The entire lesson should be focused specifically on speech. You need to perceive all exercises precisely as preparation for speech, as steps to conversation.

It is absolutely not necessary to be able to read and write to have a conversation. At all! To have a conversation you just need to be able to:

• listen
• understand what you heard (this is about listening in class; I had articles and videos on this topic)
• know how to react

To know how to react you need to know:

• how words are pronounced, what intonation the sentence has
• speech etiquette
• what form does the word have (in what case is it used, etc.)

Why do I like students to hear the word first? Because it becomes easier for the teacher to teach how to pronounce this word correctly. If a word is learned not from hearing, but from a graphic version, then we need to read this word out loud several times. If you don’t do this, then your eyes will remember it, not the muscles of the speech apparatus. But it is better, of course, to use pictures rather than a graphic version of the word.

The same thing happens the other way around. If you have learned words by ear, you need to show how they are written and read, again connecting what we see with what we hear. Therefore, all the exercises from the Activity Book need to be spoken in order to establish a connection between the eye and the ear, with the word that we heard with its writing, and then we can do the task. When the speaking stage is skipped, nothing will come of the letter in the Activity Book. I write about this all the time in the Teacher’s Book.

To reinforce the pronunciation of words, we repeat them several times. You need to give your muscles time to get used to the word and sentence. How do we repeat? Sometimes purely mechanically. For example, I ask you to repeat three times: велосипед, велосипед, велосипед.

This is the technical side of things, and many teachers make the mistake of skipping this step. Yes, each word needs to be spoken several times, and later you must return to the same word (after 15 to 20 minutes) to consolidate what you have learned.

I have articles and videos about oral drills in class.

When students have learned to recognize a word in speech and when they have learned to pronounce this word, you can start a conversation. It doesn’t have to be anything complicated. It could be a simple question: Что это? — Это карандаш. Кто это? — Это мама. Где ручка? — Вот.

You can play games such as bingo or guessing games. I wrote and spoke a lot about them, and there are many of these games in the textbook Soroka and Sarafan.

We start the conversation with dialogues and only with them! The answers in the dialogues will most likely be monosyllabic: да, нет, вот. This is how it should be at the initial stage.

Monologues should be used at higher levels of language proficiency and for older students. There are no monologues in the Soroka course, because of the age of the students and the low level of Russian proficiency.

In general, Soroka’s entire textbook is about speaking. In the lesson we teach words to recognize and pronounce, and then use them at the right time. We talk in class.

What to do with grammatical forms of words?

In Soroka we study each new form of a word as a separate word. Those велосипед и велосипеда are two different words. And we teach them immediately in the right situation (нет велосипеда) and with the right ending. The student does not think about what the genitive case is, but what the ending is. This is a separate word; it is used in such and such a situation.

I already had articles and videos about output to speech.

And, by the way, my textbook is aimed specifically at speech. Write questions in the comments. Also write how you put it into speech and what you do for it. Best wishes!

1. Understand the teacher’s commands that must be followed: слушай, читай, повтори, скажи, подними руку.

2. Respond to tasks or commands: Повторите, пожалуйста! Извините, я не понял(а). Да, конечно. Можно?

3. Listen and repeat pairs of words: живот – он живёт, мы живем – живьем, цел – цель, полет – польет, был – бил, мыло – Мила, бить – пить, жар – шар.

4. Listen to the wordsчей – чай – чья, шьем – шутка – шьют, сел – съел – съесть, порт – Петр – пьет, and find each of them graphically. This version of the task is in “Soroka” in the work on reading with cards, but this is also a listening task. There are several cards on the table. The student hears the word and chooses the card on which the desired word is written. This is such an easy option for children.

5. Identify rhyming words by ear, mark them with numbers (пример, премьер, ножом, ружьем).

6. Listen to pairs of syllables (words, sentences), write in the graphic key (on the card), plus (+) if the syllables (words, sentences) are the same, and minus (-) if they are different.

7. Listen to the questions, and mark in a graphic key what a possible answer is:

• Вопрос: Сколько времени?

• Ответы: Сейчас холодно; Сейчас 2 часа; В два часа

8. Listen to the phrases, and mark in the graphic key the words that are named (names, geographical names, company names, etc.)

9. Dictation. Listen to the text, and try to understand its content. Listen to the text, and write (or draw, like in our Surikov dictation).

10. Listen to the phrases, and write the type of intonation structure. A lightweight option for children who walk along “Soroka”: Each has two cards in their hands — on one there is a “+,” and on the other there is a “?”. The teacher reads sentences with different intonations. When students hear a question, they pick up a card with a question mark (?); when they hear a regular declarative sentence, they pick up a card with a plus sign (+).

11. Listen to the text (watch the video), fill in the gaps in the graphic version of the text.

12. Listen to a series of words, remember and reproduce from them those that relate to one topic (the topic is named in advance).

13. Listen to the phrases, and combine them into one sentence (two to three short phrases are presented). You hear: Девочка сидит. Мальчик сидит. Вы говорите: Девочка и мальчик сидят.

