cost ($18.50 plus shipping) but then it is not a student consumable material. Teachers in a center could certainly share the material, if that fit. Here's a link to the website for additional details: http://sim.kucrl.org/products/details/listening-and-note-taking
One other thought to consider is that by focusing on keywords, the instructor also has an opportunity to provide another context of teaching vocabulary that would support students' text reading. While we are generally pretty successful with developing decoding and fluency and even reading comprehension strategies, expanding readers' vocabulary is extremely difficult. Here's another approach to make progress in this vocabulary component.
Best,
Daryl
Reading and Writing moderator
Well low and behold, look at what was recently published: "Listening strategy use and influential factors in Web-based computer assisted language learning."
The article appeared in the Journal of Computer Assisted Learning (2014), 30, 207–219 and written by L. Chen, R. Zhang & C. Liu.
The short story of this exploratory research is that the researchers described the strategies (cognitive, meta-cognitive, and affective) that English language learners were employing in their on-line instruction. Differences were noted depending on the learners' characteristics such as motivation, learning style, and levels of anxiety.
An instructor might find this article of interest for several reasons. For example, the authors describe the variations in strategies, which could be informative in working with their learners. Since the connection is also made to motivation and anxiety, one could use such information in a positive manner for individualizing more of the instruction for the learner.
Last, the study used a number of learner completed survey measures that instructors may want to incorporate into their learner orientation activities. The results could be helpful in discussing individual differences and that learners not only have different skill levels, they are likely to progress at different rates and benefit from different instructional approaches. The goal of the instructor is to find the optimal instructional formula for each learner.
OK, it's Friday afternoon and someplace some weekend music is cranking up. Hope you have a great weekend.
Regards,
Daryl
Reading and Writing community coordinator