Listening: Why Our Learners Struggle and How to Fix It w/Dr. Tamara Jones

Episode Summary:

In this 3rd episode of our TESOL 2025 Presenters’ Series, featuring Dr. Tamara Jones, we explore the common pitfalls of traditional listening instruction in classrooms. Dr. Jones reflects on her own experience of simply playing recordings and offering multiple-choice questions, highlighting that this method primarily provides practice rather than actual teaching. She delves into the challenges of understanding the listening process, both for students and educators, and raises and answers the important question of how to effectively teach listening skills.

RBERNing Questions for this Episode:

1- What are some of the key listening comprehension problems, and what evidence-based approaches do you suggest we take to solve them? 

2- How do you think as educators we got into the practice of "assessing" listening rather than teaching the skills to improve it?

3- What were the measurable results of using some of the strategies you mentioned? What has been some of the feedback you've received from students who have completed these exercises?

Guest BIO:

Tamara Jones has taught in Russia, Korea, England, Belgium and the USA.  She is currently the ELC Academic Manager at Howard Community College in Columbia, MD.  Tamara holds a PhD in Education from the University of Sheffield in the UK and is a co-author of Q: Skills for Success, Listening and Speaking 4 and author of There must be 50 Ways to Teach Pronunciation and There must be 50 Ways to Teach Vocabulary.  She is also the editor of Pronunciation in the Classroom - The Overlooked Essential and co-editor of Listening in the Classroom – Teaching Students How to Listen.  Her research is currently focused on the connection between pronunciation and listening and she is always interested in practical ways to make pronunciation instruction integral to ESL/EFL.

Resources:

Websites/Contact Info:

https://www.howardcc.edu/programs-courses/continuing-education/english-language-center/

Email: tjones@howardcc.edu

To find out more about Mid-State RBERN at OCM BOCES' services, listen to season 1 of the show with host Collette Farone-Goodwin, or to receive CTLE credit for listening to episodes, click here: https://midstaterbern.org/

Transcript

Tamara: 0:00

You've honed in on one of the problems, the biggest problems for our listeners, and that is understanding where one word ends and the next word begins. This is a huge problem for our listeners because in English, we run all our words together. We push words together and we follow specific rules when we do this.

Yasmeen: 0:29

Welcome to RBERNing Questions, a professional learning podcast where we answer your most compelling questions about teaching, serving, and supporting multilingual learners. I'm your host, Yasmeen Coaxum, and through our talks, I look forward to bringing the methods, philosophies, and stories behind teaching multilingual learners to light. Let's get into the show. Welcome to another episode of the RBERNing Questions podcast, and we are in the midst of our series of TESOL Convention 2025 presenters. So today we have with us Dr. Tamara Jones, who did an absolutely wonderful presentation with her colleague, Dr. Marnie Reed, who could not join us today, but perhaps we will have a conversation with her at another time. So the title of their presentation was 10 Language Learners Listening Comprehension Problems and Evidence-Based Solutions. So we're gonna first start off like we usually do. I attended their presentation at TESOL 2025. So that's how we met. And we'll go ahead and start off with some information about what you are currently doing in education at this time. Take it away, Tamara.

Tamara: 2:01

Thank you. first of all, I would just like to say it was so nice to meet you at TESOL. It's always so fantastic to go to those conventions and connect with, uh, professionals that are excited about the same topics that we are. Before I went to the convention, I was feeling a little dispirited, a little overwhelmed, and I left the convention connecting with people like you and feeling really excited about the profession again. So it was great.

Yasmeen: 2:28

Thank you so much.

Tamara: 2:28

So my name, as you said is Tamara Jones, and I am the Academic Development Manager at Howard Community College's English Language Center.

Yasmeen: 2:38

That's out in Maryland, is it? Is that in Maryland?

