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Louise Ward

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Decoding skills WAALC 2019 minus Olya's slides

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Decoding skills Symposium 2018 minus Olya's slides

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For anyone interested in doing the same MOOC that I did to learn about these skills, I suggest joining the page below on Facebook; admins will announce on this page when registrations open for the next one.

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[EVO] Teaching listening: principles, techniques and technologies

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EVO] Teaching listening: principles, techniques and technologies has 586 members

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Instant quizzes for any subtitled Youtube video

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Workshop presentation 2017

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TEACHING LISTENING SKILLS Have we been doing it wrong? text remains on page speech transient "Focusing on decoding skills rather than general comprehension is probably the most effective means of improving a novice listener's performance... [E]fficiency in the fundamental process of matching strings of phonemes to words and phrases allows the listener greater opportunity to focus on wider issues of meaning."

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Includes a link to Field's textbook Listening in the Language Classroom

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Stepping into the real world: transitioning listening

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This is the recorded version of a presentation which originally took place on Friday 4th April 2014 at IATEFL Harrogate 2014. The abstract "I've studied English for years, but I can't understand anyone!" This was a common complaint from my students on arrival in the UK.

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Sample listening lesson from Sheila Thorn and Richard Cauldwell

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Sample listening lesson from Sheila Thorn and Richard Cauldwell

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The audio can be found here: http://www.thelisteningbusiness.com/download/1.10%20Jane%20002.mp3

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Olya Sergeeva - using videos to practise understanding fast speech

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Olya Sergeeva - using videos to practise understanding fast speech

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Hancock & McDonald - Pronunciation as a listening skill

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Hancock & McDonald - Pronunciation as a listening skill

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Conti on how we've been teaching listening wrong

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Conti on how we've been teaching listening wrong

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Introduction
Listening is often described as the 'cinderella skill', as it is by far the area of language instruction that language teachers neglect the most. The reasons for this neglect are manifold. First and foremost, as much research has shown, listening is the skill MFL teachers understand the least and consequently do not feel confident teaching. Add to this the fact that instructional materials are often uninspiring, poorly designed and usually under-exploited by course-books. To cap it all, possibly as a result of all of the above, many MFL students fail at listening tasks, with serious consequence for their self-efficacy as listeners and their motivation in general.
Listening - a pivotal skills
Yet, listening is by far the most important skill-set, especially if we are preparing our students for the real world, where 45 % of communication occurs through the aural medium and only 25 % through reading and writing. Moreover, the human brain is naturally wired to acquire languages through listening, as it is through our caregivers' aural input that we acquired our mother tongue in the first place. Not to mention the fact that in this day and age poor listening skills hinder access to an enormous wealth of freely available audio-visual online information in the target culture - a huge missed opportunity!
Why traditional listening instruction is ineffective
The main reason why many students fail at listening is that MFL teachers do not actually teach aural skills. In fact, as I found out through several surveys I conducted over the years, although MFL teachers claim to be teaching listening skills, when asked to make a list of the aural skills they impart in their lessons they are unable to provide an answer. Difficult to teach what you do not fully understand.

I, myself, started to understand listening very late in my career, after coming across work by Richards and Field a few years back. Up until then, like many other colleagues, I had been teaching listening by playing an audio-track and quizzing students on its content through true-or-false or who-has-done-what questions. In other words: I had been teaching through testing, not through modelling.
From quizzing to modelling
Yet listening instruction ought to be about modelling. Firstly, about modelling of language through the aural medium, like caregivers do with their children in first language acquisition; secondly, about modelling effectively. Listening strategies and skills. But what skills?

The answer to this question is crucial for effective instruction to take place, as teaching listening should be about training students in the execution of each of the major skill involved in comprehension. Just like football coaches do when they train their players in each discrete skillset (passing, dribbling, shooting, etc.) building up their craft gradually but steadily until they are ready to play a full match. What a lot of MFL teachers do, on the other hand, is the opposite to what football coaches do. They start straight from the full-match bit, neglecting the all-important skill-training part.
Listening comprehension unpacked
My teaching approach being rooted in Skill-theory accounts of language acquisition, understanding the skills L2-students need to master in order to effectively comprehend aural input has made all the difference. It has enhanced the quality of my teaching, not merely in the area of listening instruction but, across all four skills, as I firmly believe that successful listening skills prime successful acquisition - a finding confirmed by Feyten's (2011) study.

