Today I will talk about the main shortcomings when working with listening in an RFL (Russian as a foreign language) lesson, and what needs to be done to avoid them. At the end, we’ll see what happens with listening in the “Soroka” and “Sarafan” textbooks (especially in “Sarafan,” where there’s more listening).
Today the book “Learning to Teach” by A.A. Akishina and O.E. Kagan will help me. This book has long been a classic for RFL teachers. If you haven’t read it, I highly recommend it. Now let’s start with the shortcomings.
1. As I already said, often listening as an element of a lesson or homework is completely absent. The teacher believes that his Russian speech in class is listening, although this is not enough. What do we have to do? Listening should be a constant element of the lesson. When planning a lesson, the teacher must include special work on listening. Listening should be a constant element of homework. At least once a week, students should listen and perform exercises based on the material they have listened to without relying on visual perception.
2. The teacher tries very hard and removes absolutely all difficulties before the audio text; this happens when the preparatory work before the test is too much. This results in the student ceasing to be an active listener. On the contrary, it is necessary to teach the student to listen actively.
3. When offering an audio text, the teacher rushes to translate all incomprehensible words and phrases. This is also bad — it accustoms the student to constant prompting.
4. The opposite situation also happens — when the teacher does not give any hints at all, no context, and believes that students should understand everything themselves. The teacher repeatedly recites (or plays) some text; and the students, just as they did not understand from the very beginning, still don’t understand. What should be done? The teacher should imagine how difficult the audio text will be for the student, and whether they’ll be able to cope with the difficulties themselves (by not rushing to help, but rather developing a guess) or whether a hint is required. It is necessary to constantly teach students to “grasp” the main meaning so that they do not strive to understand every word.
5. The teacher, offering a text for listening, allows students to view (read) it. This also applies to subtitles. In this case, listening skills do not develop.
6. When offering a student a text for listening, the teacher doesn’t set listening goals: what the student needs to hear, and why he will listen to it. When offering audio texts, you need to set a goal — why you need to listen to this text: 1) to get the necessary information (to formulate what exactly), 2) to express your attitude to this event, and 3) to compare this information with what is already available, etc.
7. Oral types of speech (dialogue, polylogue) in class are, at best, simply read aloud. And often they are missed altogether. What do we have to do? It is best to give dialogues or polylogues first orally. At the same time, the teacher kills two birds with one stone: develops listening skills and introduces new text. From the point of view of modern methodology, it is not recommended to consider work on dialogue as work on reading.
What’s in “Soroka” and “Sarafan”? In my speeches, I constantly say that we have an order of working on the material: listening, speaking, reading and writing. As you already know, listening comes first here. I’ve already made a video about how to work with audio files in a lesson on “Soroka.”
I have a video tutorial for the “Soroka” textbook where I talk about the order of work (listening, speaking, reading and writing) and why this particular order is important to us.
We have free audio for lessons. Using these audio files you can introduce dialogues orally, as I already said today. The “Soroka” and “Sarafan” textbooks contain many tasks on listening and listening comprehension. For example, the dictation “Surikov.” There is a task to carry out commands: Show me where the red car is. This, too, is not an exercise in listening and understanding. Well, our favorite games are also about listening and listening comprehension.
Tell me in the comments what exercises you use in your lessons with your students. If you found the information useful, put + in the comments.
Later I will show different types of listening tasks and give examples of listening exercises.