Tamara: 2:41

That's right. Yeah. It's in Columbia, Maryland. We're about halfway between Baltimore and Washington DC. It's a new role for me. I just started a few months ago and my job is to teach a few classes, which I really enjoy. I love being in the classroom with our adult learners, our students come from all over the world. They're all adults, but they come with a variety of backgrounds. Some of our students have limited or interrupted formal education in their first languages, and some of our students have doctorates in their countries. so we have a wide variety of students and it's really a pleasure to work with them. That's definitely quite a range.

Yasmeen: 3:22

Yeah, exactly. That's really exactly quite a range. Okay. Alright.

Tamara: 3:26

And, the other part of my job is to do things like organize professional development for our teachers. We have about 70 to 75 adjunct instructors within our program, as well as supporting teachers as they join our program, as they're onboarded, and also, part of the job is working with our Intensive English Program students, advising them, helping them choose their classes, and as soon as the semester is over, I'll start supporting our world languages instructors, and also our, adult basic education instructors as well.

Yasmeen: 4:03

Alright. So, I really am curious, I mean, I ask all of my guests this, but how did you get into the profession of TESOL? What inspired you to actually start teaching English language learners, multilingual learners? I see this fabulous, poster of Japan in the back there. Did you perhaps, travel to Japan and, teach?

Tamara: 4:26

I did not.

Yasmeen: 4:26

Just tell us what happened here.

Tamara: 4:27

I just love, I love the poster, but, no, it was, despite coming from a long line of teachers in my family, I never thought I would be a teacher. I actually wanted to be a lawyer or do something with international Law, however, I really wanted to travel and as soon as I finished my bachelor's degree, I wanted to travel overseas. I lived in Russia for a little while and I needed money, and I thought something I could do as, many of us get into I thought something I could do to make a little money way back in 1992, I think, was I could teach something like that, the early nineties anyways, and I thought, well, I can teach. And so I got started and I got a job teaching and I was working with children then, and I absolutely loved it. Like I can remember the exact moment when I realized, oh my gosh, this is what I wanna do. Like I love this. And so I was able to, um, I came back to Canada I'm Canadian, and, I started looking for ways that I could live overseas and teach. I was definitely interested in all things international and I got a job teaching at a Hagwon, an institute in Korea, and so I went to Korea for a couple of years and that was a springboard to various teaching opportunities at several different countries. Eventually landing me in the United States.

Yasmeen: 5:56

Okay. And so how did you go from, and by the way, your story is extremely similar to mine. I just wanted to live in a foreign country just because I had never done it, and then of course there was figuring out, so how am I gonna support myself while doing this? And then I just totally fell in love with it. With it and with traveling and et cetera, and experiencing different cultures. So what made you decide, to hone in on the specific area of listening? Because I see that you've written, a few books, which I didn't know that you were the author of Q Skills for Success Listening and Speaking 4, and I'm pretty sure that I, in fact, I know that I used that book when I was teaching in Turkey,'cause I was like, oh, Q Skills So I was like, oh, really surprised to see that, and then you also were the author of"There Must Be 50 Ways to Teach Them Pronunciation." And you also edited, a book"Pronunciation in the Classroom: The Overlooked Essential." So I understand that your current research is focused on the connection between pronunciation and listening. But first, let's get into how you decided to hone in on this specific skill.

