Summer Lecture Series Teacher Resource Guide

This website is based on a collection of Stanford faculty lectures from diverse academic fields accompanied by supplementary material and exercises. It represents a collaborative method for utilizing online media in intermediate to advanced, university-level listening comprehension classes.

Stanford University's English for Foreign Students has incorporated a lecture series into its summer intensive program for incoming graduate students and researchers for over 30 years. These lectures feature faculty presenting topics in their areas of specialization that are nonetheless geared toward an academically diverse population whose English skills are not at native level. They are intended to both give the students a feel for graduate level courses, while at the same time providing instructors additional resources, especially for listening comprehension and discussion courses.

The main series of lectures was named for Professor Fred Hillier at the event of his 25th year participating in the program. Professor Hillier continued to give lectures long after his retirement from Stanford, and gave his final lecture for the program in 2006. In 2004, the Community Speakers series was added to the program to give students exposure to topics beyond the academic, and have included talks on helping the homeless, music, and wine making.

Early on, the lectures were occasionally recorded on audio tape, and then video tape, but since 2003 there has been a concerted effort to put them online as quickly as possible so that teachers can make better use of them in lessons. Because the program only runs six weeks, and there is at least one lecture each week, this has proved challenging, but the process has become more streamlined with time. Typically there are at least six separate sections of listening comprehension classes that use the material, so instructors have collaborated (to a greater and lesser extent) to create materials to supplement this resource. These have included comprehension questions, vocabulary lists, and short clips for bottom-up (fill-in-the blanks) and top down (summarization and question-making) activities. Initially this was done by e-mail, but in 2006 it was done on a wiki, a tool much more suited for such collaboration. In most cases, both the supplemental material and online version are available to teachers and students within three days of the lecture.

This process represents a paradigm for supporting teachers using current, online materials. The addition of the wiki transforms the effort into a dynamic, collaborative product, allowing multiple participants to quickly add their own ideas and access others' suggestions. As the course ends, this material can be moved to a more stable web page, retaining all of the functionality except for years into the future.

Instructors have found that the content available on these pages is useful for their purposes, but we fully expect that future lectures will stimulate other ideas for activities. We do recommend that students learn to open the video in a stand-alone player so that they can have greater control of playback. Also, while it is quite straightforward to transcribe these videos, we recommend that teachers maintain judicious control over the text, as this is the key skill that most listeners at this level need to develop.

This website includes (for various lectures, but not all):

Streaming video
Streaming audio
Downloadable video and audio
Vocabulary words and phrases for pre-listening orientation
Content questions to scaffold and assess comprehension
Short clips for in-class activities and homework