Teaching Lisening Strategies from César Narváez Vilema
Goals and Techniques for Teaching Listening
Integrating Metacognitive Strategies
Using Authentic Materials and
Situations
Strategies for Developing Listening Skills
Listening Strategies
Listening for Meaning
Developing Listening Activities
Construct the listening activity around a contextualized task.
Define the activity's instructional goal and type of response.
Check the level of difficulty of the listening text.
Use pre-listening activities to prepare students for what they are going
to hear or view.
Match while-listening activities to the instructional goal, the
listening purpose, and students' proficiency level.
Using Textbook Listening Activities
Integrating Listening Strategies With Textbook Audio and Video
Strategies for Developing Speaking Skills
1. Using minimal responses
Reading Purpose and Reading Comprehension
Reading as a Process
Goals and Techniques for Teaching Reading
Focus: The Reading Process
Integrating Reading Strategies
Using Authentic Materials and
Approaches
Reading Aloud in the Classroom
Strategies for Developing Reading Skills
Using Reading Strategies
Reading to Learn
Developing Reading Activities
Construct the reading activity around a purpose that has significance
for the students
Define the activity's instructional goal and the appropriate type of
response
Check the level of difficulty of the text
Use pre-reading activities to prepare students for reading
Match while-reading activities to the purpose for reading
Using Textbook Reading Activities
Assessing Reading Proficiency
Reading Aloud
Comprehension Questions
Authentic Assessment
Teaching Listening

Listening is the language modality that is used most
frequently. It has been estimated that adults spend almost half their
communication time listening, and students may receive as much as 90% of their
in-school information through listening to instructors and to one another.
Often, however, language learners do not recognize the level of effort that
goes into developing listening ability.
Far from passively receiving and recording aural
input, listeners actively involve themselves in the interpretation of what they
hear, bringing their own background knowledge and linguistic knowledge to bear
on the information contained in the aural text. Not all listening is the same;
casual greetings, for example, require a different sort of listening capability
than do academic lectures. Language learning requires intentional listening
that employs strategies for identifying sounds and making meaning from them.
Listening involves a sender (a person, radio,
television), a message, and a receiver (the listener). Listeners often must
process messages as they come, even if they are still processing what they have
just heard, without backtracking or looking ahead. In addition, listeners must
cope with the sender's choice of vocabulary, structure, and rate of delivery.
The complexity of the listening process is magnified in second language
contexts, where the receiver also has incomplete control of the language.
Given the importance of listening in language learning
and teaching, it is essential for language teachers to help their students
become effective listeners. In the communicative approach to language teaching,
this means modeling listening strategies and providing listening practice in
authentic situations: those that learners are likely to encounter when they use
the language outside the classroom.
Goals and Techniques for Teaching Listening
Instructors want to produce students who,
even if they do not have complete control of the grammar or an extensive
lexicon, can fend for themselves in communication situations. In the case of
listening, this means producing students who can use listening strategies to
maximize their comprehension of aural input, identify relevant and non-relevant
information, and tolerate less than word-by-word comprehension.
Focus: The Listening Process
To accomplish this goal, instructors focus
on the process of listening rather than on its product.
- They develop
students' awareness of the listening process and listening strategies by
asking students to think and talk about how they listen in their native
language.
- They allow students
to practice the full repertoire of listening strategies by using authentic
listening tasks.
- They behave as
authentic listeners by responding to student communication as a listener
rather than as a teacher.
- When working with
listening tasks in class, they show students the strategies that will work
best for the listening purpose and the type of text. They explain how and
why students should use the strategies.
- They have students
practice listening strategies in class and ask them to practice outside of
class in their listening assignments. They encourage students to be
conscious of what they're doing while they complete listening tape
assignments.
- They encourage
students to evaluate their comprehension and their strategy use
immediately after completing an assignment. They build comprehension
checks into in-class and out-of-class listening assignments, and
periodically review how and when to use particular strategies.
- They encourage the
development of listening skills and the use of listening strategies by
using the target language to conduct classroom business: making
announcements, assigning homework, describing the content and format of
tests.
- They do not assume
that students will transfer strategy use from one task to another. They
explicitly mention how a particular strategy can be used in a different
type of listening task or with another skill.
