ESL Assignment
- 1. Name – U Phyo Min Hein ID – 1-DE-9 Subject – Teaching Listening Assignment – What criteria would you (need to) consider to choose a good listening text? And why you consider these criteria? Date Submitted _ 18. 4. 2022 There are many criteria for a good listening text. Teacher have to consider the following facts: Will this be interesting for the students? Will the students understand the context ideas? Does it discuss abstract concepts or is it based on everyday transactions? Does the information come thick and fast? Are there moments in which the listener can relax? Is the majority of the vocabulary and grammar appropriate for my students? Will I need to cut part of the recording because it is too long? Is it long enough? Is the recording clear? Will background noise affect comprehension? Are there many voices, potentially causing confusion? Do the speakers talk too fast for my students? Is the accent familiar? Is it comprehensible? Among these criteria, I will explain some of criteria which is more useful and crucial for me. (1) Will this be interesting for the students? In considering for this fact, our listening topics for students must be clear and make interesting for them. If I imagine – I need to choose familiar topics and text to make students interesting in listening. If the topic relevant to the situation and have trend with the real life occurring
- 2. surrounding, I have to choose the topic that more relevant and interests with their real life situation. (2) Is the majority of the vocabulary and grammar appropriate for my students? While students are listening to the audio, they will deeply focus the vocabulary and grammar more than other facts. But we have to know the level of our students so that the text we choice and their levels are matched. If we put the higher vocabularies and grammar structure sentences in the text for the lower level students, they will not understand our listening text. But we can’t even choose the easy vocab and grammar for higher level students because it doesn’t match and doesn’t valid. We can’t also choose the vocab and grammar which are unfamiliar to the students. That is why, to have a good listening text, we have to choose the appropriate vocabulary and grammar for the students. (3) Is the recording clear? We need to double check the audio recording which we choice is clear or not. Not only the recording for the text is needed to be clear, but also it is needed to get the clear context which help the students in specific information of the listening to the record effectively. So, we need to focus for our recording with the context clear information. The first thing we’ll have to decide is which source of real audio we’ll use. Will it be a TV commercial, weather report or movie trailer? Base our decisionon the course work. Did we recently teach words related to the weather? Then the weather report is a good choice. Did our students just learn words related to health? Then we should go for the news report about a recent outbreak of the flu. Are there grammar points we need to review, like a verb tense? Choose an audio file that features the tense we have to review. A report about what will happen to the environment if we don’t implement changes is a great way to review the first conditional. Review and sharpen listening skills at the same time. What about the audio format? Will we play a cassette or CD in class, or show them a video? Will we play a video online? Or will we send them a link to the listening assignment for homework? A good rule of thumb is to give students variety, so if all we’ve been doing is listening to CDs, give them an online video to watch. The context is also the situation of the listening text. So this will give us a lot of extra information to help us in the test. The more we know about the situation, the easier it is to help us imagine the scene. The context can help students think about what the speakers are saying. What do students know about the context? If the students hear a word they don't know, they’ll think about how it might relate to the context. If students are not sure about an answer, they have to use their common sense. In real life, when we listen, the context is clear; we may be listening to friends chatting in a café, following a college lecture, getting information from our boss at work, listening to a science programme on the radio etc. When test-takers sit a listening exam, that real-world context is missing so it’s important that this information is given in the context sentence, e.g. You will hear a zoologist called Emma Drayton giving a talk to a group of new volunteers about her work at a wildlife park in Ireland.
- 3. From this context sentence, we know: the speaker’s job the speaker’s name who she’s giving the talk to the speaker’s gender what the talk’s about that it’s probably a monologue because it says ‘giving a talk’. The speaker’s name is often given in context sentences and used in the questions. I have to ask my learners to look out for this, as it makes it clear that questions relate to this speaker’s opinions, feelings, and so on. (4) Will background noise affect comprehension? This criteria is very important because while the students are taking the listening text with too noisy background sounds, they will be confused and difficult to listen to. This background noise is effected on not only weakly to the students’ while listening process but also weak in students’ comprehension after listening the text. That is why, we have to choose the audio without background noise affects. Preparing the environment is also important for the background noise to get the lower background noise. If playing the story out loud to the whole class, limit distraction by making the environment at home or in school as quiet as possible. For instance, we need to use headphones for listening if appropriate. (5) Are there many voices, potentially causing confusion? For dialogues, it’s easier for test-takers to identify the speakers when one is male and one is female. Where there are three speakers or the context requires two speakers of the same gender, the voices have to be clearly distinguishable e.g. one could be in UK English and the other in US English. Using the names at the beginning of the audio is helpful too. If we are writing a test, names that are commonly used for both men and women should be avoided, e.g. Sam, Alex, Lee etc. because test takers could become confused about who’s who. If test-takers are puzzled about any aspect of the context, the test may have a negative impact on them. While all the main principles that underpin assessment, Validity, Reliability, Impact and Practicality play their part when testing listening, test writers shouldn’t underestimate the role of Impact. That is why, we need to focus on many voices not to get students potentially causing confusion.
- 4. (6) Is the accent familiar? Is it comprehensible? There are the probable impacts of different accents on listening comprehension. Matsuura, Chiba, Mahoney, and Rilling (2014) investigated the relation between familiarity with an English accent and the level of comprehension. Participants in the study listened to the same text voiced by both one Canadian and one Indian speaker. Canadian was the familiar one to the participants and Indian was the unfamiliar. The results showed that the participants performed better listening comprehension levels when they listened to the Canadian speaker, which leads to the finding that being familiar with the accent contributes to the level of listening comprehension. According to Goh (1999), 66% of learners mentioned a speaker's accent as one of the most significant factors that affect listener comprehension. Unfamiliar accents both native and non-native can cause serious problems in listening comprehension and familiarity with an accent helps learners' listening comprehension.