iELT2018: Listening, just for the phon of it

‘Who wants to get meta?’ asked Kyle.

The 2018 Innovate ELT conference was once again a rewarding (don’t say fun!) day’s professional development. Rather than do a talk, I thought a live lesson with real learners would make a nice change. Many thanks to Traci and Anthony’s classes at Oxford House for agreeing to come and take part. Many thanks as well to Kyle Dugan for posing the question on the online audio swapshop ‘who wants to get meta?’ – asking for recordings about what we did to improve our listening skills. And of course many thanks to the respondents to said question. I chose three for the lesson and edited them down for the students. Thanks then to Charlotte Giller, Sandy Millin and Daniel Pick.

We had an hour, and this meant around 45minutes with the learners and then 15 or so with the observing teachers interviewing the students.

It was all videoed. I’ve finally added this here:

You’ll notice that I managed to keep my shades dangling from my polo shirt. Very cool, I’m sure you agree.

The procedure:

After a brief chat about listening, the learners accessed the files on their mobiles and listened in pairs (using headphone splitters). Once they’d got as much of the content as they were happy with, they moved on to the next speaker. We then came together as a class to focus on some transcription of 3-5 word clusters of the first speaker only (see handout). We did some segmentation work and some ‘botanical walks’ (see Cauldwell 2018) with some of the highly reduced segments. We followed with a mini dictation of similar sounding clusters and then moved on to the final discussion with teachers.

The handouts for the learners, featuring follow-up resources for home study are here.

The handouts for the observing teachers are here – possibly usable with the recorded lesson.

The 3 audio files are here.

References from handout and further reading:

• Cauldwell, R (2013) Phonology for Listening, Birmingham: Speech in Action
• Cauldwell, R (2018) A syllabus for listening – decoding. Birmingham: Speech in Action
• Field (2008) Listening in the language classroom. Cambridge: CUP
• Field (2017) Through the Fog. Presentation given at the IATEFL conference Glasgow.
• Norrington-Davies (2016) From rules to reasons. Hove. Pavillion.

Receptive phonology and listening skills are a key element on our Dip TESOL course at Dublin TEFL. Want to find out more? Head over to our info page.