Teaching and Assessing ELLs' Listening Skills with Listenwise
Listenwise is a website that offers teachers free admission to curated public radio stories and podcasts along with supporting materials that have a special emphasis on current events every bit well as other content areas. Listenwise also includes resources that are specially helpful for ELLs, such as interactive transcripts, tiered vocabulary lists, graphic organizers for active listening, and reduced speed audio. (Larn more about these resources as part of Listenwise'due south Premium features for schools.)
In this article written for Colorín Colorado, Listenwise'due south founder, former public radio journalist Monica Brady-Myerov, shares what she has learned near pedagogy and assessing listening for students, especially ELLs.
A Question That Changed My Life
For many years, I reported on pedagogy equally a public radio journalist. My career was in audio storytelling, and I had experience covering politics and organized religion as well. Just I was also a female parent with two immature kids. And it was one morning time at breakfast when I was listening to NPR with my children as we even so practice every morning that my daughter asked a question that changed my life — and I hope the lives of many students.
"What is waterboarding?" she asked. She was in the threerd course at the time, only 7 years one-time. I didn't think she was listening to the story nearly the CIA torture method, let alone understanding it and having questions. I wrongly assumed she was tuning it out. Only she was absorbing information technology at a college level than I could have imagined. If I had given her the transcript of the story to read, there was no way she could take understood information technology. But she listened and understood. That was the moment I realized that there's a wealth of amazing content on public radio that just needs to be unlocked for eye and loftier schools students, and it was the moment that Listenwise was built-in.
Listenwise in the Classroom
Helping ELLs Improve Their Listening Skills
Every bit we built Listenwise into a library of public radio stories effectually ELA, social studies, and science curriculum themes, we were developing a resource that gave teachers an engaging mode to teach topics such as the offset of World State of war 2, Black History, or Women'south History through audio stories. Only we were also building something bigger: a tool that helps teachers focus on and amend the skill of listening. I soon learned there was a real desire on the part of teachers to help kids better their listening skills, but they had very few resources available to assist them in that endeavour. For example, if you Google "listening skills", you get about seven meg responses, and nearly of them are about building amend listening skills within your sales team or among business executives. Just in that location's very trivial well-nigh students improving their skills — particularly for English language learners (ELLs) who want to improve their linguistic communication skills through listening.
For ELLs wh
o are at an intermediate level and higher up (for instance, WIDA level 3 or college), these public radio stories are a keen way to expose them to conversational English and advanced vocabulary. Listening is a great blaster, allowing ELLs to access the aforementioned content as native speakers while they are improving their language abilities. Students' receptive vocabularies can be at least two class levels college than their expressive vocabularies. So when students listen to stories with more difficult vocabulary, they stretch their receptive abilities. This as well helps them develop a personal context for the vocabulary and retain the meanings.
In many schools, pedagogy listening every bit an important skill falls away after students acquire to read, but we have seen more schools starting to pay attention to this core language development skill. The Common Core has recently given Speaking and Listening more attention every bit an Anchor Standard and focuses on these skills on the SBAC tests in many states. Withal there have been no K-12 tools devoted to building listening skills...until now!
Tracking and Testing Listening Skills
To meliorate a skill, yous must first be able to test and track information technology. And I speedily establish that, merely equally in that location weren't many resources to teach listening skills, there was no online listening measure that could runway key listening skills as identified past research.
Nosotros began research to create formative assessments to integrate into our curriculum collections for like shooting fish in a barrel integration into instruction without additional testing time. Our curriculum squad established a listening skills matrix to identify the viii fundamental elements of listening that nosotros wanted to appraise and how they align to the Common Core Country Standards:
- Literal
- Principal Thought
- Vocabulary
- Speaker's Purpose and Betoken of View
- Summarizing
- Inferencing
- Analyzing Speaker's Reasoning
- Finding Evidence
These elements are seen in reading assessments and are useful skills to master when listening as well. For instance, when students are able to hear a speaker's vocalization, they tin can pay attention to the tone, emphasis, and pacing of the speech to make inferences and place the speaker's point of view. The kinds of natural speech constitute in these stories is not organized as a well-written essay, with a topic judgement or linear progression of ideas, so students need to do identifying and summarizing the most important ideas in the audio.
