Chapter 14: In One Ear, Out the Other: Learning To Listen 199
Try http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer for fairly current BBC shows first broadcast
on TV and radio. I also use Channel 4 programme archives, which are free.
Access http://www.channel4.com and register for their 4oD service, which offers
a wide variety of shows to download. Another favourite is http://www.lbc.co.uk
offering podcasts from their London radio station. It’s a talk station that
invites ordinary people to call in and discuss current affairs. You can scarcely
find a more cosmopolitan bunch than the residents of London so there’s still
an international feel to the programmes.In a lesson you can only usually deal with a few minutes of listening text at a
time, so select clips from longer recordings that are appropriate to the level
and interesting to analyse. If your students have Internet access you can set
longer listening tasks as homework. They can listen to extracts of 20 minutes
or so in preparation for a class discussion the following lesson. Although
students do sometimes become anxious when they hear the unfamiliar, texts
downloaded from the Internet are easy for the students to access by them-
selves for personal study at another time.Accommodating accents
Hearing authentic listening material designed for native speakers is very
motivating for your students, but you face a serious problem where there are
many accents to deal with.When you teach pronunciation, you generally use whatever is considered
to be Standard English in your country and your own accent as models.
Suddenly you realise that in the TV clip you want to use there’s a heavy
Newcastle accent, some Liverpool dialect and a New Zealand speaker too.
Well, there’s a difference between recognition and imitation.A good way to deal with unusual accents is by adapting a tape-script for your
students. This means turning it into a ‘fill in the gaps’ type exercise where
students can read along and just fill in certain words pronounced in a fairly
regular way. Or, they have to put complete lines of the dialogue into the cor-
rect order. So even if they don’t catch every word just by listening they can
still complete the task with the support of their reading skills. The accents
then become incidental. In both cases you’re connecting listening and read-
ing so that students learn to match the sound and spelling of the language.When you model pronunciation you actually want them to speak like you
or as similarly to you as possible. When you expose your students to other
accents, however, you help them to get used to the reality of English as a
diverse and global language.Accents are different from dialects, which feature entirely different vocabulary
and grammatical structures.