Tamara: 7:19

My interest in listening comes entirely from TESOL and a TESOL convention I attended several years ago. I often choose sessions about the topics I don't know very much, and I was often a conversation teacher. I had taught pronunciation for several, years after being thrown into a pronunciation class and learning to teach pronunciation by staying just a few weeks ahead of where my students were. But listening was a topic that I felt like I didn't really know a lot about, and so I went to some sessions at TESOL on bottom up listening, and specifically a session that really like just it completely, it was one of those pivotal moments where you leave a session thinking, oh my gosh, this is gonna change my teaching. And it's so exciting after being in a profession for 10 or 15 years. To still be learning exciting things, exciting new things. So I felt really energized after attending Beth Shepherd's presentation at TESOL on bottom up listening. And I was so excited about it that I came racing back to my program in Columbia, Maryland, the English Language Center, and I said, I wanna know more about this. Every year in my program we have a study group. It's a geeky, book club where we choose a topic and we do a lot of reading about research and many of us are years out of grad school, so we don't always have the opportunity to read as much research as we'd like. So we choose a topic and we read as much research about it as you can, and for four weeks we meet and talk about the articles and the research that we're reading. And so I said I really wanna do one on bottom up listening because it was something I didn't know anything about, and for years I had been teaching listening the way that so many of us do by going into the classroom, pressing play on the cassette'cause that's how old I am. But, pressing play on the recording, telling students to answer the multiple choice questions or answer the questions, replaying the recording, and then checking the answers and then maybe replaying it a third time for students. But that's how I"taught", and, I'm saying taught very loosely. That's not actually teaching listening. Instead, I was just providing practice or maybe even testing the students' listening, but that wasn't really teaching it. But it had never occurred to me that there was a way to teach listening, because listening happens inside our brains, and it's a very fast process and it's a very hard to understand process, I think. When students don't get something right, why didn't they get something? Right? It's very hard for them to describe why they didn't get something right. It's hard for us as teachers to know why they didn't get something right. And unlike teaching the skill of reading where we teach students how to maybe sound out words and what different letters sound like, and we build up a reading skill from the bottom up, bottom up listening is not something that is often incorporated into our textbooks. It's often not a skill, certainly that I was very, I wasn't familiar with it at all when I came back from TESOL and started doing this reading about bottom up listening, but it totally, completely changed how I approach teaching listening in the classroom, how I approach listening with my students, and since then, of course, I've been lucky to learn so much more and develop relationships with people like Marnie Reed who are also interested in listening and how students listen, and this connection between how we learn to speak and how we learn to listen as well.

Yasmeen: 10:58

So when you talk about, when you say bottom up listening, you just equated it to bottom up reading, right? What's a quick and simple definition of bottom up listening?

Tamara: 11:10

Basically when our ears are hit with a sound stream, right? It's just a set of sounds. And our brain does a lot of things very quickly when listening. We assign sounds to this stream of speech. We differentiate between one sound and another sound. We understand how those sounds go together to form words where one word ends and the next word begins. We understand how those words fit together in an overall stream of speech to make sentences to make utterances, so all of this is happening. You're doing this all, I'm doing this all, the listeners are doing this all really, really, really fast, but that is basically bottom up listening. It goes to understanding sounds, attributing meaning to sounds, understanding how sounds go together to form words, attributing meaning to those words. Understanding again where one word ends the next word begins, and understanding how those words fit into the sentence that they hear.

Yasmeen: 12:12

Now what you were describing before about hitting the play on the cassette player, that is what you refer to in another podcast as product oriented approach, right? The product oriented approach, and that's because we're only concerned with the actual product, which is, did you answer this correctly? Right. So we're concerned with that product and not concerned with the process in order to produce the correct product, which in fact is, the answer to, whatever the comprehension question is. So I'm really curious, how do you think that as educators, we got into this practice of assessing listening rather than actually teaching the skills to improve it?

Tamara: 13:03

That's a great question. And just to be clear, the product and process dichotomy was, introduced by researchers such as John Field and Vandergrift and Christine Goh. And so it's certainly not something that I can claim. I'm just repeating what the experts have said. But, how did we get into this? It partly goes to, I think, without anything other than my own instinct to back this up. I would have to, if I was gonna answer this well, I would like to do a little reading on that, but, I think it maybe comes in part from the communicative approach that we do a lot in our textbooks. Teachers are given a lot of materials to do background building before listening, having students to look at a picture, having students maybe even brainstorm what words they might hear or what the listening is gonna be about. What do they already know about, that topic that they're gonna be listening about? That's often considered top down listening, but we don't provide teachers in our textbooks with much bottom up listening practice. Practice, identifying sounds, practice, with dictations, those kinds of bottom-up activities have really fallen out of favor. Teachers might consider them to be uncommunicative boring, to do dictations, but really students benefit from it and they really need it. Actually it's probably to do with trends in language learning, and partially it's because materials don't often provide that extra practice. And with teachers, we're super busy in the classroom. We have a textbook we have to get through, and often it's very hard to incorporate external activities that will take us a lot of time and prep, even though we know that might be the right thing to do.

