Active Listening - Communication Skills Training from MindTools.com Listening is one of the most important skills you can have. How well you listen has a major impact on your job effectiveness, and on the quality of your relationships with others. For instance: We listen to obtain information. We listen to understand. We listen for enjoyment. Given all the listening that we do, you would think we'd be good at it! Turn it around and it reveals that when you are receiving directions or being presented with information, you aren't hearing the whole message either. Clearly, listening is a skill that we can all benefit from improving. Click here to view a transcript of this video. Tip: Good communication skills require a high level of self-awareness. About Active Listening The way to improve your listening skills is to practice "active listening." In order to do this you must pay attention to the other person very carefully. If you're finding it particularly difficult to concentrate on what someone is saying, try repeating their words mentally as they say them.
On Language, Texting, & Being I can speak some French. I took it all through school but learned it mostly when writing my dissertation which involved several French books that were, at the time, not yet translated. And for the books that were translated, I read the French not for accuracy per se but to get a sense for the writing — its style, its rhythm, its mode of being. Now, I love translations. I find the act of translation as amazing and erotic (such intimacy with another) as it is impossible (however actual). Anyway, at that point, my French wasn’t terrible (this was 15 years ago). We imagine, perhaps, that language is a tool much as, say, a hammer is. But that’s not how language works. And each language is different, asks different things of us — the French tu wants something different from me than the German du and, in the process, makes something different of me. When I was in grad school, I had to prove proficiency in two languages so, other than French, I chose classical Greek. Oh, was I wrong.
10 Best Free Listening Websites with Quizzes to Practise for Listening Exams So what do you do to practise listening for exams? Growing up, I never had the opportunity to do any extra practice to improve my listening skills. We didn’t have the Internet and the thousand possibilities it offers to learners of any language nowadays. So, exams are just around the corner and I know you’re beginning to freak out. These are, in my opinion, the best sites with quizzes to practise listening comprehension. url: three main levels (beginner, intermediate and advanced)Pre-listening /Post-listening activities: noTranscript: yesAudio Download: noWhat I like best: it has some other listening activities like dictations or listening based on pictures for lower levels. Check also:
What we know about second language acquisition Education researcher and trainer Dylan Wiliam tweeted this abstract today. The study concerned has analysed 71 peer-reviewed studies in order to find out the optimal conditions for learning a second language. Here is the relevant part for teachers of French in the UK, or teachers of English in France: (1)... L2 learners with little L2 exposure require explicit instruction to master grammar; (2) L2 learners with strong L2 aptitude, motivation, and first language (L1) skills are more successful; (3) Effective L2 teachers demonstrate sufficient L2 proficiency, strong instructional skills, and proficiency in their students’ L1; (4) L2 learners require 3-7 years to reach L2 proficiency, with younger learners typically taking longer but more likely to achieve close-to-native results. Point (3) raises an interesting question: are native French speakers teaching in the UK, and perhaps with imperfect English, at a disadvantage in some cases.
BusyTeacher.org While these are crucial concepts, others are equally important. What follows is an assortment of alternative ways to teach listening, some quite simple and others based on many years of research. In each case, I will explain each one briefly and give you a suggestion for using it in class. Get the Entire BusyTeacher Library: Dramatically Improve the Way You Teach Learn more 9 Different Ways to Explore Listening 1Affective ListeningAffective listening (not to be confused with effective listening) refers to listening with the student motivation at the forefront. In conclusion, I’d like to point out that not all of these concepts may be useful in your classroom. Your students might prefer a competitive listening game over applying metacognitive awareness to their burgeoning listening skills. Resources: AFFECTIVE LISTENINGRost, M. and Wilson, JJ. 2013. AUTONOMOUS LISTENINGRost, M. and Wilson, JJ. 2013. COMPETITIVE LISTENINGHorrigan, M. 2013. EXTREME LISTENINGWebb, C. 2016. Bilbrough, N. 2014.
