I. Discussion: www.ezslang.com and www.stanford.edu/dept/lc/efs/FlashACE/.

II. Practice test

III. What is effective listening? Automatically moving from sound to meaning while interacting with that meaning :filtering, linking, predicting, judging, etc. Listening should be consciously  practiced daily, ideally more than once per day. Review: 3 keys to improving listening.

A. Learning to comprehend more effectively

§       Getting the meaning

§       Retaining important points (notes & memory)

§       Interpreting and integrating

B. Improving processing

§       Handling faster speech, especially reduced forms, and noisy environments

§       Accommodating a range of accents

§       Making processing (sounds, words, grammar, discourse) more automatic

C. Increasing language knowledge

§       Sound system: sounds, syllables, stress, and intonation

§       Vocabulary: words and phrases

§       Grammar: phrases & relations; recognizing function words (articles, prepositions, auxiliary verbs, etc.) and word endings (-s, -ed, -ing, etc.)

§       Discourse: typical structures and discourse markers (transitions, emphasizers, etc.)

IV. Importance of vocabulary - How many words do you know? How many words do native English speakers know? What do you know when you know a word?

                        1. General service list; Academic word list (also called University Word List)

                        2. www.er.uqam.ca/nobel/r21270/levels/: a set of tests at various levels

                        3. Babylon: www.babylon.com; Google definitions.
                            Note that for listening, you need to connect the meaning to the sound

                        4. Keeping a list and reviewing it:
                            a) note new words that you've seen before or that seem important
                            b) get the word, its definition, and a sentence from the context you saw it in
                            c) collect in groups of 10-20 and review regularly (till you know them)
                            d) try actively to notice these words in other contexts

V. Websites for English listening practice: for language learners: review and several new ones

Randall’s Cyber Listening Lab – www.esl-lab.com. Includes over 140 scripted exercises divided into 4 groups: general listening, academic listening, long conversations with video, and short exercises. Some are quite engaging (see for example “A Great Car Deal”). Exercises are also divided into easy, medium, difficult, and very difficult. Lessons have pre- and post-listening exercises, the latter including quizzes and text completion. Transcripts include glossed vocabulary. Features links to other language learning sites created by Randall Davis, like www.ezslang.com.

English Baby! – www.englishbaby.com. Provides examples of real English interactions among friends and acquaintances--a good source for slang and idioms, works best with advanced learners. New exercises daily Monday-Friday each week. Mostly audio with occasional video: includes transcripts, quizzes and vocabulary lists.

Lingual.Net – www.lingual.net. Focusing on the approach of learning English through movies, this site uses short movie clips with accompanying captions that can be turned on or off. A transcript is also provided, and many of the clips include a quiz. The site demonstrates the "Tri-View Method" for improving listening comprehension using their material.

English Trailers – www.english-trailers.com. This site also works on learning English through movie clips, in this case focusing on trailers, the short clips used by studios to advertise new movies. Like many other sites, along with the video clip this includes both a quiz and the transcript.

English Language Listening Lab Online – www.elllo.org. This site focuses on short, unscripted interviews of normal people talking about their everyday lives, interests, travel, and cultures. A wide variety of native and non-native English accents are covered. More than 1,000 lessons, with transcripts and quizzes. The transcript page also includes both the mp3 and some audio language notes by the site's developer, Todd Beuckens.

FlashACE – www.stanford.edu/dept/lc/efs/FlashACE/. This set of 10 Flash-based aural comprehension exercises was inspired by the Plaister Aural Comprehension Test. They were developed in-house by EFS instructors originally for Macintosh computers and reprogrammed in Flash by Ken Romeo for use on the Web. The object is to understand the spoken description so that you can identify which of three pictures is being described.

Interesting Things for ESL Students – www.manythings.org. This site has dozens of exercises for ESL students in various skills. For listening, see www.manythings.org/e/listening.html as well as the minimal pair identification exercises at (e.g., right/light) at www.manythings.org/pp.

RealEnglish – www.real-english.com/. This site has both a free and a paid version with video clips of people on the street answering questions. These focus on both grammatical and functional English points, and the videos highlight the key concepts. You can also see many of these by going to www.youtube.com and typing in "realenglish"

About.com - http://esl.about.com/cs/listening/. This is the listening section of a large ESL site hosted by Kenneth Beare. Includes a variety of listening activities divided by levels. Exercises range from number identification and spelling to short dialogues and reports. Also has links to other ESL and native speaker sites for listening. Free, but filled with advertisements including flashing banners and extra browser windows opening. Some files play directly through browser; others require RealPlayer.