Yasmeen: 14:51

Okay, so the podcast that I was referring to was the Speech Pronunciation and Listening interest section of TESOL International's. It was their podcast and it was called SPLIS or S-P-L-I-S. The title of the podcast was Fostering Word Recognition and Listening Comprehension, so having to do with all of those bottom up listening skills that you were just talking about. In your presentation, you suggested some exercises to help students chunk streams of speech, right? You said in that podcast that it's something that all of us do at lightning speed, and so it's really important for us to understand how we can encourage students to do this in a way that will increase their understanding of what they're listening to. So can you share some of these suggested exercises that you presented on chunking streams of speech?

Tamara: 15:54

Sure, and Marnie Reed, and I through Tsol Press, edited a book called Listening in the Classroom: Teaching Students How to Listen. Yes. So some of these activities we're pulling from this textbook. There were multiple wonderful, fabulous authors, and Dr. Christine Goh wrote the forward, so that was quite a feather in our cap for sure. But, so some of these activities come from the book, and that's something, if you're interested in listening, I would highly recommend, you can again buy it through TESOL Press, and in our presentation we talked about, so there's several things happening, right? There's the, the understanding sounds, connecting sounds, differentiating between sounds. But as you mentioned, there's a problem often with separating this stream of speech into words, and that's, Christine Goh her research. I've said her name a few times'cause she really is one of the leaders in research on listening and one of the first that came out with an article. I'm gonna say back in 2000, 25 years ago. She came out with some research and published it called a Cognitive Perspective on Language Learner's Listening Comprehension Problems, and she identified 10 problems that students have with listening. Most of them are related to bottom up listening, this idea of understanding sounds and separating sounds into streams of speech and understanding what was meant, not just what was said or what was meant by what was said. and so as I said, you've honed in on one of the problems, the biggest problems for our listeners, and that is understanding where one word ends and the next word begins. This is a huge problem for our listeners because in English, we run all our words together. We push words together and we follow specific rules when we do this. For example, if one word ends in a consonant sound like some, it ends in a vowel, but it ends in a consonant sound, right? Some is a consonant sound, and the next word begins with a vowel sound like apples. We don't say some. Apples. We say. Some apples. Some apples. So if you're a listener, you might hear some apples and think, I don't know this word. Some apples. I don't know what some apples is or what some apples does. I don't know this word. That's a problem. We also, if a word ends with a consonant sound like some and the next word begins with a similar or the same consonant sound like money, we connect those words as well. Some money. We don't say some money, we make one sound. We also, we do. We do tons of these things. we add sounds in. So for example, if one word ends in a vowel sound and the next word begins with a vowel sound, like, for example, if one word ends with a vowel sound and the next word begins with a vowel sound like go and away, we connect those two by inserting a w sound to glide between go away. So go away. We also change sounds, which is students are just like, why are you doing this to us? But for example, if a word ends in a"tuh" sound and the next word begins with a"yuh" sound, like can't and you, we often connect those words with can't you. So we takeover.

Yasmeen: 19:32

The, yeah, the famous"Ju", JU sound that's like up there in the middle somewhere.

Tamara: 19:36

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. So we do all of this stuff. We do it without thinking about it, and it's not like street English or lazy English or casual English. We do this when we give presentations. We do this as a sign of fluency, and students, you know when you're teaching pronunciation, you teach students how to link, but I often tell them, it's not so important that you do this, although it is a marker of fluency and it is something that certainly will help you be easier to understand. But you don't have to do this, but you have to be prepared to listen to this because we do this. All the proficient English speakers connect words constantly. So it's a real challenge for students to understand where one word begins and the next one ends. And, research has shown that students are often very reluctant to abandon their first guess, even when it doesn't fit the cotext or the context. So, for example, if somebody says, you need to assist her with a project and a student hears a sister instead of assist her, because we cut the h sound off of unstressed pronouns. So it's assist her. Sounds like a sister. And a student hears sister and they stop listening and think, why are we talking about family members now? And it's very hard for them to give up what they understand, even when it's not fitting into the context at all, and then they stop listening and they run into problems because they are missing out on everything else that's coming after because it's like a moment of panic, oh my gosh, I don't, why are we talking about family? And I'm, I have to think about that for a minute before I can reset and start listening again. So it's a real challenge for our students.

