Long Presentation (45 minutes) A task based approach to improve listening comprehension and active listening skills among university ESL students more

Sat, Sep 16, 16:15-17:00 Asia/Tokyo

Teaching listening skills is one of the toughest parts of our jobs as ESL teachers, and this task becomes increasingly difficult when we teach Japanese students who are primarily from a non-English speaking environment. With barely any exposure to English at home or from their surroundings, Japanese students require hand holding, and thorough guidance to develop their active listening skills. Moreover, in the current ELT practice, we focus more on testing listening rather than teaching listening. Listening tends to be a transient and invisible process that cannot be observed directly. It is quite hard to generate “while-listening” activities that are engaging, and those that motivate students to interact with the audio. Most teachers find that teaching listening is challenging, and revert to the tried and tested approaches of creating pre-listening activities (perhaps pre-teaching vocabulary), playing the audio a couple of times while our students complete worksheets with gap-fill activities, true-false, multiple choice questions etc., and then some post-listening activities. In this presentation, I would like to present a couple of approaches to listening that involve group work, and active listening. One of the approaches is “Listen and make”, where the students work in groups while they are listening to create an object/drawing that represents the main idea. For the other activity, the students work in pairs to catch words and phrases from the listening task as they are listening.