EFS 693A Listening Comprehension
Strategies for effective listening in an academic setting, with a focus on identifying key ideas in lectures. Practice in understanding words and phrases commonly encountered in classroom settings. Work with computer-based exercises to promote comprehension of rapid, natural speech.The course is for incoming graduate students who, based on their score on our listening placement test and an interview, we decide are in need of concentrated practice and study in academic listening. Non-academic listening is only very briefly addressed. This 10 week, credit/no-credit course is only taught in the fall quarter and typically has 8-14 students per section. Most, but not all, students are engineering students, and the majority are Chinese and Korean speakers. The class meets for two 75 minute sessions each week in a classroom with a whiteboard, a vga connection to a projector or TV, and a VCR/DVD player. I have taught this course once before, but have taught the next course in the listening series many times.
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In general, listening content was introduced so as to facilitate a bottom-up approach: from words to overall comprehension. This approach was taken because of the usual skill set of foreign graduate students at Stanford, who typically have much familiarity with text than speech. The task, is to facilitate a connection between words, phrases and sentences in text, where they have a considerable passive vocabulary and are comfortable extracting complex information, to an aural mode. The curriculum is mainly based on five principles: building vocabulary, enhancing awareness of phonological and psycholinguistic principles, developing skills to connect sound with words and phrases familiar in text, reinforcing self-study skills, and providing contact with real lectures.Vocabulary is an obvious area for language learning, and, while graduate students are quite familiar with specialized terminology, they often have difficulty with the more idiomatic speech used in daily life. Courses like this are one of the few places they can focus on how to comprehend this language. In addition to pointing out the phonological characteristics that are not obvious in text, I try to emphasize how familiarity with spoken language decreases the need for cognitive resources to process input, thus increasing comprehension. This principle can be used to understand why certain passages are difficult, but students can also use it to create their own practice routines for increasing proficiency.While there is a wealth of listening material available to learners over the internet (not to mention on campus), it is very challenging to approach this in an organized way that is pedagogically sound. For the past few years, I have been working with EFS to make certain lectures available online. However, the key pedagogical advance has been to create small, less than 60 second clips for focused practice. Transcripts are, of course, important, but the key is keeping them away from the learners until they have made an attempt to understand the audio. Sakai has made this possible through the assignments (samigo) tool. Further, by having assignments available online, students are able to review them and learn from their mistakes. One thing that I would like to emphasize is that because this is a language course, taught in the target language of the learners, there are many features that do not quite fit the mold of traditional undergraduate “good teaching”. In order to facilitate a firm grasp of a language, language teachers know that it is important to control the information: listening is only useful if learners *try* to understand, speaking is only worthwhile if learners *want* to convey some information. However, this is exactly where Sakai excels: I was able to use the strengths of each tool to control the timing and conditions of information flow. The Wiki was collaborative group learning, Materials gave supplemental resources for autonomous study, and Samigo gave a structured environment for students to challenge themselves. In addition, this course demonstrates how formative assessment can be delivered effectively while at the same time providing an opportunity for reflection.
Class meetings began with one of several regular "corners" and proceeded to the main lesson content. The "corners" allowed students to prepare for certain discussions or formative assessments, while lessons introduced methodology for listening, which was then re-enforced with homework.Regular corners included vocabulary, a quiz, and homework review and preview. Vocabulary was facilitated by the Wiki tool in Sakai. Each week, each student had to add an idiomatic word or phrase, plus an example sentence. Ideally these phrases would be found in spoken language and would not be specific to any particular field. The students added these to the Wiki tool so it would be a collaborative project, and they could learn from each other's words. The new words and phrases were reviewed in class for expansion and consolidation on Thursday, the day that they were due. On Tuesday, there was an in-class quiz which included 5 of these words or phrases, randomly chosen from the cumulative list. Students simply had to write one sentence which illustrated that they understood the usage. Three dictation sentences, unrelated to the vocabulary, were also given: These sentences were .mp3 files cut directly from recordings of lectures that were used in previous classes. They were repeated several times for each sentence, with silences between repetitions. It is important to note that these quizzes were not collected - students were to assess their own grasp of the words and dictation. This method was in line with one of the main themes of the course: students were constantly encouraged to take responsibility for their own learning and to challenge themselves in any way that they could.The main content of the daily lessons followed a bottom-up concept, beginning with concepts such as phonological properties of individual words and moving through improving comprehension vs. improving proficiency. The course ended with a final review and assessment. Homework assignments moved from words to overall comprehension. All homework used clips of real lectures and was done in the assignments (Samigo) tool using the file upload, short answer, and fill in the blanks item types. A final project submission required several files, so students were given the option to submit these to the drop box or on a CD-ROM. Feedback for homework was given both in the assignments themselves and in individual meetings with the students. These individual meetings were facilitated using the Sakai Sign-up tool.Attendance was recorded as a non-submitted assignment in the Sakai Gradebook tool. Announcements were used for non-classroom communication: reminders, online sign-ups, etc.The materials tool included all PowerPoint presentations used in lessons, quiz audio and other class activity audio and links, as well as a section of vocabulary-related links.