Yasmeen: 21:27

Alright, so then what is an example of an exercise that you might suggest to educators in order to help with this?'Cause clearly it's like a fire alarm. We really need to be able to implement some strategies to help with this phenomenon, I guess I wanna call it. Yes, exactly.

Tamara: 21:45

Yeah, exactly. So in terms of, um, helping students deal with what Marnie Reed calls the Izzy Busy phenomenon in which is he busy, those are all very basic words that all students know, but when they're pushed together, they can become unrecognizable for students. There are several things that teachers can do. One of my favorite activities, and this is something that I do with my pre beginning students, and I also do this with my high advanced level students, you can do this with any level of student, you just choose different sentences. So I identify some sentences for my learners, and so right now, for example, I'm teaching, we call it a level five. It would be a, probably a level C1, CEFR level C1 group of students, and we're using a textbook, and so we do the listening activity from the textbook, but then as an extra step, I take out 5, 6, 7 sentences from the listening. I just use a little editor on my editing software. You could use Zoom, you could use anything. Through our LMS, I have a little video editor that I can use and I take a little snippet, a little sentence, and then in class I play the sentence for the students once, twice, three times at regular pace. I play the sentence for students and they have to identify how many words they hear. So they have to use what they know about English grammar and what they know about the English sound system and where words are connected. We, at this point in this semester, we've gone through, some rules about connection, some examples, they've identified things. So at this point they are counting words. And this is an activity that I got from Joe Siegel and Siegel, their work, it's, I just love it'cause it's very low prep. Even if you don't wanna be super organized and have the sentences isolated, you could just play the sentences. Play the sentences for the students a couple times. Have them identify, write down, hold up their fingers, how many words they think they've heard, and then you have to show them. Either write on the board or reveal on your PowerPoint, the exact sentence. Play the recording for the students again so they can see the sentences, see how every word is separated. For beginning students, I would do the exact same thing. I would just choose shorter sentences that are level appropriate for them.

Yasmeen: 24:14

Okay. Excellent, and just kinda looking at all of the wonderful authors of this book, Listening in the Classroom: Teaching Students How to Listen, I see, Joseph Siegel in his chapter three, recognizing Morphological Markers. Is it? Yeah, Morphological Markers for Improved Listening Ability. There are so many really, interesting chapters in this book, such as Parsing Streams of Spoken Speech, which is what we're talking about now. Yes. Yeah, exactly.

Tamara: 24:49

Yeah. And that's a great chapter because that helps teachers think about, teachers like me, think about how, we use our knowledge of grammar to fill in the blank. So in English speech, we don't say every word clearly. We don't speak like this. Some languages do not have a pattern of stress and reduction that English has. In English, we reduce words like function words like prepositions often, articles, pronouns. We don't always reduce these words, but we often do and we do for, kind of neutral speech. So for example, a sentence like, tell him I am home five words, but that can sound like, tell him I'm home. It can sound really like two words. And I do an activity with some of my, students where I will show them one long sentence with a lot of function words. For example, they are buying the souvenirs and posters versus a short sentence with a lot of content words. For example,"The teacher reads the books and slides" or something like that. And when I speak these sentences and I've had students time me because they don't believe that it could possibly take the same amount of time to read because one sentence looks so long and the other looks so short, because the content words are, there's a similar number of stressed syllables, similar number of content words. They actually take the same amount of time to say, or very similar amount of time to say. So if students come from a language or are just because they're learners struggling to hear and identify every word, they won't be able to. We simply don't pronounce every word clearly. So doing things, like are suggested in the book of dictations or having students apply what they know about English grammar, apply what they know about the differences between stressed and reduced words, can be really helpful for their listening. Even if they just understand that they're really only listening for the content word, that in English, it's the speaker's job to say the content clearly and the listener's job to fill in all the gaps with everything they know about the language.

