Notes reading and listening
A few notes on teaching reading and listening
Important assumptions
- Students barely have any exposure to English outside the classroom.
- Students do not have self-directed learning skills.
- Our classroom is the only place where they practice the language.
Vocabulary building
It seems that a typical (IELTS) reading/listening lesson goes like this:
Pre-teach language items
Teach exam techniques
Students do practice
Check answers
As a lesson is only 90 minutes, we may not have time to review previously learned vocabulary and students end up having roughly the same vocabulary size at the end of the course.
It's crucial to keep in mind that we need more than just a few encounters with a target word in order to make it stick.
Therefore, it is important that we are deliberate about helping students build their vocabulary. It's best to let them learn the most relevant vocabulary from the passages and transcripts. Then, come up with a system that employs various tools and techniques to review the vocabulary, within and across lessons.
It is also important to provide students with additional resources on vocabulary, as well as effective learning strategies e..g using flashcards, as suggested by Paul Nation.
Aural decoding ability training
Another issue with the flow above is that while students do get some opportunity to listen to English, they rarely get to actually work on their ability to decode connected speech, ending up not knowing what's tripping them up and running into the same problem when they encounter similar features.
We should dedicate a small portion of lesson time to "training students' ears." One common way is to let them do dictation exercises. Conveniently, we do have a dictation web app on EHStudy (more exercises will be uploaded there over time).
For more information on decoding, please refer to Sheily Thor's Integrating Authentic Listening to the Classroom. The book is available in our virtual library. Check out the 📌 pinned message in the #virtual-library channel on our Discord server for more details.
Redoing a practice
It might be a good idea to let students redo a practice. This is a good way to reinforce the skills they've learned and to identify any gaps in their understanding, as well as to exploit other aspects that weren't addressed the first time around.
Handout-friendly versions
We're thinking of making handout-friendly PDFs for the practices in the textbooks so that teachers can print them out and let students redo them.