PEER SPEAKING AND LISTENING – COLLABORATIVE CHRISTMAS COLOURING-IN DICTATION
Daniela Bunea, Colegiul Național „ Gheorghe Lazăr” Sibiu
Abstract: Learners of English as a foreign language need to be given opportunities to use the language in formal and informal conversations within contexts that are meaningful and realistic. When teaching the skill of listening, exposing students to the“ top-down” way of processing information supports them in learning the language in an integrated way – learners start from their background knowledge and keep re-evaluating information. If students are to gain experience with different types of listening texts, they need to work with a variety of tasks. One such task is described in this paper – it is a short and focused listening-for-specific-information task that allows students to use a few well-balanced listening strategies, i. e. predicting, inferring, monitoring, clarifying, responding and evaluating.
Key words: listening, speaking, dictation, collaboration, peers, task.
Motto:“ I learned to listen with all my being.”( Eric Clapton, British musician)
In the communicative classroom, learners of English as a foreign language need to be provided with multiple opportunities to use the language for both meaning- and formfocused instruction. By the same token, starting from very young ages, students should be given, as often as possible, suitable chances for language use in formal and informal conversations within contexts that are meaningful and realistic.
When teaching the skill of listening, exposing students to the“ top-down”( as opposed to“ bottom-up” – as first named by D. E. Rumelhart and A. Ortony back in 1977) way of processing information supports them in learning the language in an integrated way. With top-down processing, learners start from their background knowledge, either content schema – general information based on previous learning and life experience – or textual schema – awareness of the kinds of information used in a given situation. Learners keep however re-evaluating information, as locking into an interpretation too early might lead them to missing pertinent, perhaps contradictory information.
What students are listening to during a task is one of the points, but not the main point – it is what students are listening for that is of paramount importance. Listeners do need to consider their purpose. Learners need to work with a variety of tasks if they are to gain experience with different types of listening texts.
Nonetheless, students need experience with production tasks as well. At least half of the time people are speaking is indeed spent listening. Consider authentic spoken language – it is more redundant than written language, abounds in false starts, rephrasing and elaborations, and incomplete sentences, pauses and overlaps are common. Peer speaking-and-listening tasks in the classroom can take the form of well-prepared activities to foster learners’ listening comprehension as well as self-confidence, self-esteem and self-efficacy, in an attempt to redeem the“ Cinderella skill”( D. Nunan, 1999), as listening has been labelled.
An illustration of such a peer speaking-and-listening task will follow. Assuming that the valuable teaching technique that we call dictation is most effective when it involves known vocabulary and when there is opportunity for repetition of material, the collaborative Christmas colouring-in dictation activity I am describing below is a relevant sampling of an adaptation of a short and focused listening-for-specific-information task.
Christmas preparations at school have always been a bit of a child’ s play in my classroom. All my students have at some point handled themselves into working / learning / playing about Christmas, and what follows is a description of the 100-minute lowpreparation, fun activity I often do with my youngest, aged 11 – elementary students of
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