Yasmeen: 27:22

Okay. I really love that exercise. I think that it really gets to the heart of the issue, brings it to the forefront and gives us something tangible in order to bring out better listening skills in our students. So just to recap a little bit for the listeners, we've now discussed two issues, right? So we've discussed,'cause this is a little bit different when we talk about parsing streams of speech. In other words, detecting things like content words versus function words is a little bit different from this, from segmenting streams of speech. Would you say those are two different issues?

Tamara: 28:07

Yes, but Yeah, they're so interrelated because unstressed, for example, unstressed pronouns, that's a reduced function word, but also, we often cut that initial sound off of them, so they become linked, and that just complicates listening for students.

Yasmeen: 28:24

Right. Now can you name maybe two other common issues that you addressed in your presentation?

Tamara: 28:32

Sure. So one of them, as we've touched on, is the problem with students identifying words. The English sounding connection as everyone who has tried to teach or learn English knows, it's a nightmare. Vowels, one vowel sound can be spelled like eight or nine different ways. It's crazy, right? So students in some languages can look at a word and immediately understand how that word is gonna be pronounced because of how it looks. And English does not have that at all. In fact, it can be extremely hard for students to guess how something is pronounced in English just because of this loose sound spelling correspondence. As well, the students run into problems with not recognizing words that they know. They know these words, but they don't understand them when they hear them, because maybe they don't have certain sounds from their L1 repertoire, and a really clear example is the puh buh. In English, we have a voiced buh and a unvoiced p, and that sound differentiates a lot of different words in English. There's a difference between Bob and Pop, right? Parking and barking, but for Arabic speakers that sound is the same sound. And so, when they hear pah they may hear it as buh because they don't have the pah necessarily in their L1 repertoire. And this of course, is especially true for vowel sounds. The English vowel system is quite complicated. Depending on what version of English you speak, it could have 14 different vowel sounds very different for students who come from languages that have five vowel sounds. And there's so many different vowel sounds, and possibilities for misunderstanding, and I found this quite interesting. There was some research done. It was a CATESOL article by Hirata way back in 1998, and this researcher found that when the listeners in his study misheard clearly articulated words, so these are the content words in the stream of speech. When they misheard those 34% of the time, it was because they were substituting one sound for a different sound. So for example, they may have heard, the word defending as depending, uh, because, of the"f""p" contrast. yes. For many students, I'm thinking of, I lived in Korea for a few years, and Koreans don't have the"f" sound. They substitute"puh" which in pronunciation can be its own challenge, but also if they're mishearing that sound, it will lead to them not understanding a content word, which can again, send them off onto this wrong path of why are we talking about dependent? That's a strange choice of a word right here. What are we talking about now? And it really they're listening screeches to a halt momentarily while they try to reset and figure out what they, why they've heard, what they think they've heard. And again, they're often very reluctant to abandon that guess. So what can teachers do about this?

Yasmeen: 31:43

Mm-hmm.