14. Listen and repeat the phrases after the speaker (teacher). (Their length exceeds the capacity of short-term memory, i.e. consists of 10 or more words). Вчера наши студенты играли в футбол со студентами соседнего университета и проиграли.

15. Listen to the phrase, and add one more to it that is related in meaning.

• Вы слышите: Я живу в Нью-Йорке.

• Вы говорите: Я живу в Нью-Йорке. Это большой и красивый город.

16. Story with a picture: A picture of a city, a portrait or a series of portraits accompany the story. You need to understand what in the description does not correspond to the picture.

17. Story with a picture, No. 2: Put a series of pictures in the sequence in which they are described in the sound recording.

18. “By telephone” instructions are given on how to get (or walk) to a certain place. You need to draw a route on a map (city diagram). In “Soroka” there are pictures with which you can do this task.

19. One student talks about his house, the second draws a house plan.

20. Two students have lists that are different from each other. At “Soroka 3” we work with lists. One student reads his list aloud, the second compares it with his own.

There are other listening tasks in the book “Learning to Teach,” but they are intended for students at a higher level than we have in “Soroka.” Therefore, if you’re interested, read pages 85 and 93 of “Learning to Teach” for yourself. And those who have already worked on “Soroka” saw that the Teacher’s Book already contains many of these tasks. They were written specifically for the textbooks “Soroka” and “Sarafan.” I would say that Sarafan has more listening tasks.

As usual, write in the comments what you use in your work, and what you like or don’t like. How do your students feel about listening exercises?

If you study according to “Soroka” and use all my recommendations, then from the first lessons your students will learn to hear and understand spoken language addressed to them. And this is exactly what we need in the classroom. We remember that our work order is as follows: listening, speaking, reading and writing. And listening comes first. Let’s all go listen! Best wishes!

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.

I would like to start with the fact that we begin to learn a language through our ears. As I was taught: “Language is initiated through our hearing.” This is a natural process.

When a child lives in a linguistic environment, he constantly hears the language, which is spoken by people around him. Then a child starts to recognize words and to repeat them. His speech starts to form in his native language (the language of his environment).

When Russian language is a foreign language for a child, he practically does not hear Russian language around himself. This means that teachers (and parents) need to make efforts to have a child exposed to more Russian speech. Audio files for the Student’s Book help us in this effort.

I can already hear your question,

“Why are there audio files for the Student’s Book, and not any other audio files?”

The answer is simple. In fact, there are no any restrictions here. You can listen to other audio files as well. But audio files for the Student’s Book are great for the following reasons.

First of all, they contain all those words that we learn in our Student’s Book and a child knows them.

Second of all, audio files contain different voices. Sometimes a person knows a word but cannot recognize it if it is said by a different person (i.e., voice). With the help of the audio files, we learn to hear and understand different voices.

And finally, audio files for the Student’s Book are easy to download on your smartphone and easy to listen to wherever you are.

How do we work with them?

1. We simply listen to the audio file (passive perception), upload the content into our subconscious, and soak in a rhythm and the sound of the new language. We can turn on the audio file and start doing our chores, talking while the audio file plays in the background. This is one of the exercises, and it does not require lots of effort.

2. We listen and repeat. We are getting ready for a conversation, training muscles of our speech apparatus and learning to pronounce Russian words. This does not require any special efforts, either. We can do any of our chores (water our flowers, wash dishes, pick up things) and simultaneously repeat the words and sentences after the announcer.

3. We listen and read a text with the announcer. This does require a special effort. Here you need the text from the Student’s Book in front of your eyes. You need to relate a written text to the verbal text. This exercise will pay off since we learn to read the text, the sentence or the word correctly. We immediately hear (not guess) the intonation and where the emphasis falls. This will be helpful for your speech. Initially we stop the audio file after each word or sentence and read after the announcer. Later we listen and repeat without stopping the audio file.

4. We listen and point at the picture of an object that we just heard. We connect a picture to an object we heard on the audio file. You need to have the Student’s Book for this activity since it contains all the necessary pictures.

5. We listen and write (this is dictation). You need to stop the audio file during a dictation. You need to prepare for the dictation in advance. For example, you can copy texts or words and solve crosswords or anagrams, which are offered in the Teacher’s Book and the Activity Book.

I want to assure you that working with audio files at least 10 minutes a day will help your students to reach significant results in learning Russian language as a foreign language.

In conclusion, I would like to mention that audio files for Student’s Books of the Soroka and the Sarafan courses can be downloaded for free from my website: SorokaM.com.

Please write your questions in the comments section below.

Have a good day!

Turn on English subtitles

Speaking requires someone who listens to you.

If you are a speaker at a conference or in a classroom, your language level is good enough to give a presentation like that. But I assume that you are a beginner. If you are a beginner, before you go speaking make sure that you understand what you listen to — practice listening and understanding first, don’t jump into speaking.