Background
• Artificiality of listening practice in the classroom, teach strategies but not enough
• Students not generally doing a lot of additional listening practice
• Students unaware of how challenging mainstream lectures can be
• Students impatient to get on with their studies • Students with weak note-taking skills
The assignment
For this assignment you will attend a Wintec course you are interested in. You will work in
groups to gain experience and understanding of lectures and classroom situations.
1.Organise to attend lectures 2.Attend lectures
3.Keep a reflective journal
Learning outcomes
• Learn more about study in New Zealand
• Communicate effectively with a Wintec course tutor • Practise your listening and note-taking skills
• Analyse and reflect on the whole experience in a journal
• Complete a summary of one lecture
• Discuss your experience with other groups in class and on line
Learning opportunities
David Crabbe (2007) discusses the idea that
teachers need to develop ways of helping learners to turn their experience of tasks into something they can apply for themselves outside the classroom – to maximize learning opportunities.
Tony Lynch (2009) has set up a variety of projects to encourage learners to venture outside the
Autonomy
‘The concept of autonomy is grounded in the natural tendency for learners to take control over their learning ...autonomous learning is more effective than non-autonomous
Listening comprehension
A model of
second language listening
The process
• Questionnaire set up on survey monkey for former students who are now studying in mainstream programmes.
• 5 questions relating to how they found the
assignment at the time, and 5 on how they think it has helped them (or not) in their studies now.
• Permission given for me to use their reflective journals.
The participants
• Former students of the Diploma in English as an Additional Language (level 5)
• 7 students responded to the survey, 6
Survey outcomes
Question Stronglyagree
agree disagree Strongly disagree
Helped focus me on my listening skills
1 5 1 0
Useful for listening to lectures in my future field of study
1 6 0 0
Reflective journal help me focus on the skills I needed to improve on
2 4 0 0
Helped motivate me to study harder
2 5 0 0
More useful than traditional classroom listening activities
Part 2
Question Stronglyagree
agree disagree Strongly disagree
Contact with
mainstream tutors gave me more
confidence
3 4 0 0
It helped improved my note-taking skills
2 4 1 0
It improved my confidence
3 3 0 0
It prepared me well for mainstream
lectures
3 3 1 0
It was a good
orientation to my future field of study
Reflections – main threads
Initial anxiety/excitement
Reflections – main threads
Shock at others’ behaviour
“I notice that many students are not seriously
paying attention to the tutor. Some are talking to their seatmates, txting, cutting fingernails and
reading magazines, while others are drawing. I can count on my fingers how many students are all
Reflections – main threads
Differences in teaching styles between home country/NZ and CfL mainstream
“Hardest part for me is to study with more than 100 people … study with someone
unfamiliar makes me stressed. Inversely, in my English class, all the students know each other very well … we feel quite close and
“In China, making notes is totally different. Teachers always writing all the important points on the blackboard and students only need to copy these points.”
“[in the Philippines] our teachers had much tighter authority and control over the class … the class sizes are usually 28-30 not four
“The lecture tutor and English class tutor’s teaching method are different. In the lecture, the tutor just tried to explain all the
information as soon as possible… on the
other hand, the teacher in English class they always explain everything slowly and
detailedly, point out the key information
Reflections – main threads
Vocabulary load
“During the lecture I realised this [vocabulary] was the challenging part of nursing course, and I must attend every class for the purpose of knowing the vocabulary.”
“The lecture was very hard to understand,
Reflections – main threads
Improvement in note-taking skills
“Note-taking proved to be another difficult
task during the lecture. When I concentrated on what the tutor was talking about I couldn’t take notes well,…, I couldn’t finish these two tasks simultaneously.”
“After the [last] lecture, I arranged all notes I took these days and I thought I have
obvious progress in my listening and taking notes.”
“Using some abbreviations and focusing on the main points, I made much progress in my note-taking.”
Reflections – main threads
Strategies for self-improvement
“This time I took notes more efficiently because I attempted to write the main points down instead of recording details.”
“I found [the tutor] was good at using volume and tone in her speaking. If she increased her voice or talked in an impassioned tone, it showed you
“After the lecture, I tidied up my notes and use the dictionary to search the words which I
wrote down without meaning. This help me to understand the subject and build up a
useful vocabulary.”
“This morning I was a little bit late to the
lecture. Coming late is not only a shame, but I also might lose many details of the lecture. I need to be a punctual person.”
“Before the lecture, I had studied some relevant vocabulary, so I could easily
Summing up ...
Growing confidence
“Comparing the feelings I had at the first note-taking session with those at this last note-taking session, I realise how sensitive I am to the differences I find in
What have we learnt?
• That we should keep the assessment
• That putting students in real world situations forces independent learning
• That a massive amount of culture shock is going on in the first weeks in lectures
What do we need to think
about?
• How can we use the learnings from these students to better prepare our students for mainstream study?
• Is there a way that we can mitigate some of the elements of culture shock, for example by
teaching classes together in a lecture style format once per week?
• How can we further improve the teaching of
With heartfelt thanks to Mary Fisher, who permitted me to insert this assignment into her programme and was then forced to
teach it, and to the Wintec mainstream
References
Benson, P. (2001). Teaching and researching autonomy in language
learning. Harlow, Essex, UK: Pearson Education Ltd
Crabbe, D. (2007). Learning opportunities: adding learning value to
tasks. ELT Journal 61/2 pp.117-125
Field, J. (2008). Listening in the language classroom. Cambridge: CUP Flowerdew, J. & Miller, L. (1992). Student perceptions, problems and
strategies in second language lecture comprehension. RELC Journal,
23, pp. 60-80
Flowerdew, J. & Miller, L. (2005). Second Language listening: theory
and practice. Cambridge: CUP.