Tamara: 31:43

Well, um, I think I've done a lot of work with my students that kind of goes back to some of the phonics and phonemic awareness activities that many of our K 12 teachers are super familiar with. That, things like, for example, an activity I talked about in the TESOL presentation was Odd Word Out. I prepare a handout containing four rows of four words, three of which contain the same vowel sound and one contains a different vowel sound. So, for example, I might use the words eat, treat, threat and meat. So EAT. T-R-E-A-T. T-H-R-E-A-T and MEAT. Those all look exactly the same, but three of them are pronounced with the E vowel sound and one is pronounced with the EH vowel sound. So I just did this activity last week with my very advanced pronunciation students, and of course this is a pronunciation class, but I think it works equally well with listening. The students work together and they identify the word because their vocabulary is so good. They can identify the vowel sounds that are different. So they work together. They would read, eat, treat, threat, meet. Okay. The threat is the different vowel sound, and they circle that one. If I were working with students who had less proficiency in English, maybe weren't as familiar with as many words, then I read the words to them. I read the entire row, and then they circle the one that is different. For example, I love English Pronunciation Made Simple by Dale and Poms. It's an old book, but it's got some great activities that contrast certain sounds in English to help students really practice hearing the difference. So for example, if I was to say eight, peace, believe, and niece, you can immediately hear, because you are a proficient English listener, that the word eight has a different vowel sound and the other three are the same. But just even giving students practice with phonemic awareness, identifying how sounds are different so that when they're listening, they can maybe get that visual image of the word in their head. Often it doesn't respond with what they're hearing, but if they can hear it, that can be really helpful. And I think also a lot of this comes down to when students are learning vocabulary, they very, very often learn vocabulary from a printed list, and as we know, words do not sound the way, look in English. So when students learn vocabulary, they have to hear the words multiple times. They have to chorally repeat the words multiple times so that they can get practice differentiating between these words, and they can get much better at picking these words out and understanding what they're hearing.

Yasmeen: 34:46

I really think an exercise with Google is fantastic. I often do this in my classes, just entering the word when they're having some fogginess. When we see it on the printed page or on a Google Doc even, I go to Google just for them to listen, right? To hear someone else, the, bot, whatever it is, right? Yes, pronouncing the word right, and then I love how you can learn how to pronounce, you can press that, and then you can see the mouth moving I mean, you know, so integrating technology into this whole process when they're learning vocabulary from the beginning. So for our audience, if you are curious about any of the other problems and the solutions, definitely, I would say taking a look at this book would be in your best interest. So again, it's Listening in the Classroom: Teaching Students How to Listen. One more thing that I wanna ask particularly about this and about these approaches, these methods. So, what were some of the measurable results of using some of these strategies that you've mentioned? Like, for example, what has been some of the feedback that you've received from students who have completed these exercises in terms of it's help in their listening skills?

Tamara: 36:06

That's really interesting that you ask that because I have sometimes heard from publishers and teachers like, oh, but these activities are really, they're good for low level students, but advanced level students, they're listening is already good enough. They don't need to do this. And what I hear from students is, I wish I had been able to do this from the start. My advanced level students, I don't think, and, just to be really clear too, if you don't have time to incorporate a lot of these activities, even just playing the listening one more time and having students read the transcript, that is still bottom up development. They're developing the connection between sound and print, right? So even if you don't have time to do anything else. Every listening activity, the students should be able to at some point, read and listen at the same time.

Yasmeen: 36:57

Yes.

Tamara: 36:57

And students give really positive feedback to that because it is extremely helpful to them to be able to hear and read. And so they really can see where words end, where are they going wrong, what did they miss here? What were the challenges that they found? So those kinds of things can be really helpful. But also I think a lot of students have never really thought about their own listening process before, and so when things go wrong, they just say, oh, it was too fast. It was just too fast. But that might not have been what the problem was at all. And in fact, we don't say a lot of words really quickly. We just say some words really quickly. So, helping students identify what the challenge is, and I think I've just had really positive feedback from my learners just to say that they've enjoyed those lessons, that they help them understand English speech a lot better.

Yasmeen: 37:51

Now, the, but the reason we have to go back to for why students aren't thinking of their listening process is because it wasn't really taught in this way. It was just, listen, oh, you didn't get this answer correct. So we weren't really encouraging that in terms of teaching listening to begin with. So of course they're not really thinking about that. Right? So, if the audience is interested in learning more about your work or they wanna follow up with some projects that you have coming up, what is the best way for them to be able to do that?