As Skill-theory posits, instruction in any skill-set must proceed bottom-up, so to speak, starting from the automization of lower-order skills. The epistemological premise of this approach being that you need to be able to execute lower order skills automatically first so as to free up the cognitive space our brain needs to focus on executing higher order skills. To use car-driving as an analogy, one can only effectively focus on the road after one has fully automatized lower-order operations such as changing gear, braking, indicating, accelerating, etc.
John Field's five-phases listening comprehension model
In my opinion, the best and most teacher-friendly skill-based account of listening comprehension to-date was provided by Field (2014), who identifies the following skill-set as crucial to the effective processing of aural input:

A decoding phase - input is 'translated' into the sounds of the language

A lexical search phase - in which the listener searches his brain (long-term memory) for words which match or nearly match these sounds.

A parsing phase - in which he must recognise a grammar pattern in a string of words and fit a word to the linguistic context surrounding it

A meaning-building phase - in which, having 'broken' the speech flow, identified the words he heard and how they fit grammatically in the sentence he finally makes sense of it

A discourse-construction phase - in which the understanding of each unit of meaning (e.g. sentence) is connected to the larger context of the narrative. In this phase, one's background knowledge will help enhance comprehension.

Field's account provides MFL teachers with a useful reference framework for curriculum design, as it suggests the direction that listening instruction should take.

In my approach, that I call L.A.M. (Listening-As- Modelling), instruction with novice-to-intermediate learners concerns itself with all of the five levels of aural processing identified by Field, starting from extensive practise in decoding skills and lexical Search and then gradually moving on to the higher order skills.
The importance of decoding skills
Decoding skills are of paramount importance, as without the ability to identify sounds students cannot identify words. Segmentation, the ability to break down the stream of sounds they hear into meaningful units of meaning (lexical items) is the most crucial micro-skill involved in aural comprehension.

Decoding skills are rarely systematically taught and when they are indeed taught, they are often imparted through slideshows of phonics or through kinaesthetic methods which anchor sounds to specific gestures but not in meaningful input or output. They are never integrated with the other four skills, a must for effective decoding skills acquisition and the focus is more on production than reception, training students in the imitation of sounds rather than training them to discriminate them from the rest of the sounds they compete with during aural comprehension. On TES I have posted a wide range of L.A.M activities that focus on decoding skills (e.g. these).
Lexical search skills
MFL teachers typically teach vocabulary through worksheets, apps or internet-based games. Nothing wrong with that, except that students rarely get to process vocabulary aurally. Why not do odd-one-outs, sorting, gap-fills and all the other vocabulary building tasks aurally rather than in writing? They require less preparation and no photocopying. Example: (sorting task) teachers utter a bunch of words (e.g. means of transport), the students sort them on their mini whiteboards in two categories two-wheel vehicles and four-wheel vehicles). I usually do two or three aural vocab tasks in every lesson.
Parsing skills, the two seconds now-or-never bottle neck
Automatization of the above mentioned 5 skillsets is necessary because the human brain's phonological storage is very limited: only around 2 seconds. To make things worse, the listener is usually only 0.25 seconds behind the speaker. This means that the listener has an extremely small amount of time to execute all of the above skills. Christiansen calls this crucial two-second time-window, the now-or-never bottle neck. During this time-window, the listener makes a first-pass hypothesis based on a mechanism called ' syntactic priming', i.e.: on hearing specific words, the listener's brain automatically predicts what sentence is likely to come next based on previous linguistic experiences associated with those words and other contextual cues. Example: On meeting someone for the first time, on hearing the person say 'Comment...' your brain will activate '...ça va' or '... vous-appellez-vous?' rather than '...serait ta femme idéale?'. In other words, the predictions our brain makes are statistically based, based on how frequently we have processed a specific sentence in a specific context.
Chunking and pattern recognition
This system is extremely efficient, because it relies on syntactic chunks stored in the brain which are applied very rapidly once one hears key words. By applying whole ready-made chunks containing several words, the brain doesn't have to process each and every single word one by one, a much lengthier and more cumbersome process. This system is analogous to what Artificial Intelligence voice recognition systems such as Siri do. They match what they hear to patterns stored in their memory.
Teaching patterns through listening
The two phenomena of chunking and priming have huge implications for listening instruction, especially with regards to the Parsing phase of aural comprehension. The first implication is that we need to teach words not isolation as many teachers do, but in high frequency chunks of language; secondly, we need to recycle these chunks as often and across as many contexts as possible, rather than keeping them confined to a single unit of work, as course-books typically do; thirdly, we need to train students in the art of identifying and analysing patterns aurally, not simply through the written medium as it is common practice. In one of my most widely read Language Gym posts 'Teaching grammar through listening' I provide many examples of how this can be done.

