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An Action Research Cycle in an Academic Skills CourseII. EAP Listening ActivitiesThe activities in the Academic Skills course were drawn from examples in the literature on teaching listening (Brown & Yule, 1983; Ur, 1984; Anderson & Lynch, 1988). Units of study in the course were comprised of pre-listening activities and activities during and after listening. The former consisted of vocabulary teaching, content area readings and discussions to activate the students' background knowledge. As well, pre-listening work introduced strategy training to non-native speakers to familiarize them with the predicting, guessing and inferring that native speakers often use to make sense of lectures (Strodt-Lopez, 1991).While listening, students worked on their vocabulary through listening for clozed words. They utilized sentence and paragraph contexts to predict the meaning of unknown words through matching and other recognition exercises. For note-taking, there were suggestions for abbreviations and the use of symbols. Teachers modeled these techniques in class and had students try them. As well, there was practice in note-taking, in learning how to identify the overall lecture structure and to determine its salient features such as discourse markers (Bame, 1995). Other activities during listening included information gap assignments, comprehension questions, and exercises to help students disentangle the components of English spoken at natural speed (Ur, 1984) and sensitize them to the features of spontaneous English speech (Brown & Yule, 1983). Grids and tables focused student attention upon the basic content of a listening passage and to record the information succinctly. Writing and small group discussion activities followed these. Additional practice in developing comprehension skills required students to summarize the main points of a passage (Ur, Ibid). Each unit of study was organized sequentially by degree of difficulty. Researchers note that effective training of listening skills requires a graded program of listening activities that encourages students by allowing them to achieve success on less complex tasks so the activities in each unit progressed in this manner (Anderson & Lynch, 1988). The literature contends that grading needs to take into account not only the language and content, but also the learners' perceptions of difficulty (Lee, 1977). For this reason, the listening activities were tested with other groups of students of similar abilities before the activities were incorporated into the course. A significant number of tasks in each unit were designed to be conducted in pairs or small groups, so that students could assist one another's language learning. This approach also encouraged learners to approach other students first, rather than relying solely on the teacher. It also promotes active and successful listening habits by encouraging students to ask questions when their communication fails (Lynch, 1994). |
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