Tamara: 38:26

Definitely the Listening in the Classroom book is a great place to start. I wrote a chapter and Marnie wrote a chapter and Marnie's work, definitely if you can have her on at a different time, her work, which we haven't talked about at all, but her work I find so fascinating on implicational intonation and how we use the music of our voice. to communicate things extremely indirectly, but we think we've been super clear. A student walks away with a totally different understanding. She's done a lot of research on that and it's absolutely fascinating.

Yasmeen: 39:02

What is it called? Implicational What?

Tamara: 39:04

Intonation.

Yasmeen: 39:06

Intonation. Okay.

Tamara: 39:07

Intonation. So very briefly, one of my favorite examples, I cite her all the time, is the teacher says,"You CAN turn in the paper late. You can turn in the paper late," which, you know, with that rise and fall on"can".

Yasmeen: 39:21

And we know what that means. That means that we would prefer that you did not do that.

Tamara: 39:27

Exactly. But the listener, the learner hears you can turn in the paper late and walks away thinking Great. I can turn in the paper late. The listener thinks that he or she has understood. The communicator, the teacher feels like he or she has been very clear about their preference. It can be a real mess when it comes to listening, but that is definitely her area of expertise. And so if you can have her back, if you can have her on sometime in the future, I would highly recommend it. And if not, then I recommend the chapter that she's written in that book. So if you are interested in listening, another great resource that will be coming out very soon is the Handbook of Second Language Listening. It's gonna be published by Routledge, I believe. And it has been co-edited by Marnie Reed and John Levis. And so there'll be a lot of great stuff in that book. I wrote a chapter for it on bottom up and top down listening, and also a little bit on metacognitive listening strategies. So when you ask students what happened, what went wrong, and they're able to think about their own listening process, that's a metacognitive approach to listening instruction. And that can be really helpful as we've touched on today. And, if anyone has any questions, they can email me at tjones@howardcc.edu. I'm always happy to talk about listening and listening instruction. It's definitely one of my areas of interest and something that I think I can always improve on as a teacher myself. But I'm definitely happy hearing about what things you've used in your classroom, what things have worked for you, if you've tried any of these strategies. How did they go? What happened? What did your students have to say? So yeah, always interested in talking about listening instruction with teachers.

Yasmeen: 41:15

I'm definitely planning on using this'cause I, I don't do this often. I, I don't know if I've ever done it, have students read the transcript while they're listening, so that's something that I think I might be implementing. Maybe on Wednesday I have my next Conversation and Listening class. that one's really good. Okay. So we've come to the time for me to ask the final question that I ask of all of my guests who come onto the RBERNing Questions podcast. And that is what burning questions should today's educators consider in order to improve their service to the ELL and ML community?

Tamara: 41:52

So I think all teachers, can think about how their listening instruction is supporting their students' actual listening. Yes. And that means that every time we do a listening activity, and even if we're just pulling right from the book and pressing play and pressing stop and asking students to fill in the blanks or answer multiple choice questions. Let's not end there. Let's take one more step and incorporate some of these bottom up activities. And as we're doing that, we can ask ourselves, how can we best support our students, and where is listening going wrong for our students? Asking the students themselves, what happened? Where did the listening go wrong for you? And helping students unpack that can be really helpful. So I think, yeah, how can we best support our students' listening is something that we all need to be thinking about because listening is one of the most important skills. So much of learning about English and learning about content areas or our world around us. So much of that learning, that input comes through listening. So students have to be good listeners and how can we get them to their listening goals?

Yasmeen: 43:07

Okay. Dr. Tamara Jones, thank you so much for joining us here today on the RBERNing Questions Podcast.

Tamara: 43:14

Oh my gosh. Thank you so much for having me. This was a real pleasure.

Yasmeen: 43:32

Thank you for tuning in to RBERNing Questions, produced by Mid-State RBERN at OCM BOCES. If you would like to learn more about today's guest or any of the resources we discussed, please visit Mid-State RBERN's webpage at ocmboces.org. That's OCM. boces.org. Join us next time where we hope to answer more of your burning questions.