Creating Listening Quizzes
Once the important elements of listening were identified, we were set to starting time writing listening quizzes based on our library of public radio stories, but nosotros faced a challenge. It was difficult to notice test writers with experience writing questions to assess listening. The closest we could find was people who wrote test questions for reading tests. So we hired experienced reading particular writers.
To review the questions, our team and some students took the quiz. Nosotros plant that on nigh of the key elements of testing listening, their questions and our answers lined up. Only in the questions about the chief indicate of the story, there was always something a little off. The main betoken question posed by the test writers wasn't wrong, exactly, but it wasn't always what I or our editor thought was the main point of the story. Why was that?
I asked our particular writers to walk me through the procedure of how they created the quiz. They received the consignment, they were given the audio file and the transcript, and they started writing, referring continually to the transcript.
"At what point in this process do they listen to the story?" I asked.
The reply: they weren't listening to the story. They were reading the transcript and basing the questions on the text, every bit you would a reading test.
Nonetheless they weren't writing reading tests — they were writing listening tests! And uncovering this flaw in the procedure highlights the very reason why a listening test is and then important. Once the quiz writers started listening to the sound, the questions they wrote were more connected to the experience of listening to the story — feeling the emotions and putting themselves in the experiences heard in the story, and not only the facts and details.
When you hear a radio story where people speak in their ain words, you come away with something different from if y'all read the same story. Researchers who report how audio affects attention and memory believe that listening requires more from your encephalon. The brain sees what it hears — this is what nosotros telephone call auditory scene analysis. Every time a person hears something the brain visually simulates what it hears. A number of researchers phone call this concept "immersed experience view." Your brain is making a film, including the sights and smells of what information technology'south hearing.
Listening is the pathway to empathy. Good stories told aloud permit the listener to connect emotionally to the people speaking — make them feel something. This makes listening an extremely visual medium with great potential for use in instruction and learning. It helps students put themselves in someone else's shoes and really feel that feel.
Have our listening claiming!
Endeavour out listening to one of these fascinating stories, feel the immersive experience for yourself and run across how your listening comprehension skills line upwardly with our listening claiming.
How Teachers Are Using Listenwise
Teachers are using these Listenwise quizzes to assemble data on student listening skills, and there are also a number of teachers using quizzes with English language linguistic communication learners. The preliminary results are the same — students' listening skills can improve with our quiz. Teachers are seeing that students proceeds vocabulary through context after multiple listens, and are particularly interested in stories that are culturally relevant. One EL teacher said, "I teach students from many different countries. These stories often describe similar situations to those my students have lived through, which allows them to ain their learning."
Another EL instructor in MA, Julia Zemetres, institute that her students liked using the slower audio when they took the quizzes. Most of her students would mind twice before answering the comprehension questions. "Listenwise has prompted me to adapt my teaching. With the Listenwise Grade Summary Report, I can see that my ELLs' inferencing, summarizing, and analyzing skills are consistently weak. Therefore, I will incorporate lessons where students tin can continue to implement these valuable skills to what they read and hear."
We hope teachers use these quizzes to encourage students to understand that listening is a discrete skill that should be practiced and tin be improved. And for students learning to speak English they can challenge themselves to hear many different voices in a fun engaging manner. We've found that public radio really works well for students learning English. It's natural, accurate linguistic communication, the topics are current and engaging, and students become to hear various voices of dissimilar ages, accents, and dialects.
The pairing of content and language teaching is critical for English learners to develop the academic skills and bookish vocabulary necessary to improve their language and exist successful in meeting standards. We are so glad that Listenwise is now function of the toolkit that teachers take at their disposal to help their students proceed their successful linguistic communication development.
Sign up for Listenwise
Acquire more about how teachers are using Listenwise and sign up for a free Listenwise account on the website, which gives you access to podcasts and current events features. You can likewise acquire about Premium features for schools, such as interactive transcripts, listening quizzes, assessment reporting by listening skills, standards-aligned lessons, differentiated assignments, reduced speed audio, tiered vocabulary, and progress monitoring.
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Source: https://www.colorincolorado.org/blog/teaching-and-assessing-ells-listening-skills-listenwise