LLAS Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies

The Listening Log: exploiting listening opportunities beyond the classroom

When Erasmus and Study Abroad students come to the UK they are exposed to a great deal of language in their new environment. This exposure presents them with a wealth of listening opportunities, many of which can be exploited for learning and skills development. This paper explains why the Listening Log was introduced and what it entails. Samples of Listening Log entries will be used to illustrate how keeping a Listening Log can encourage learners to apply skills covered on the course and reflect on their own performance, thus achieving autonomy.

Teaching and assessing phonetic transcription: a roundtable discussion
This report is from the 2nd meeting of the Phonetic Transcription Group held on 3 May 2007 in the Dept of Linguistics and Phonetics, University of Leeds. Attendees represented a number of different perspectives and specialisms, including general phonetics, clinical phonetics and phonology, corpus linguistics, sociophonetics, English language.

Listening: theory and practice in modern foreign language competence
Second language (L2) listening comprehension is a complex process, crucial in the development of second language competence. Listeners use both bottom-up processers (linguistic knowledge) and top-down processes (prior knowledge) to comprehend. Knowing the context of a listening text and the purpose for listening greatly reduces the burden of comprehension. Teachers can help students develop sound strategies for comprehension through a process approach to teaching L2 listening. This will help students learn how to listen and develop the metacognitive knowledge and strategies crucial to success in listening comprehension.

Spanish: processing instruction
These materials set out the principles behind processing instruction. Processing instruction materials are reading and listening activities. The aim is to design tasks such that learners have to show that they have attended to the meaning of specific target features when they are reading or hearing sentences in the target language. These target features are those which a) appear to be slow to be acquired in production, b) have differences with the learners’ L1 and/ or c) are likely to be ‘ignored’ by learners when they normally hear or read the languages because the features are communicatively redundant (i.e. there are other clues in the input which communicate the same meaning, e.g. intonation, syntax, lexical items).

Danish: Speak Danish website
An online Danish language learning site for beginners. This free interactive course includes lessons in pronunciation, grammar and common phrases.

REAL Reading and Listening for Adult learners of Dutch, Greek, and Swedish
A suite of reading and listening materials developed as part of an EU Lingua Project and in association with the TELL Consortium. Reading: Integrated suites of reading exercises, each containing a number of independent units based on an authentic text in the target language. Available in Dutch, Greek, and Swedish. Listening: Integrated suites of listening exercises similar to Reading Units and in the same languages, except that each exercise is based on an authentic audio passage in the target language

Chinese: Language skills for Britain: dissemination of best practice
Over two years, from 2000 to 2002, within the framework of the FDTL 3 programme of the Teaching Quality Enhancement Fund, Oxford's Institute for Chinese Studies has developed an experimental approach to non-intensive teaching of Mandarin Chinese. It goes counter to conventional teaching strategies by isolating particular skills and focusing a teaching programme exclusively upon each one. The aim has been to learn through experience how much can be achieved with volunteer beginners in each distinct skill, and to devise materials which can contribute flexibly to teaching or learning regimes serving individual needs. The four-phase project has dealt with three basic skills – reading, speaking, listening – followed by the needs of native Cantonese speakers embarking on spoken Mandarin. In each case a pedagogical specialist from China, Taiwan or Hong Kong has spent a month in Oxford developing material, and a student-teacher from China or Taiwan has spent four months in Oxford working with a class of volunteers. Achievements and results have been monitored through systematic testing, and the whole programme kept under regular review at the national level by a seminar of professional Chinese language teachers

French: Listening comprehension - Club Méditerranée - transcription exercise
This is an audio transcription exercise aimed at first year Undergraduate French students. The recording gives information on the holiday firm Club Méditerranée and the kind of clients it attracts. There are buttons on screen which the user can click at any time to hear the whole recording or a short section of it. The user is advised to begin by listening to the whole recording at least once without trying to type anything, and then to listen section by section, typing what they s/he has heard. The user is allowed 3 attempts at each section, after which the work is checked for mistakes and automatically marked. The "Show Answer" button brings up the correct response and allows the user to proceed without scoring any points. During the course of the exercise the full correct transcript is compiled on the right of the screen. This exercise was created using Authorware. Provided the resources are in the same folder, double clicking the file '3clubmed' should launch the programme.

MS-Office exercise and lookup templates (Nottingham, 6 July 07)
Event date: 6 July, 2007
Location: University of Nottingham

MS-Office exercise and lookup templates (Aston, 3 July 07)
Event date: 3 July, 2007
Location: Aston University

Listening Materials for French: off the peg and home grown
Event date: 13 February, 2002
Location: CILT, London