Presentation Title:
A Look at Listening for Chinese Teachers: How is Listening Constructed and How to Engage Students.
This presentation asks how we listen in general terms, and how to apply listening concepts to the CFL (Chinese Foreign Language) learner. What activities can the teacher employ to get students involved in their own listening,? How can both students and teachers create engaging and meaningful exercises? During the presentation, teachers will create at least one short exercise. Please know that this presentation is not designed to address a specific proficiency level, and most material used for demonstration is beyond the novice level.
Before getting started, teachers might look at a few of these videos to see what is possible.
Video One: Student practicing a memorized song. The song is intended to introduce basic word groups of novice level Chinese (adjectives, time words, and question types).
Video Two: Two students discussing the lyrics of “Hui Niangjia 回娘家.”
Video Three: Butterfly in the Rain
Although the lyrics for this song are rather advanced for CFL learners, the use of timed slides in Pinyin demonstrate how students can more easily follow along, even though they may not understand. This is one of the types of exercises that students can (with a small amount of time) create.
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Presentation
The remainder of this document shows the basic order of the presentation, with main activities included.
Audio Samples:
Two audio samples will be played to demonstrate that listening is not a static activity; in most types of listener must INTERPRET and RECREATE the meaning. Different listeners (native speakers) will often come to the same “meaning,” though each listener processes the content differently. Often, listeners recreate different meanings, so have slightly different interpretations.
Sample one: “Aiqing de Gushi”
Actual audio will be available on day of the presentation.
Teachers will listen to the sample once only, then try to summarize what they heard in writing in about five sentences. Then teachers will compare their summary, and we will have a short discussion to see how the summaries differ.
[Question (Intended to show that listeners have some bias). What country does this story take place in, and what is the evidence? What type of text is this, or who is telling the story?]Sample Two: “CuoCuo”
Teachers listen to the sample once, then write a short summary.
[Questions, who died and how? Who is in the room and why? How do we know? What does the term “xiaojie” mean and what does the term “xiaojie” reveal about the time the story was written?]__
Before going on to creating an activity, a few comments about the nature of listening are mentioned.
From Michael Rost’s Listening in Language Learning, Longman Press, 1990, ISBN 0 582 01650 9
Although this is a useful book, the reading is quite difficult, with emphasis more on theory than pragmatics.
Rost
Types of listening plus “language learning” listening:
Main types of listening (5-13):
1) Transactional – listening for information
2) Collaborative – listener(s) interact, so a conversation
The author of this presentation would like to suggest that another “type” of listening is, 3) Listening for a language class, so listening to classmates or the teacher, but also listening to publisher prepared audio.
Type three is an interesting phenomenon, since arguably listening for language learning is not at first a “natural” type of listening. It may be similar to practicing the piano, training for an athletic event, or working to improving a skill.
Listener roles
1) Participant – listener has rights; so a conversation
2) Adressee – listener is being spoken to and has some rights (asking questions or making brief comments). A class or meeting.
3) Auditor – listener has almost no rights or is not expected to respoind; listening to a speech or listening to a bus driver’s instructions.
4) Overhearer – sitting next to people talking on a bus or subway, hearing part of a conversation in a hallway
* A language learner in a classroom probably assumes all of these roles. However the discourse is often not real or is “artificial.” So language listening is somewhat artificial.
In the chapter “Development of Listening Ability” (151), Rost discusses learning taxonomies. Rost argues that taxonomies tend to imply preferred orders for learning listening skills, although no research has shown that skills are actually learned in a particular order.
Rost then proposes global or uppermost skills, with the notion that learning top skills will subsume included component skills or “steps.”
The presenter (McArthur) takes this to mean that a learner can develop a lot of ability by becoming comfortable with ambiguity (not understanding everything), so more listening can be done that is focused on the uppermost skills. This leads to the concept that “… what we understand is based on what we already know, and what we already know comes from being able to understand.” (Rost 155).
In other words, McArthur believes, largely by his own language learning experience, that a learner should gradually devote more time to listening as an end. Listening becomes a practice or training, the same way one must practice if they would like to learn a skill (piano, swimming, tennis, running a marathon). Total comprehension is an ultimate goal, but one must be in the regular habit of listening (without understanding everything) in order to meet this goal.
However, most CFL students in public schools are not at a level to listen to talk shows, news, or other types of programming available on the internet. Students need interesting material in small doses that ideally they can create themselves. The following two activities are intended to provide insight about how to get a class to create some new and interesting material.
Activity One: (For conference participants).
If married, list two or three points about what your spouse does that annoy you. If you are not in a relationship, you can pick another situation to describe that causes annoyance. Then write one or two short paragraphs that describe a situation, and we will then see how the two paragraphs can be put into Quizlet to make a short unit.
Example One:
McArthur got yelled at again. His wife was putting away the leftovers, and could not find a lid to one of the containers. She had told McArthur many times that he should always match the lid to the container before storing them in the dish cabinet. But McArthur preferred to put all of the lids in a box, and all of the containers next to the box. Invariably, a lid would get misplaced, and they would get into the “put the lid with the container” argument. Just like McArthur was always losing one his wife’s favorite socks when he took the clothes from the laundry room to the bedroom.
Example Two:
Stuck in traffic again. There must be 30 cars ahead of me before the traffic signal. Why doesn’t everybody pay attention to the light, and start at the same time, instead of waiting for the car in front to go? If we all started together, we might only have to wait for two light changes. But if you wait for the car in front, it could be five or six light changes. Waste of time, waste of life. I blame Obama!
Activity Two: Use Quizlet to make an “audio” file for a song.
Activity Two in Progress