Pre-listening activities: what to focus on?
At last year's IATEFL conference in Brighton I was at a
presentation on teaching listening where I got into a bit of an argument with
the speaker. I don't know if it was my nerves before my own, first presentation
at IATEFL but I wasn't on my best behaviour, which I later regretted. The
whole situation was rather ridiculous. Even more ridiculous was the fact that
in principle I agreed with the presenter who argued that there is little
benefit in pre-teaching vocabulary before listening activities - I wouldn't
agree though with his claim the word "prowl", one my favourite words in
English, is useless :)
There is an interesting piece of research to substantiate the
speaker's argument, which he surprisingly did not mention. Chang and Read
(2006) administered a listening comprehension test to160 students who were
divided into four groups and received a different kind of support:
1. Providing background information
on the topic (in L1)
2. Repetition of the input
3. Previewing the test
questions
4. Vocabulary instruction
Which one do you think was most beneficial to the learners?
The order these four types of support are listed above actually
represents their effectiveness according to Chang and Read's findings.
Providing topical knowledge ranked as the most useful while pre-learning
vocabulary was consistently the least useful form of support across all levels
of proficiency.
Are you surprised by the results?
If you're an English speaker teaching in a non-English speaking
country, try setting up your own experiment in your classroom: play a recording
or podcast based on a highly local news story about the upcoming elections or
some such with lots of names of various politicians. Don't be surprised if your
students - say, from intermediate level and up - understand more than you do. I’ve
tried it and I stand by the assertion that topic familiarity is much more
important than glossing a few isolated vocabulary items. The reason is that a
lot of listening occurs... well, before listening. What students would therefore
benefit from is pre-task activities which aim to:
activate a topic-related
schema (general knowledge about the related domain)
awaken their
background knowledge (what they already know)
arouse their
curiosity about and interest in the topic through various prediction tasks
So should we banish the practice of vocabulary pre-teaching
activities altogether? Certainly not. There are other studies which showed that pre-learning low frequency vocabulary (e.g. prowl) has a (relative) value. For example, Webb (2009) found that it helped learners improve their comprehension when watching TV
programmes, particularly if students have
already mastered the most frequent 3000 words in English.
Most importantly, teachers rarely teach vocabulary for the sake of
teaching vocabulary - although it is perfectly justified - most vocabulary
teaching takes place within listening and reading activities. If we do away
with pre-tasks focusing on vocabulary, when would you teach vocabulary? So as
long as you have a clear understanding of what you want to achieve, vocabulary
instruction before listening is clearly warranted.
The template below, which I developed for
teachers I was mentoring a few year ago, includes various pre-task ideas including both content-related support and vocabulary instruction.
On a personal note, I’d better look out for the speaker I unintentionally upset last year and apologise to him – the IATEFL 2012 conference starts today!
Listening Activity Template
References
Chang, A. C-S., & Read, J. (2006). The effects of
listening support on the listening performance of EFL learners. TESOL
Quarterly, 40(2), pp 375-397
Webb, S. (2009). Pre-learning low-frequency vocabulary in
second language TV programmes. Language Teaching Research, 14(4), pp
501-515
At last year's IATEFL conference in Brighton I was at a
presentation on teaching listening where I got into a bit of an argument with
the speaker. I don't know if it was my nerves before my own, first presentation
at IATEFL but I wasn't on my best behaviour, which I later regretted. The
whole situation was rather ridiculous. Even more ridiculous was the fact that
in principle I agreed with the presenter who argued that there is little
benefit in pre-teaching vocabulary before listening activities - I wouldn't
agree though with his claim the word "prowl", one my favourite words in
English, is useless :)
There is an interesting piece of research to substantiate the
speaker's argument, which he surprisingly did not mention. Chang and Read
(2006) administered a listening comprehension test to160 students who were
divided into four groups and received a different kind of support:
1. Providing background information
on the topic (in L1)
2. Repetition of the input
3. Previewing the test
questions
4. Vocabulary instruction
Which one do you think was most beneficial to the learners?
The order these four types of support are listed above actually
represents their effectiveness according to Chang and Read's findings.
Providing topical knowledge ranked as the most useful while pre-learning
vocabulary was consistently the least useful form of support across all levels
of proficiency.
Are you surprised by the results?
If you're an English speaker teaching in a non-English speaking
country, try setting up your own experiment in your classroom: play a recording
or podcast based on a highly local news story about the upcoming elections or
some such with lots of names of various politicians. Don't be surprised if your
students - say, from intermediate level and up - understand more than you do. I’ve
tried it and I stand by the assertion that topic familiarity is much more
important than glossing a few isolated vocabulary items. The reason is that a
lot of listening occurs... well, before listening. What students would therefore
benefit from is pre-task activities which aim to:
activate a topic-related
schema (general knowledge about the related domain)
awaken their
background knowledge (what they already know)
arouse their
curiosity about and interest in the topic through various prediction tasks
So should we banish the practice of vocabulary pre-teaching
activities altogether? Certainly not. There are other studies which showed that pre-learning low frequency vocabulary (e.g. prowl) has a (relative) value. For example, Webb (2009) found that it helped learners improve their comprehension when watching TV
programmes, particularly if students have
already mastered the most frequent 3000 words in English.
Most importantly, teachers rarely teach vocabulary for the sake of
teaching vocabulary - although it is perfectly justified - most vocabulary
teaching takes place within listening and reading activities. If we do away
with pre-tasks focusing on vocabulary, when would you teach vocabulary? So as
long as you have a clear understanding of what you want to achieve, vocabulary
instruction before listening is clearly warranted.
The template below, which I developed for
teachers I was mentoring a few year ago, includes various pre-task ideas including both content-related support and vocabulary instruction.
On a personal note, I’d better look out for the speaker I unintentionally upset last year and apologise to him – the IATEFL 2012 conference starts today!
Listening Activity Template
References
Chang, A. C-S., & Read, J. (2006). The effects of
listening support on the listening performance of EFL learners. TESOL
Quarterly, 40(2), pp 375-397
Webb, S. (2009). Pre-learning low-frequency vocabulary in
second language TV programmes. Language Teaching Research, 14(4), pp
501-515
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