41 – Dealing with feelings

In listening classes we do not deal sufficiently well with the difficulties that students are facing, in particular their feelings about their own abilities. So in a listening class, we focus on the correct answers, praise the students who got them, and then move on to something else. But many students (a) may not have got the right answers and (b) may feel privately dreadful at their lack of ability to decode the recording.

So I was first intrigued and then delighted when Fred Gordon (of The London School of English), at the 2018 IATEFL conference in Brighton, described one of the advantages of using the dictogloss listening activity was that his students realised that

everyone else is doing equally badly, which is great.

How can ‘doing equally badly’ be ‘great’?  The key is in the word ‘equally’ and all will become clear as you read on, but it’s worth giving an outline of Fred’s talk first. (You can see a recording of his talk here.)

Fred’s talk

The title was ‘Authentic Listening at lower levels – Responding to how Learners Feel’. So although his ‘badly-great’ comment was associated with dictogloss, his talk was principally about the use of authentic recordings in the classroom.

His themes

His themes were that teachers should:

• learn and act from their own experiences as language learners
• apply what they have learned in their own teaching
• be sceptical about standard practice that you learn on training courses
• move away from a correct-answer approach
• directly address feelings – especially the negative ones

This last theme, addressing feelings, is the one we focus on.

His own experiences

Fred spoke of his own experiences both as a learner of French at school, and as a learner of Spanish in adult life. At school, whenever a listening activity in French class came up, he experienced a ‘dim panic’ and would find it isolating.

In adult life, he was employed as a teacher of English in a small Spanish town – a complete beginner in Spanish. After a while there, he described meeting people he knew on the street, one of whom asked him a question which he failed to understand even after the third repetition of the question. He was told ‘There’s a problem with your hearing’. He felt awful, humiliated.

From learner experience to teacher reasoning

Although this experience was an emotional shock he could still reason to himself – ‘As a teacher I knew it was not my fault that I did not understand’. He knew the blame lay with the fact that language teaching (of whatever language) fails to prepare people for real-life listening. Materials have little resemblance to real-world conditions: the recordings are slow, clear and there is a lack of connected speech (by which I think he means Nolan and Kerswill’s (1990: 295) ‘the fluent continuous speech performance of everyday life’).

The difficulties are caused by the contrast between language-learning materials and real life speech. Additionally there is a focus on getting correct answers, on success and failure – and is demotivating, and therefore there is a lack of engagement with the texts.

A lovely question

He then asked himself this lovely question:

How would I feel if I didn’t know it wasn’t my fault?

This is a lovely question because it took him into his students’ situation: they don’t have the wisdom of knowing that their classroom materials don’t teach them everything. His students wonder ‘I study English, why don’t I understand?’ Fred realised that if he were in their situation (without the knowledge that would help them reason out why they were not succeeding in listening), he would continue to feel stupid and alone in his stupidity, that it was ‘just him’.

What he chose to do in practice was to abandon closed questions which require correct answers and opt for open questions plus discussion.

This approach would he feels, remove the feeling of inadequacy-in-isolation (‘it’s only me’).
Instead of closed questions he recommends asking:

• How do you feel? (It’s a question they can all answer)
• What do you think about the recording?
• Why do you think that?
• AND for almost any text, at any level, the question before listening ‘How much do you think you will understand?’

Fred’s summary

The fear of being incorrect, the culture of right and wrong leads to a lack of proper exposure to authentic texts. In class we have a great opportunity to encounter authentic texts safely so that people feel comfortable and supported, and they experience positive outcomes.

Although it might seem very risky to use authentic recordings at lower levels, it pays off.

Great talk, I recommend it – it’s here.