Les personnages dans La Peste Séquence 2 Nous allons étudier le roman de Camus en Oeuvre Intégrale (OI) : vous devrez avoir la connaissance la plus fine possible de ce roman. Comment faire ? Lire le roman, mais surtout le relire et l'annoter ! En effet, d'ici la fin de l'année, vous aurez tellement lu qu'il vous faut des notes pour retenir tout cela ! (photo de zimpenfish) Lire, c'est bien, mais relire, stylos et petits papiers en main, c'est mieux ! BusyTeacher.org YouTube, as well as websites such as wikihow.com, instructables.com, and soyouwanna.com, have an incredible assortment of guides on how to do almost anything, from cutting up onions to making paper airplanes. In this article, I’m going to explain how to adapt a video tutorial into a listening lesson for your ESL/EFL classes. How-to videos contain a number of features which makes them perfect for exploitation in the ESL/EFL classroom: authentic English with natural pronunciation content that relates to everyday life a wide range of topics that can be used images and (in some cases) titles and subtitles which make the meaning clearer the pleasure of learning a useful skill and new English vocabulary at the same time The following sections will guide you through several steps of planning for using a how-to video in class. In addition, I will share a few videos you might want to use, and provide some links to websites for finding more videos. Searching for the Right Video Planning Your Lesson
The many reasons (29 so far) why we DON'T succeed in learning languages, and retorts for why we can. Let's hear your reasons/solutions in the comments! Today’s post is my serious attempt to collect every possible reason why we don’t learn a language in list format, and to offer possible suggestions to overcome them, or to request your solutions to these problems! I will be updating this list to add new reasons based on your comments. (Note that in the post after this, I am looking for the opposite to reasons why we can’t and I want to hear your success stories that could potentially inspire millions of people!) I am genuinely going to try to get the number of reasons and their possible retorts up to the high double digits, because I want there to be no more excuses for us to remain monolingual throughout our lives. If any of these apply to you, please consider my reply to them seriously and follow the links in each point to blog posts where I dive into it in more detail. As an engineer, I do feel many problems can be looked at analytically and a possible solution offered up when you think about it logically enough! 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.
Some interesting resources for listening at basic levels | English in Soria VOA news: News in easy American English, with transcripts.ESL Lab: An interesting site with a lot of listening exercises.YouTube SpeakOut videos, e.g. The videos are useful and interesting, but don’t have transcripts or activities (though watching and trying to understand is an activity!). Enjoy them, and please tell me if I could add any to this list! Like this: Like Loading...
Bilingual Mind: Understanding How the Brain Speaks Two Languages Learning to speak was the most remarkable thing you ever did. It wasn’t just the 50,000 words you had to master to become fluent or the fact that for the first six years of your life you learned about three new words per day. It was the tenses and the syntax and the entire scaffolding of grammar, not to mention the metaphors and allusions and the almost-but-not-quite synonyms. But you accomplished it, and good for you. Humans are crude linguists from the moment of birth — and perhaps even in the womb — to the extent at least that we can hear spoken sounds and begin to recognize different combinations language sounds. “Before 9 months of age, a baby produces a babble made up of hundreds of phonemes from hundreds of languages,” said Elisabeth Cros, a speech therapist with the Ecole Internationale de New York. (MORE: How Terror Hijacks the Brain) Excelling on the Stroop test is hardly a marketable skill, but what it suggests about the brain is something else.
100 Ways to Improve Your English — #2 Podcasts - The English Blog If you’re not familiar with podcasts, here’s a definition : "a podcast is a digital audio recording, usually part of a themed series, that can be downloaded from a website to a media player or computer". I spend a lot of time listening to podcasts on my iPod when I’m at home doing the dishes, on the bus or train, or just out walking. My favourite podcasts would probably not be suitable for most learners of English (except those at a very advanced level), but the good news is that there are dozens of podcasts available specifically for learning English — and they’re a wonderful way to improve your listening skills. TIPSubscribe to you favourite podcasts using iTunes or another service to make sure you don't miss any episodes.
Visible Thinking Routines for Blogging Our school‘s fabulous PE teacher, Claire Arcenas, is bringing blogging to her PE classes. She is incorporating Visual Thinking Routines to help her students become reflective commenters. In a recent planning session, she reminded me of the book Making Thinking Visible by Ron Ritchard, Mark Church, and Karin Morrison, that I had download but not read yet. We then started diving into the core routines outlined on Visible Thinking from Harvard University. The core routines are a set of seven or so routines that target different types of thinking from across the modules. Each one of these routines seemed well suited to help guide students in quality blog post writing as well as commenting. Here is our first attempt: Blogging as Information/Research Research- What have you read that has informed your position? Purpose– What kind of thinking is involved- To make sense of a concept that I am trying to understand or wrapping my mind around. Blogging as Reflection Blogging as Documentation
How to be a good listener: the experts' guide | Life and style A close friend was going through a terrible time this summer. As she cried to me on the phone in her lunch break or over coffee at the weekend, I tried to be the best friend I could. I told her to focus on the friends and partner who love her, suggested therapy and exercise to alleviate her stress, and gave her advice as to what she might say and do to change her situation. I’ve always prided myself on being a good listener. Maybe I’ve got one of those faces: partners, friends, colleagues, even strangers at the bus stop seem to want to confide in me. On day one, in my first training session, I realised to my horror that I wasn’t a very good listener at all. How to listen to a friend who is down The first step, Pam says, is being aware of the barriers. The hardest habit for me to break was the instinct to turn the conversation round to the positive. It is possible, when you know how, to say a lot without saying anything at all. Your most important tool, she says, is silence.