 

VI. Websites for listening practice: native speaker websites useful for language learners. These include captions, a transcript, or at least an accompanying text that will help with comprehension: review and several new ones

Scientific American Frontiers – www.pbs.org/saf/. This site has the video and transcripts from 15 years of a science show (1990-2005) produced by PBS and hosted by Alan Alda. Each show is narrated by Alda and includes interviews with experts. The language is similar in some ways to academic language but the show is more entertaining and has better visuals than most lectures. You can look through the list of shows or use the search feature to see if there are shows that cover some particular interest of yours.

Uncommon Knowledge – www.hoover.org/publications/uk. This site hosts a series of programs recorded at Stanford's Hoover Institute. The series includes over 300 programs from 1995-2005. Each show is moderated by Peter Robinson and usually includes 2 or 3 guest experts who take divergent positions on a topic or issue.

News Hour – www.pbs.org/newshour/video/.  The News Hour with Jim Lehrer is an excellent nightly news show produced by PBS. The archive includes shows broadcast after February 2000. This uses the same high quality video and transcript format as Scientific American Frontiers and is keyword searchable.

CNN Student News – www.cnn.com/studentnews/. CNN Student News presents news stories in a format aimed to be interesting and accessible to US secondary school students. The site has video of current and recent stories along with the transcript and other support materials.

Google Video Captioned – http://video.google.com/videocaptioned. The Google Video site maintains a list of 99 selected videos that include captions. It is also possible to search http://video.google.com or http://youtube.com for videos by adding "cc" (close captioned) to your keyword search (note that this may also bring up non-captioned videos that simply have "cc" in their titles).

VII. Some principles for learning to listen on your own.

1. Remember that listening practice activities can have three general objectives: learning to comprehend more effectively, improving processing, and increasing language knowledge. You will use different procedures depending on which of these you're focusing on.

2. It is often useful to listen in "chunks" of about 2-4 minutes; you should rarely listen longer than 10 minutes without pausing to reflect or doing some followup activity (such as summarizing--see below).

3. Avoid distractions, concentrate, and don't try to practice listening  when you're sleepy.

4. Listen every day: 2-3 times a day is better.

5. Use a variety of procedures (see VI below) to
   - Focus on different skills
   - Maintain an appropriate level of challenge.

6. Exploit materials for multiple purposes.

7. Use meaning technologies (transcripts, captions, online dictionaries, translations) carefully; try to limit their use during times you are listening for comprehension.

8. Find material that interests you--if it isn't interesting stop using it and go find something else.

9. Spend a lot of your time listening about topics you already know something about.

10. Focus mostly on speakers/dialects you can easily process, but challenge yourself with others from time to time.

VIII. Some techniques for learning to listen on your own. Think about how to link each of these to specific language learning objectives. Use a variety of techniques, and try connecting several into a coherent procedure--your own lesson. Here are some other than just listening and taking notes.

1. Listen to a 2-4  minute segment, pause, and summarize: oral is best (record yourself) but written is useful too. [Helps with improving comprehension; linking listening to speaking/writing]

2. Listen to a 2-4  minute segment, pause, and predict what is going to happen next--then check your prediction. [Helps with improving comprehension]

3. After listening to a segment, do a dictation of several sentences and check your answers. [Helps with improving processing; noticing grammar and vocabulary]

4. When working with quizzes:
   - Hide the multiple choice options--try to answer the question based on your own information first [Helps with improving comprehension].
   - Sometimes, try to answer the questions before you listen to the passage [Changes your listening task from overall comprehension to listening for specific information]

5. Try using captions for the first 30-60 seconds, then turn them off and try to understand: turn them back on when you can't understand [Helps with improving comprehension].

6. The first time through a video clip, try watching it with no sound. Try to figure out what's going on and what the speakers might be saying (use a clip with people interacting, not just a lecture). [Using the visual information to help with comprehension].

7. Read transcript first before listening [Helps with improving comprehension--listening to more familiar material; also allows looking up of unknown key vocabulary before listening].

8. Identify difficult parts and go over several times [Helps with improving processing; noticing grammar and vocabulary]

9. Keep a vocabulary list and review it regularly [Helps with improving language knowledge]

10. Use speed control if available (e.g., on Windows Media Player) to slow speech down to 80% [Helps with processing]

 

IX. Final exams

        A. Lecture

        B. Picture identification

        C. Dictation

 

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Homework: None! But be sure to come on time for the final exams.