By raising students' awareness of
listening as a skill that requires active engagement, and by explicitly
teaching listening strategies, instructors help their students develop both the
ability and the confidence to handle communication situations they may
encounter beyond the classroom. In this way they give their students the
foundation for communicative competence in the new language.
Integrating Metacognitive Strategies
Before listening: Plan for the listening
task
- Set a purpose or
decide in advance what to listen for
- Decide if more
linguistic or background knowledge is needed
- Determine whether to
enter the text from the top down (attend to the overall meaning) or from
the bottom up (focus on the words and phrases)
During and after listening: Monitor
comprehension
- Verify predictions
and check for inaccurate guesses
- Decide what is and
is not important to understand
- Listen/view again
to check comprehension
- Ask
for help
After listening: Evaluate comprehension
and strategy use
- Evaluate
comprehension in a particular task or area
- Evaluate overall
progress in listening and in particular types of listening tasks
- Decide if the
strategies used were appropriate for the purpose and for the task
- Modify
strategies if necessary
Using Authentic Materials and
Situations
Authentic materials and situations prepare
students for the types of listening they will need to do when using the
language outside the classroom.
One-Way Communication
Materials:
- Radio
and television programs
- Public address
announcements (airports, train/bus stations, stores)
- Speeches
and lectures
- Telephone
customer service recordings
Procedure:
- Help students
identify the listening goal: to obtain specific information; to decide
whether to continue listening; to understand most or all of the message
- Help students
outline predictable sequences in which information may be presented:
who-what-when-where (news stories); who-flight
number-arriving/departing-gate number (airport announcements); "for
[function], press [number]" (telephone recordings)
- Help students
identify key words/phrases to listen for
Two-Way Communication
In authentic two-way communication, the
listener focuses on the speaker's meaning rather than the speaker's language.
The focus shifts to language only when meaning is not clear. Note the
difference between the teacher as teacher and the teacher as authentic listener
in the dialogues in the popup screens.
Strategies for Developing Listening Skills
Language learning depends on listening.
Listening provides the aural input that serves as the basis for language
acquisition and enables learners to interact in spoken communication.
Effective language instructors show
students how they can adjust their listening behavior to deal with a variety of
situations, types of input, and listening purposes. They help students develop
a set of listening strategies and match appropriate strategies to each
listening situation.
Listening Strategies
Listening strategies are techniques or
activities that contribute directly to the comprehension and recall of
listening input. Listening strategies can be classified by how the listener
processes the input.
Top-down strategies are
listener based; the listener taps into background knowledge of the topic, the
situation or context, the type of text, and the language. This background
knowledge activates a set of expectations that help the listener to interpret
what is heard and anticipate what will come next. Top-down strategies include
- listening
for the main idea
- predicting
- drawing
inferences
- summarizing
Bottom-up strategies are
text based; the listener relies on the language in the message, that is, the
combination of sounds, words, and grammar that creates meaning. Bottom-up strategies include
- listening
for specific details
- recognizing
cognates
- recognizing
word-order patterns
Strategic listeners also use metacognitive
strategies to
plan, monitor, and evaluate their listening.
- They plan by
deciding which listening strategies will serve best in a particular
situation.
- They monitor their
comprehension and the effectiveness of the selected strategies.
- They evaluate by
determining whether they have achieved their listening comprehension goals
and whether the combination of listening strategies selected was an
effective one.
Listening for Meaning
To extract meaning from a listening text,
students need to follow four basic steps:
- Figure out the
purpose for listening. Activate background knowledge of the topic in order
to predict or anticipate content and identify appropriate listening
strategies.
- Attend to the parts
of the listening input that are relevant to the identified purpose and
ignore the rest. This selectivity enables students to focus on specific
items in the input and reduces the amount of information they have to hold
in short-term memory in order to recognize it.
- Select top-down and
bottom-up strategies that are appropriate to the listening task and use
them flexibly and interactively. Students' comprehension improves and
their confidence increases when they use top-down and bottom-up strategies
simultaneously to construct meaning.
- Check comprehension
while listening and when the listening task is over. Monitoring
comprehension helps students detect inconsistencies and comprehension
failures, directing them to use alternate strategies.
Developing Listening Activities
As you design listening tasks, keep in
mind that complete recall of all the information in an aural text is an
unrealistic expectation to which even native speakers are not usually held.
Listening exercises that are meant to train should be success-oriented and
build up students' confidence in their listening ability.
