Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Emma Halliday LSA 2: Helping Learners Listen To Broadcast News
Emma Halliday LSA 2: Helping Learners Listen To Broadcast News
Emma Halliday LSA 2: Helping Learners Listen To Broadcast News
Contents
Emma Halliday LSA 2. Helping Learners Understand Broadcast News.
2
Page 3 Introduction.
Page 15 Bibliography
Introduction
Many students ask for guidance on how to practise their listening outside
of class. With the rise in volume of news media online and on TV, listening
to the news seems like good advice. Students have easy access to
authentic, current material, a variety of topics, types of discourse and
accents; something which course books often lack. Although challenging,
this kind of listening gives students information about world events, the
target culture and brings the world into the classroom.
Types of Listening
There has been growing recognition that we do not listen to all types of
information in the same way; we don’t process all discourse as though it
were equally interesting or worthy of being remembered (Richards C. ,
1990). One news watcher may watch the Six O’clock News every night to
decide if there is something of interest. This type of low level monitoring
only requires the listener to have a general understanding of the text. If
they then detect a story which has some particular relevance, they will
pay much closer attention.
BBC World News I’m Phillipa Thomas, here are today’s headlines.
In this utterance listeners will use their bottom-up processing skills to:
Top-down Sub-Skills
Content Knowledge
When a listener hears this headline they will use their top-down
processing skills to match what they hear with what they already know
about strike action, the locality and the London Tube system. They will use
the news footage to make hypothesis about content confirming or
rejecting these predictions as they listen. They will use their previous
experience of strikes to anticipate the type of lexis that will be used, to
guess words, to compare it to other similar strikes, infer possible travel
disruption or political repercussions.
As the story unfolds, the audience is assumed to already have the back-
story, fitting together the sequence of events and inferring unstated
information. Trade union members, rail privatisation, and strikers hold
loaded meanings to a British listener. This shared cultural knowledge will
allow a British listener to follow the story much more easily than their
American counterpart.
Discourse Knowledge
Expert listeners use their knowledge of the genre and format to orientate
themselves to different parts of the programme. A football enthusiast
knows that sport news often comes at the end of the programme and that
starts with premiership football followed by first and then second division.
If the listener is only interested in her football results she only has to pay
close attention to the end of the programme.
Problem 1
I’ve found Arabic students in the early stages of learning have a tendency
to try and understand every word of a text. When students don’t achieve
this, it can lead to a feeling of failure. This is a particular problem in mono
-lingual environments. This could be because students are only exposed to
graded listening material. It’s graded by the course book, their teacher or
by other students who can translate, if there is a breakdown in listening
comprehension. I’ve noticed students studying in English speaking
environments have a much higher tolerance of ambiguity as they are
surrounded by a high volume of incomprehensible material. Rost states
that L2 listeners must learn to cope with “genuine” speech and
“authentic” listening situations (Rost, 2002).
Solution
Procedure:
Evaluation: I use this activity with low level learners and I’ve found this is
often their first exposure to authentic spoken English on the TV. The task
is very achievable, low pressure and fun. As Tennant argues, at lower
levels, listening tasks should focus on helping students feel competent
and believe in their ability (Tennant, 2011). This is a good prediction
activity even at higher levels, especially for students who are
apprehensive about their listening ability. Students can watch footage of a
news story and do the same activity.
Problem 2
Solution
Aim: Students will learn about history and politics of Scotland. Students
listen and respond to news interviews on the Scottish referendum.
Procedure
Give students a map of the whole UK and ask them to try and draw
the borders of all four countries.
Live listening. Tell students the history of the UK over the last 1000
years with the aid of different maps, showing changing borders and
occupations. Introduce the debate around Scottish Independence.
Ask and answer any student questions.
Students work together to think of possible advantages and
disadvantages of Scottish Independence for Scotland.
Students watch 6 vox pox interviews from the news in which
members of the public give their opinion on the debate. Students
listen and say whether each person is for or against independence.
After each interviewee pause and let students check their ideas
together.
Ask students if any of the interviewees expressed the same ideas as
they did about the advantages/disadvantages of independence.
Ask students how they would vote if they were Scottish. Pair
students up with someone with opposite point of view and tell them
they have to try and convince each other to vote the same way as
them.
Problem 3
One of the major issues students have is the perceived speed of news
discourse but it could be students’ unfamiliarity with the rhythm of news
discourse rather than its pace which causes difficulty. I’ve found Italian,
Spanish and Turkish and students find hearing unstressed words
particularly problematic; this is probably due to these languages being
syllable-timed.
Solution
Procedure:
Problem 4
When teaching CPE exam classes in Poland, I found that while students
comprehended almost the entire news programme, they often took the
information at face value. This could be because news programmes are
generally presented in class material as transactional; functioning to
communicate information from the speaker to the listener. While at higher
levels, students are expected to analyse newspaper discourse more
critically, I’ve found this isn’t true of broadcast news.
Solution
Procedure
Use two or three news reports from different channels covering the
same story. I’ve found BBC News, Al Jazeera English and France 24
to be good sources for these activities.
Give students words from two reports and ask them to define and
say if it has a positive, negative or neutral meaning.
Students to listen for the words in the reports and decide whether in
the context of the story the word is used positively, negatively.
Students check together. Students listen again; writing the words/
phrases preceding and following the target lexis. Students discuss
together how the co-text and context can influence the literal
meaning of a word.
Bibliography
Bell, D. M. (2003). TV News in the EFL/ESL Classroom: Criteria for Selection. TESL
EJ.
Carol, & Cunningham Florez, M.-A. (1999). Crticial Literacy for Adult English
Language Learners. Centre for Adult English Language Aquisition.
Tennant, A. (2011). Listening Matters: Process Listening. Retrieved June 11, 2015,
from http://www.onestopenglish.com/:
http://www.onestopenglish.com/skills/listening/teaching-tips/listening-
matters/listening-matters-process-listening/154594.article
Torres , M., & Mercado , M. (2006). The Need for Critical Media Literacy. Retrieved
June 15, 2015, from http://journalism.uoregon.edu/:
http://journalism.uoregon.edu/~cbybee/j412_u09/NeedCriticalMediaLiterac
y2006.pdf
Usó, J. (2006). Current Trends in the Development and Teaching of the Four
Language Skills. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & co.
Van Duzer , C., & Cunningham Florez, M.-A. (1999). Crticial Literacy for Adult
English Language Learners. Centre for Adult English Language Aquisition.
Ya-Jun, Z. (2007). Schema Theory and its Application in Teaching Listening for
non English Major Undergraduates . Sino-US English Teaching.
Yang. (2010). The Influence of Schema & Cultural Difference on L1 and L2.
English Language Teaching.