APLING678 Week 3 - Listening & Speaking

From Theory to Practice: Getting Started with Listening and Speaking

Guiding Questions:

• What are the skills needed to listen and speak in a second language?
• How can digital technologies facilitate the development of listening and speaking skills?
• How different is real-life listening and speaking tasks compared to technology-mediated ones?
• What implications and considerations should teachers think of if they want to incorporate technology-mediated listening and speaking tasks?

Readings: Complete the following readings:

• Text: Walker & White (2013) Chapter 3
• e-Reserves: Robin (2011) Chapter 4 in Arnold & Ducate (eds.)
• Weblink: Educational uses of digital storytelling (University of Houston, College of Education) http://digitalstorytelling.coe.uh.edu/index.cfm (Read the section on About Digital Story Telling and watch some examples of your choice. The title "I read banned books" will be available with closed-captioning in the attached file. Download and view it in ITunes media player and be sure to turn on the close-captions. (Alternate download source: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bw03xzhF-1z8clBzd3J1NTZ3S1k/view?usp=sharing)

Substantive Discussion Post:

Although Walker and White spend a couple of pages outlining why communication on the internet is mostly in written form and say that “there are some who go as far as arguing that the internet has promoted writing once again as the dominant medium of communication” (28), there are still plenty of opportunities to practice and develop one’s listening and speaking skills using the internet and smartphone apps.

The skills needed to listen in a second language can be divided into psycholinguistic/bottom-up skills, such as perception and matching sounds to language items, and social/top-down skills, such as interpreting meaning using world knowledge and interacting with the speaker. Speaking skills can also be divided into these categories. Some psycholinguistic/bottom-up speaking skills are pronunciation and performing speech acts. A couple of social/top-town speaking skills are managing interaction and organizing discourse. While a second language learner needs to have all of these skills eventually, different tools can be used to practice different skills over time. Teachers should take this into consideration and vary their use of technology and other tools enough that all aspects of listening and speaking are eventually practiced.

Task 1, designing your own video listening task, calls upon most of the meta-cognitive and cognitive strategies listed in Robin’s Table 2 (107). Students have to plan, monitor their comprehension, evaluate their listening strategies (to make the questions they write comprehensible), make contextual inferences from what they see in the video, and use elaboration or repetition to write questions for their classmates. A traditional, low tech, listening exercise, on the other hand, usually has so little context that inference can be difficult, and unless specifically directed to do so, students would probably not evaluate their own listening strategies. Designing one’s own video listening task as it is outlined in Task 1 slows the task down and broadens the focus to include evaluation of one’s listening skills and strategies. It is a broader and more in-depth task than the traditional (pre-internet) listening comprehension exercises that simply required a student to listen to disembodied voices and answer questions about the information being discussed.

Task 2, using lyrics and music, is a mostly top-down listening exercise, where the student can use the singer’s expressions to help interpret meaning and the music video to infer information which is not explicitly stated and to help identify the speaker’s mood. When combined with having the lyrics in hand, this task also becomes a bottom-up exercise. “Most researchers and teachers agree that you need to help students to develop competence in carrying out both processes” (Walker and White, 30).

Task 3, making listening materials using Audacity, requires more tech skills on the part of the speaker than listening skills on the part of the listener. This task in particular is a good example to remind teachers that they should consider the value of the lesson and decide if it meets enough of their goals to be worth using, or if they are just using technology for the sake of using technology. In real life, a listener often has to filter out background noise to understand the speaker. Perhaps Audacity could be used to overlay background tracks on speaking tracks (train station noise over track announcements, for example) to simulate real life listening conditions.

Task 4, using Chatbots, is a good reminder to teachers that there are some dangerous things on the internet, and if the teachers plans to use chatbots, she should not just turn her students loose on the internet to find their own chatbot. Many out there seemed linked to dating sites and chatrooms of dubious character. Even if the teacher had safe chatbots already loaded onto the classroom computers, the teacher needs to consider the usefulness of this exercise. The chatbots often have irrelevant responses and could potentially confuse a second language learner, who is trying to rehearse in his mind what the speaker is likely to say. Robin points out that “lowbrow fare” like game shows and soap operas can be excellent L2 tools because of their “reliable amounts of redundancy, high degrees of predictability, and familiar narrative craftsmanship” (110), but the chatbots currently available, although they seem like a simple, lowbrow tool, are not redundant or predictable. They will often answer an identical question with a different answer each time it is asked. However, as Walker and White wrote, it is “worth keeping an eye on developments in this area” (39). Chatbots could become a more useful L2 learning tool as AI develops in the future.

Task 5, speech to text, is an excellent way to practice one’s pronunciation. Newer iPhones have this as a built in tool. I use the dictation feature when I am walking and texting, for example. Having spent 20 years of my life in Texas, it is interesting to see how Siri interprets some of my drawn-out English words. “Hour” sometimes appears as “Ow were”. When I switch my keyboard to German and dictate in that language, it’s thrilling to see Siri correctly interpret and type what I have said in German. (Perhaps I have less of a Texan drawl in German!)

Task 6, Voki, as well as Digital Story Telling  (University of Houston), are creative tools with endless possibilities. Using Voki or creating a website to tell a story requires a student to have clarity of voice, pace the narrative, use economy of detail, and use good grammar and language (from the 7 elements of digital storytelling, University of Houston, College of Education). Those requirements engage all of the necessary speaking skills listed by Walker and White (37): pronunciation, performing speech acts, managing interaction, and organizing discourse. Melissa and I will explore these tasks more for our final project.

When contemplating the difference between “real life” and tech-mediated listening and speaking tasks (with high schoolers in mind), I question how much of a distinction there really is. Many teenagers chat and text via technology more than they converse in person. For them, “in real life” might mean listening and speaking through technological devices. For my situation, in particular, teaching German to high schoolers in America, Task 7, practice in virtual space, might be the closest approximation my students could get to “real life” L2 practice. Unless they participate in an exchange trip, Skype could be the closest they get to speaking with native German speakers. There are sometimes delays over Skype which can make turn taking more difficult than in an in-person conversation, but Skyping with native German teenagers would provide high school German learners the opportunity to practice all of their speaking skills and strategies at once. This would be a great tool for more advanced students, who have already become adjusted to speaking in the L2 through Speech to Text, Voki, and digital story telling.