Two of my favourite activities to focus my students on patterns using listening are: sentence builders and sentence puzzles. I use sentence builders (in figure 1 below) in every single lesson of mine and my students report that they find them extremely useful; I use them to teach grammar, or rather, to model language patterns. I make up sentences which the students translate on mini boards as I utter them at moderate pace (as I am modelling, not testing). After several examples, it is their turn to make up sentences; first for the class, then for a partner.

Fig. 2 - Sentence builder

After some oral-interaction task such as 'Find someone who...', I focus them on patterns again through sentence puzzles (see figure below).

Fig. 2 - Sentence puzzle
Conclusion
In conclusion, for years listening instruction has concerned itself with testing MFL students rather than training them in the effective execution of the five skill-sets crucial to comprehension. Listening comprehension tasks are tests through and through and they do have their place in the MFL classroom; as plenaries, at the end of a sequence of listening tasks which would have modelled the sounds, lexis and morphological and syntactic patterns that the to-be-administered listening comprehension task contain.

MFL teachers need to reconsider the way they teach listening. First of all, they need to drastically increase the students' exposure to aural input, whether to L.A.M tasks or oral-interaction tasks. Secondly, they need to teach decoding skills extensively from the very early stages of instruction. Thirdly, they must teach vocabulary aurally, as much as possible, in high-frequency chunks, rather than in isolated words as they often appear in word lists. Finally, and more importantly, we must train our students in grammatical-pattern recognition and analysis through the aural medium, not only to facilitate the development or listening skills, but, more importantly because pattern-recognition promotes acquisition.

Steven Smith and I are currently working on a book entitled 'Breaking the sound barrier' in which we propose an integrated framework for listening instruction based on the principles laid out in this article, and suggest a wide range of listening-as-modelling activities. In the meantime, if you want to know more about my L.A.M. approach do read the related articles on my blog.

Gianfranco Conti, PhD, is a French and Spanish teacher at Garden International School, Co-author of 'The Language Teacher Toolkit', and founder and owner of www.language-gym.com.

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Why we have been teaching listening skills wrongly for decades

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Introduction Listening is often described as the 'cinderella skill', as it is by far the area of language instruction that language teachers neglect the most. The reasons for this neglect are manifold. First and foremost, as much research has shown, listening is the skill MFL teachers understand the least and consequently do not feel confident teaching.

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Rachael Roberts -teaching connected speech

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Rachael Roberts -teaching connected speech

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There is a huge difference between what our students see printed on a page and what we actually say in everyday speech.

In a recording of a TESOL Spain Presentation on Youtube (well worth watching), Mark Hancock makes the following joke:

Patient: Doctor, Doctor, I've got two theik, a near rake, sore rise, bruise darms a stummer cake and I far tall the time.

Doctor: I see, perhaps you'd like to way tin the corridor?

(Try reading it aloud)

The joke [apologies for the vulgarity 😉 ] showcases a good number of examples of features of connected speech. Teacher can tend to shy away from highlighting these in the classroom, but research shows that teaching learners about connected speech can really make a difference in terms of how well they understand native speakers. See for example, Authentic Communication: whyzit important ta teach reduced forms (Brown 2006) . Equally, some ability to use these features in their own speech will also be likely to make students more confident and fluent speakers.
Features of connected speech
As a brief overview, there is a strong tendency in English to simplify and link words together in the stream of speech, in order to help the language flow rhythmically. Some of the most common features:
Assimilation
This is when the sound at the end of one word changes to make it easier to say the next word. For example:

'ten boys' sounds like ' tem boys' (the /n/ sound changes to the bilabial /m/ to make it easier to transition to the also bilabial /b/)

Incidentally bilabial just means two lips together, which is a good example of the kind of jargon that puts people off!
Catenation
This is when the last consonant of the first word is joined to the first vowel of the next word. This is very very common in English, and can be very confusing for students. For example:

'an apple' sounds like 'a napple' (Teacher, what is a napple?)
Elision
Elision means that you lose a sound in the middle of a consonant cluster, sometimes from the middle of a word. E.g. 'sandwich' becomes 'sanwich'.

Or from the end of a word. For example:

'fish and chips' 'fishnchips'
Intrusion
This is when an extra sound 'intrudes'. There are three sounds that often do this /r/ /j/ and /w/

E.g. 'go on' sounds like 'gowon'

I agree sounds like 'aiyagree'

Law and order sounds like 'lawrunorder'

[I probably should have used a phonemic keyboard!]

