Chapter 14: In One Ear, Out the Other: Learning To Listen 197
Short, authentic listening texts work because they provide students with a
clear example of real, live English and this is motivating for them because it’s
what they want to be able to do in the future. However, the activities are hard
to prepare and present challenges of unnecessary words and sounds. I give
more information on authentic listening texts such as CDs later in this chapter.Normally your students are confined to the classroom where only your voice
provides a realistic listening situation. Being in front of your students is great
because apart from the words you say, you give other non-verbal clues.The environment you’re in offers a great deal of context and meaning to the
language spoken there. After all, you don’t expect to hear an order for fish
and chips with a pint of beer in a fast food hamburger place. When you look
at the menu in such a place, you realise that there are fairly limited possibili-
ties as to what the speaker can say.In addition, the speaker’s body language varies according to the needs of the
situation. Most people use facial expressions such as smiles and frowns to
match their words and in addition, it’s normal to point at things you’re refer-
ring to or to use emphatic gestures to stress certain words.Of course, a film can record the environment and the body language, which
is very helpful but the communication is pretty one-sided. Your students can
only respond to what’s said on screen. So a film is a little more authentic than
a tape recording (unless you’re practising phone calls or radio broadcasts).If you’re anything like me, the idea of using a video camera, TV and or projec-
tor seems quite labour intensive. To do so you probably need a transcript
and exercise you’ve designed yourself. Some schools just don’t have the
budget for that kind of hardware anyway. Another problem is that when you
record people they get nervous and stop behaving naturally, which results in
bad acting and stiffness. After all that preparation you lose the authentic air
that you’d hoped to capture. But if you just leave the camera running until
the subjects forget it’s there – a sort of Big Brother approach – you may also
get a stream of word whiskers and pausing, which distracts the students.Word whiskers are the meaningless things you attach to sentences to fill the
gaps when you don’t know what to say. They include um and err as well as
other annoying, repeated phrases. How much of this kind of dialogue do
your students need to understand anyway? Here’s an example of how native
speakers can really sound: ‘So I told her yeah. I went... I told her right... um
“You’re out of order!” You know what I mean though. Cause like, she really is’.