Presentation title

CW9. Alternative Listening

Abstract

What happens in the everyday listening classroom is fairly routine. Students spend a lot of time being prepared for listening and then answering questions that often test rather than developing listening skills. Neither of these activitivities has much to do with real-life listening. This workshop explores two ways of changing this routine. Part A of the workshop looks at how BBC materials available on the web can be exploited to create interesting and semi-authentic tasks for students. Part B looks at the advantages of doing authentic listening with short reports on the National Public Radio website. It outlines a project where students produce their own quizzes on NPR reports and present them to their peers. While both approaches presented in the workshop aim to develop listening skills, another key benefit for learners is gaining confidence that they can do real-life listening tasks successfully.

Presenter 1

Rob Blake, Mr.
Sultan Qaboos University
Rob Blake has been working at the  L.C for three years and  a member of the curriculum unit for two. His interests are the challenges for Arabic students in  acquiring  literacy in English and using internet resources in the classroom.

Presenter 2

Nicholas Hilmers, Mr.
Sultan Qaboos University
Nicholas Hilmers has taught Foundation Programme courses and credit English language courses at SQU since 2009. He has also taught English in the US, Sweden, Austria, Kuwait and Japan. His professional interests include vocabulary acquisition and and authentic listening.

Form of presentation

Certified Workshop