My grandchildren in Vancouver attend French immersion school. This means that their classes, most of them, are in French. French immersion is very popular amongst English-speaking parents, because it enables their children to go to a school where there are fewer special needs learners.
On the positive side, students in French immersion develop good French reading skills. However, they understand spoken French fairly well, but only fairly well, after years of French immersion school. Their speaking skills and pronunciation are not as good as they should be, in my opinion. They have a strong vocabulary, and therefore can easily learn to speak the language well if they are motivated to do so and have the opportunity to speak a lot.
However, at school, the only French they hear comes from their teachers. I remember when I was in school, I didn’t always listen very attentively to my teacher. The other students were usually quite a distraction, or maybe I spent most of my time trying to distract them. I don’t remember. Listening to the teacher in the classroom is not enough. I would like to see the kids be assigned listening on MP3 players in order to improve their comprehension and pronunciation, but also to develop the skill of listening.
Most of my language learning time is spent merely listening. I do this all the time while performing other tasks. Yet some people claim that they are unable to focus while listening in this way. I feel this is a skill that can be developed. Probably it is an important skill to develop while kids are at school. If people develop the ability to download audio lessons and listen and learn, they can use a lot of dead time during the day to acquire knowledge and skills in various fields, throughout their lives. Listening is a powerful way to learn!
You won’t be surprised to know that I think LingQ is an excellent way to develop listening skills. Children could be assigned interesting content to listen to and read, and asked to save words and phrases (create LingQs) from these texts. Their knowledge of these saved words and phrases could easily be reviewed on the cloze tests that are a part of the LingQ system, as a measure of their activity and to motivate them to complete the assignments.
Compared to the enormous cost of our school system, and our expensive university system, the tiny little MP3 player could be a powerful yet inexpensive tool, if only people were trained to listen.
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1 comments on “Developing Listening Skills”
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Hi Steve
I wondered when you are listening during that dead time, does that mean active listening? Do you actual focus on what you’re hearing? I always find it hard to be attentive throughout a track if I’m doing something else. I sort of fade in and out of it picking up the gist but not sure if I could say what the entire conversation/piece was about. Do you think this is okay? Is it okay for it to be something going on in the background? Another thing I do find invaluable with listening on a regular basis is I think it is helping in my new study of Chinese. Here I’m not worried about meaning I just want to hear the sound of the language. Perhaps to hear tones. Do you think that listening in this way is also useful?
Anne