If you want to discover more about features of connected speech- and I think it's fascinating stuff, there's a list of useful books at the end of the post, but now let's look at some activities to help raise awareness and encourage more natural sounding speech.
Connected speech activities
I remember reading somewhere that there are three ways to deal with pronunciation in the classroom: integrating it into other activities, dealing with it discretely, and completely ignoring it. 😉 Let's assume we aren't going to do the latter, and look at the other two approaches.
Integrated activities
I strongly believe that students should be made aware of the basics of connected speech right from the start. I don't mean that you should be teaching your beginners exactly what catenation is, but you can certainly show them how words link together and what happens to sounds in the stream of speech. You don't have to be an expert, and you don't even need to know very much about the technical aspects; you just need to listen to yourself very carefully and notice what is happening in your mouth as you speak.
Drilling and using the board
At lower levels, we tend to teach quite a lot of functional chunks, such as 'What's your name?' Phonetically that could be transcribed as /wɔ:tsjəneɪm/. However, this is likely to confuse (terrify) the students. Instead, using the board, you can just show the students how the words link by using arrows, and write the schwa /ə/over the top of 'your' . Alternatively, you can use your fingers to show how the three words (separate fingers) meld into one long sound (push fingers together). And model and drill the phrase as it is said naturally.

If students struggle with longer phrases, try the technique of back-chaining, starting from the last sound and working up to the whole sound bit by bit. For example with 'Where do you come from?' you drill 'frum' 'kumfrum' 'dz-kumfrum' 'where-dz-kumfrum' I have no idea why this works- but it does.
Using recording scripts
Where new language has been recorded (or by recording it yourself), ask students to first look at the chunk of language written down and try saying it a few times. Then play the recording several times and ask them to write down what they hear, however they want to spell it. Use the two written forms to elicit the differences (such as the use of the schwa) and then drill the more natural pronunciation. You could of course just say the phrase for them, but it can be hard to keep repeating something exactly the same way.
Make it part of presenting new language
Whenever you are dealing with new language, you need to be thinking about the meaning, the form AND the pronunciation. So if you're teaching 'Have you ever + past participle', make sure you're teaching it as something like /əvju:w'evə/ not 'Have... you... ever...' You don't need to explain that the first /h/ is elided or that there's an intrusive /w/- just provide a good model.

Incidentally, I say 'something like' because individual ways of connecting and simplifying speech do vary a bit.
Be aware of the difficulties connected speech may cause with listening
If students struggle to understand something in a recording, or that you say, be aware that they may actually know all the words, just not recognise them in the stream of speech. A great example of this is the student who asked me what 'festival' meant. I went into an explanation, giving examples of different festivals...but teacher, he said, why do you always say it at the beginning of the lesson? (I was saying First of all...).

If students don't understand a phrase, see if they do understand it written down and then take the opportunity to highlight the differences between the written and spoken forms.
Discrete activities
As well as teaching connected speech as you go along, it is also worth doing some discrete activities for the purpose of awareness-raising.

A good activity to start learners thinking about connected speech and weak forms is to dictate just part of some phrases. For example: 'uvbin'. After students have written these down as best they can (this should be a light-hearted activity), you dictate the full phrase, in this case 'I've been to Paris.'.

After doing a listening activity, try doing a dictation where you handout the recording script, with chunks of 2-3 words missing. These should include some aspects of connected speech. Students have to complete the gaps, which will help to develop their decoding skills.

Mark Hancock has some great activities in Pronunciation Games and on the HancockMacDonald website. I particularly like The Word Blender, a game for A2/B1 students which starts to help students identify some of the features of connected speech.

This is necessarily a very brief and somewhat simplistic overview. For more information and ideas, you could try:
Reading Sound Foundations- Adrian Underhill- Macmillan Pronunciation- Dalton and Seidlhofer- OUP Pronunciation Games- Mark Hancock-CUP
Sharon Noseley-Kallandzhs' DELTA Phonology_Assignment_and_Lesson_Plan
Sharon Noseley-Kallandzhs' powerpoint on features of connected speech If you are currently taking CELTA, can I suggest my e-book, The CELTA Teaching Compendium, available from Amazon and Smashwords, containing everything you need to know for CELTA teaching practice.

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Posts about intrusion on elt-resourceful

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There is a huge difference between what our students see printed on a page and what we actually say in everyday speech. In a recording of a TESOL Spain Presentation on Youtube (well worth watching), Mark Hancock makes the following joke: Patient: Doctor, Doctor, I've got two theik, a near rake, sore rise, bruise darms a stummer cake and I far tall the time.

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ESL Diagnostic Listening Teacher Training Video