Developing Listening Comprehension in English Language Learners

Course Description

This course explores a number of issues involved in helping learners develop their listening comprehension of English as a second or foreign language. Participants will explore and understand factors that affect the success or failure of listening comprehension, examine an adaptable lesson template that can be used to develop the listening comprehension of students, and look at specific listening activities targeted at novice-level, intermediate-level, and advanced-level students. The course will also highlight effective assessment methods, including computerized testing of listening ability.

Objectives:

Teachers will be able to:

• Create pre-listening, while-listening, and after-listening (or post-listening) activities to build comprehension of spoken English, to help their students go through the steps that first language and second language listeners go through when they try to comprehend incoming information.
• Use the five language-teaching approaches (grammar-translation; direct method; audio-lingual, communicative language teaching, and task-based approach) and identify how the teaching of listening is (or is not) incorporated into these approaches.
• Create bottom-up, top-down, and interactive listening goals, and translate them into classroom activities and lessons appropriate for beginning, intermediate and advanced level learners. Participants will be able to use intensive, responsive, and selective kinds of listening activities for the word level, sentence level, and for mini-talks and conversations.
• Create discrete-response tests of phonemic discrimination, paraphrase recognition, and response evaluation, with a cognitive understanding of the critical issues in testing and the purpose of the listening test to define the kind of test that will be created and used