To a large extent, the communication and collaboration was built into the course, by its small size and frequent face-to-face meetings. Sakai helped facilitate this by providing a place for communication out of class (the announcements tool) and facilitating the individual meetings (the sign-up tool). However, the wiki tool added something that would have been difficult without Sakai: a way for students to collect and collaborate on vocabulary that had real meaning for them. A short survey after the course resulted in the following responses:Did you find the vocabulary wiki useful? Is there any way that it could be improved? "It is very useful. The phrases I learned from vocabulary wiki have appeared in my life this quarter lots of times. The most recent phrases I heard are "peeves" and "rain check" ""Very much, especially that you can easily go back to the materials put from the beginning."
Students commented on the learning material in a variety of ways. The official course evaluations contained the following:Please comment on the individual instructors with regard to effectiveness and attitude toward students:Strengths:"Professor Romeo ... provides multimedia teaching in class, and also teach us several useful skills in using software to improve English listening.""have face to face consulting time"Also, directly related to the materials and methods: Please comment on the strengths and weaknesses, if any, of the textbook(s) and reading(s). What materials were most and least valuable? Why?"Recorded files had their written version so that you could check."A post-course survey resulted in the following responses:*What did you think of the fill in the blank assignments? "It was challenging for me... But is was useful.""They were extremely useful. Both the kind of assignment and the results you could immediately get. "*What did you think of the transcription assignments? "I believe dictation is a helpful way; however, I do not like doing it. I think you arrange the time which the students would spend on the assignments each week pretty well.""They were also extremely useful because listening and listening again to understand every word you get more familiar with the accent the speaker is using.""The different methods which you taught at the end of the fall quarter to practice listening was most useful for me. "
All students showed increased listening proficiency between the pre-course assessment and the final assessment in the last week. In addition, the official course evaluations had the following item:Please comment on assignments and exams (difficulty, length, frequency, usefulness, and their success at testing conceptual understanding rather than recall):(Strengths)"The assignments are good for practice myself after class.""High level of difficulty, different from the exercises you can train with at home"Course Look & Feel, Web Usability Self-Assessment: Not EvidentEffectiveExcellentCourse Look & Feel, Web Usability Evidence:Unfortunately, the Sakai interface does not have a very good reputation for look and feel or usability, so we try to be fairly thorough about giving orientations to faculty and students. An unforeseen benefit of the time spent on the overview in this course was that students who could not figure out how to submit assignments used the drop-box tool, rather than resorting to email.
Unfortunately, the Sakai interface does not have a very good reputation for look and feel or usability, so we try to be fairly thorough about giving orientations to faculty and students. An unforeseen benefit of the time spent on the overview in this course was that students who could not figure out how to submit assignments used the drop-box tool, rather than resorting to email.
Learner Support Evidence: Learners' needs could be addressed in class meetings, and in the three required meetings with each student individually.From the official course evaluations:Please comment on the individual instructors with regard to effectiveness and attitude toward students:Strengths:"Professor Romeo is good at invoking our motivations."
Soon after I started teaching ESL, I realized that listening is a crucial first step. However, while “textbook” media is often barely connected with reality, it is difficult to use most uncut “real” media for pedagogical purposes. I found that breaking up media into small, less 10-30 second or even 60 second clips is the best way to allow learners to get their heads around how native speech works. With that motivation, along with teachers involved in the English for Foreign Students program, we created the Summer Lecture Series website, including full lectures, short clips, vocabulary and comprehension questions. However, the key to putting this into lessons was the Sakai platform, which gave us the tools to deliver this content in the multiple choice, short answer or fill-in-the-blanks items. With EFSLANG693A, I was able to create a course outside of the summer program that used topical and realistic content for every part: in-class examples, quizzes, homework, and final projects. The Materials section allowed me to thoroughly deliver the content in an organized way so that the students would have a single portal for the entire course.Subsequently, I have realized that it is not always clear to teachers outside of the program exactly *how* they can use this kind of media, so I tried to create a course that was both repeatable and instructive. Putting it in Sakai gave me exactly the portability I needed, allowing me to focus on explaining the pedagogy rather than the delivery. Fill-in-the-blanks exercises and transcription tasks are things I have worked with for a long time, but creating them is rather time-consuming without a platform like the Samigo tool. The export capability of Samigo allows me to post zip files which even teachers outside of the Stanford system can use. In addition, the wiki tool allowed me to integrate vocabulary into the lesson in a meaningful way. It is possible to use vocabulary textbooks, or even use the lists of words that are relevant to the lectures, but students are rarely given the opportunity to explore new words on their own, as they would in real life. Because they are exposed to English every day, they inevitably run into a rich set of vocabulary, so I had always wanted to incorporate these into formal lessons, rather than keep them separate. Not only does the wiki allow students to achieve this goal, it allows them to see each others’ words and learn from their peers, who are inevitably in similar situations. Because Sakai has a stable place for this all to happen, I was able to create a meaningful quiz cycle, to encourage student to increase their involvement with the words just one more level. I believe that this is one of the few ways to teach vocabulary that really gives students ownership over the content.
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