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TESOL SUMMER INSTITUTE: TEACHING LISTENING AND SPEAKING BY SALLY LA LUZERNE-OI During June 1994 and 1995, I participated in the Summer Institute on Current Methods and Practices in TESOL, a teacher training program held in Vinnytsia and Kharkiv. My role was to present a six hour module on the teaching of listening and speaking to groups of Ukrainian teachers of English. Discussing second language acquisition, materials development, and testing were objectives of this module. The enormous amount of information about any one of these topics, along with my limited knowledge of the teachers’ expectations, made planning the two-week module (at least the first time) almost as difficult as planning a semester course. With so little time and so much to cover, I decided to limit the theoretical aspect of the module to providing the rationale for experiential activities. For example, language teachers sometimes ask students to listen to a tape or a spoken passage without giving them a reason for listening. I referred to studies showing the most effective listening practice occurs when students are told what to listen for. In other words, they should be provided with questions, grids or charts to focus their listening. After this brief introduction, I asked the teachers to participate in a listening activity to de monstrate the practical application of the theory. During our introductory session, my students had introduced themselves to me and so it was my turn to tell them about myself. But before doing so, I asked them to write the words hometown, brothers/sisters, children, interests and holidays. Thus, when I talked about myself, the students had reference points on which to focus while listening. Other experiential activities included listening to directions and drawing, listening to a story and per forming an action, and listening in order to predict what would happen in a story. We discussed how these activities could be adapted for classes at beginning, intermediate and advanced levels. The teachers felt that the activities which encouraged predicting were the most useful, but by the end of the first two hour session, I felt that the teachers needed to improve their own listening skills before passing on this novel technique to their students — on more than one occasion, I had to ask them to stop talking to one another and listen! From this introduction to listening, the module moved into a combination of listening and speaking activities with an emphasis on student-centered and communicative activities. One of the current theories about language learning is that students learn better by trying to communicate pertinent ideas with a partner or in small groups rather than by simply carrying out repetition drills or answering decontextualized questions fired at them by the teacher. In a student-centered classroom, the teacher circulates among the groups and facilitates the work in role playing, guessing games or information gap exercises. Many of the Ukrainian teachers in my classes said they were aware of these communicative skills and how to conduct them, but admitted that these techniques are not always put into practice. In a society where the traditional role of the teacher has been that of rigid and abritrary class manager, it is not easy for a teacher to loosen the reigns of control and some feel that if they are not in front of the class lecturing or drilling, they are not teaching. In addition, classrooms with tables nailed to the floor are not conductive to group work. Yet the room configuration did not keep the teachers from standing up and mingling with their colleagues in order to complete a variety of experiential exercises. Most of the time in the listening and speaking module was spent on activities which the teachers, for the most part, enjoyed doing and it was not unusual to hear moans when I announced the end of an activity. I had hoped to incorporate more discussion of how the teachers could adapt the materials or develop similar materials to suit their own teaching situations, but, perhaps because of time constraints, they did not seem very interested in pursuing this idea. Handouts with activities which they could plug into their lessons were most appreciated. During the Summer Institute in Kharkiv and Vinnytsia in 1994, I was surprised at the excitement when, in the last 45 minutes of the module, I showed the teachers a sampling of evaluation forms for oral presentation. I later wondered why I had found this suprising as the evanescene of speech makes is particularly difficult to evaluate. Indeed, there is always a lot of discussion and debate among my colleagues at Hawaii Pacific University about grading speaking and listening skills. By their excitement, the Ukrainian teachers in my classes were merely corroborating the attitudes of my American colleagues. Because of the interest in the evaluations, I decided to expand that part of my module for the 1995 Summer Institute. In addition to various evaluation forms, I showed my a copy of a syllabus from a listening and speaking class which I teach in Hawaii. Both the evaluation forms and the syllabus focus on the weight of class participation, oral projects, vocabulary quizzes and an oral final exam — individual components that together determine a student’s final grade for the class. This time the enthusiasm and interest were even greater ’НАШЕ ЖИТТЯ”, СІЧЕНЬ 1996 19
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