Macmillan Workshops 4, 5 and 6
The fourth and fifth Macmillan Workshops in Bulgaria took place in Sofia and number 6 was in Stara Zagora.
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The workshops had the titles: Receptive Skills - Listening and Reading Speaking and Drama - Fluency and Accuracy more here
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The Romain Roland Language School, Stara Zagora |
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In Receptive Skills - Listening and Reading we discussed what makes a good listener. In short the conclusion was that a good listener is someone who is good at decoding what they hear to get meaning. In order to decode what they hear students need to filter through a vast amount of sound to get to the meaning. This workshop looks at what the vast amount of sound includes and how this can be brought into the classroom to develop listening skills in our learners. We did this specifically by listening to short clips of recordings and then describing the sounds we could hear. |
colleagues in Stara Zagora get to grips with interactive reading tasks
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| The clips came from a range of textbooks and materials on the market. |
Listen to the clips and ‘describe’ what you hear. Cockneys (00.05 – 01.45) Diane Abbot (02.06 – 03.12) World of English 1 (03.20 – 04.18) Castaways (04.22 – 05.17) World of English 2 (05.18 – 06.34) Which country is it? (06.39 – 12.31) Holidays (12.39 – 13.11) |
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Yeah. An’ he came down the other week. He’s a nutter. He is. I’ve never known a Cockney like ‘im. He’s goin’ round sayin’: ‘goin’ out tunoit’ an’ all this, you know, he goes round like that. |
We looked at accent and discussed how this can cause difficulties for listeners decoding meaning. |
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... and colleagues had a go at Cockney themselves. The colleagues identified elision, assimilation, interruption, speed, slang and many other characteristics of this speech. |
| We listened to a real interview between a politician and a
journalist from a EFL publication on the market. Here, colleagues suggested that the speech was a formal radio interview and this explained the slower interaction between interviewer and interviewee. There was a discussion about the role of sentence stress for highlighting meaning in speech. Here, the politician frequently blurred parts of her speech while stressing and pronouncing clearly the meaning carrying words. |
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Yes, but magazine is not magazine, magazine is spisanie. Right, telephone and computer are true friends, but magazine is a false friend.'' |
with another recording from a Bulgarian publication we talked about the effect multiple speakers have on the difficult for decoding meaning. This particular recording offered seven speakers and a dog! There was discussion about the need for clarifying the division between pronunciation (accuracy) and listening (fluency) materials. |
| We listened to another recording which used actors, or so we thought, was not scripted, and though there was quite a lot of 'real world' sounds in the recording, the feeling was that it still wasn't 'quite right'. It still sounded a little bit false. |
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Another recording offered a professional recording, by this we mean that there were what appeared to be trained actors, the speech was unscripted, or perhaps semi-scripted. This recording had a male trying to identify countries from their outlines and a female guiding the male through his task and then giving the corrections. |
| We summarised some of the characteristics of 'real world' speech we thought our students need to decode in order to get to the meaning of what they hear. The challenge to teachers is to bring this into the classroom so that learners can become adept at filtering and getting at the meaning. |
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| DIY listening. There was agreement that textbook materials don't always provide the best input listening experiences for students to develop these skills. I suggested that perhaps the teacher can do a better job. I still think this is the case and am waiting to be convinced otherwise. Teachers can produce better listening experiences by using their own speech in the classroom. They can do this by using 'semi-scripts', a term which I think comes from Marion Geddes in the late 70s, in order to 'approach authenticity' which is a good as it can get in the classroom. The great thing about content material is that they are full of diagrams, illustrations and pictures which can be used as the 'semi-script' both for the teacher to deliver the input speech, and for the learners to use as a frame for listening.
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| Types of listening activities: Listen and do |
There are many tasks students can do in this context. |
| I followed the same idea in talking about organising reading
tasks for learners. There are many types of reading to be found in
coursebooks, we looked only at 'information transfer' tasks. The reason for this is that the 'processing of input reading text' is at the core of integrating content and language methodology. Students need to get to the most important content and summarise it, rearrange it, learn it in as easy a way as possible. Setting up info transfer goes some way to providing students with a view of the core of a content topic area as well as a means for organising this content. |
 Pharmacology lecture notes I like to use material from my wife's education. She is a Paediatrician. The excerpt above is from her pharmacology notes. There were 20 pages like this. It's one long linear text. You can just imagine the professor giving the lecture and my wife writing as much as she, as quickly as she can. When it came to learning the material, my wife was having problems learning the material. I offered to help, and once we'd agreed that I don't know the slightest thing about pharmacology, we began to look at the structure of the content. |
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With some discussion we managed to produce this diagram.
The linear text of 20 pages is in fact a large tree diagram which shows
types of medical substances and the effect they have on different nerve
groups. There is also the names of the drugs on the market. The
only thing missing is the dosage. It took my wife half an hour to
memorise the 'picture' we'd created. I'd go as far as to say that the professor (never met him/her) would have been doing a better job had they actually given the students the diagram in the first place before the lecture began. The professor, no doubt, would argue that this isn't his/her job. In a foreign language, content like this must be structured as simply as possible to allow students easy access to it. As we can see here, even in MT, it's difficult to listen and take notes, and then learn linear 'text'. |
| On a much simpler level, card sorting in the classroom is
one way of getting students to read and discuss and organise text according
to decisions they make about content and logical structure. This example is from Geography. Students read, discuss and sort the text depending on they decisions they make about coal as a source of electricity. |
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Diet and
disease
Certain
diseases, such as coronary heart disease, breast
cancer and
bowel cancer are more common in some
countries than
in others. It is thought that some of these
diseases may be
linked to diet. Below is some information
about them.
Obesity
People who
weigh 20% more than the ideal are overweight.
They have a
shorter life expectancy and are more likely to
suffer from
diseases that include heart disease, diabetes,
gallstone, high
blood pressure, arthritis and varicose veins.
Some people put
on weight easily. The reasons are not
understood.
They do not necessarily eat more than other
people, but
they eat more than they need and lay down the
excess as fat.
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I used this following example as a linear text and asked colleagues to identify a generic structure in the text. |
| The best diagram I've come across to accompany this text, is this tree diagram / flow diagram, where the flow describes cause and effect. |
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There are plenty of other materials and examples like this in the workshop, too many to upload here. If any colleagues would like more information or simply to discuss the ideas, please do get in touch with me at keithpkelly@yahoo.co.uk
27.05.08
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