Construct the listening activity around a contextualized task.
Contextualized listening activities
approximate real-life tasks and give the listener an idea of the type of
information to expect and what to do with it in advance of the actual
listening. A beginning level task would be locating places on a map (one way)
or exchanging name and address information (two way). At an intermediate level
students could follow directions for assembling something (one way) or work in
pairs to create a story to tell to the rest of the class (two way).
Define the activity's instructional goal and type of response.
Each activity should have as its goal the
improvement of one or more specific listening skills. A listening activity may
have more than one goal or outcome, but be careful not to overburden the
attention of beginning or intermediate listeners.
Recognizing the goal(s) of listening
comprehension in each listening situation will help students select appropriate
listening strategies.
- Identification:
Recognizing or discriminating specific aspects of the message, such as
sounds, categories of words, morphological distinctions
- Orientation:
Determining the major facts about a message, such as topic, text type,
setting
- Main idea
comprehension: Identifying the higher-order ideas
- Detail
comprehension: Identifying supporting details
- Replication:
Reproducing the message orally or in writing
Check the level of difficulty of the listening text.
The factors listed below can help you
judge the relative ease or difficulty of a listening text for a particular
purpose and a particular group of students.
How is the information organized? Does the
story line, narrative, or instruction conform to familiar expectations? Texts
in which the events are presented in natural chronological order, which have an
informative title, and which present the information following an obvious
organization (main ideas first, details and examples second) are easier
to follow.
How familiar are the students with the
topic? Remember that misapplication of background knowledge due to cultural
differences can create major comprehension difficulties.
Does the text contain redundancy? At
the lower levels of proficiency, listeners may find short, simple messages
easier to process, but students with higher proficiency benefit from the
natural redundancy of the language.
Does the text involve multiple individuals
and objects? Are they clearly differentiated? It is
easier to understand a text with a doctor and a patient than one with two
doctors, and it is even easier if they are of the opposite sex. In other words,
the more marked the differences, the easier the comprehension.
Does the text offer visual support to aid
in the interpretation of what the listeners hear? Visual
aids such as maps, diagrams, pictures, or the images in a video help
contextualize the listening input and provide clues to meaning.
Use pre-listening activities to prepare students for what they are going
to hear or view.
The activities chosen during pre-listening
may serve as preparation for listening in several ways. During pre-listening the
teacher may
- assess students'
background knowledge of the topic and linguistic content of the text
- provide students
with the background knowledge necessary for their comprehension of the
listening passage or activate the existing knowledge that the students
possess
- clarify any
cultural information which may be necessary to comprehend the passage
- make students aware
of the type of text they will be listening to, the role they will play,
and the purpose(s) for which they will be listening
- provide
opportunities for group or collaborative work and for background reading
or class discussion activities
Sample pre-listening activities:
- looking at pictures,
maps, diagrams, or graphs
- reviewing
vocabulary or grammatical structures
- reading
something relevant
- constructing
semantic webs (a graphic arrangement of concepts or words showing how they
are related)
- predicting the
content of the listening text
- going over the
directions or instructions for the activity
- doing
guided practice
Match while-listening activities to the instructional goal, the
listening purpose, and students' proficiency level.
While-listening activities relate directly
to the text, and students do them do during or immediately after the time they
are listening. Keep these points in mind when planning while-listening
activities:
If students are to complete a written task
during or immediately after listening, allow them to read through it before
listening.Students need to devote all their
attention to the listening task. Be sure they understand the instructions for
the written task before listening begins so that they are not distracted by the
need to figure out what to do.
Keep writing to a minimum during
listening. Remember that the primary goal is comprehension, not production. Having
to write while listening may distract students from this primary goal. If a
written response is to be given after listening, the task can be more demanding.
Organize activities so that they guide
listeners through the text. Combine global activities such as
getting the main idea, topic, and setting with selective listening activities
that focus on details of content and form.
Use questions to focus students' attention
on the elements of the text crucial to comprehension of the whole. Before
the listening activity begins, have students review questions they will answer
orally or in writing after listening. Listening for the answers will
help students recognize the crucial parts of the message.
Use predicting to encourage students to
monitor their comprehension as they listen. Do a
predicting activity before listening, and remind students to review what they
are hearing to see if it makes sense in the context of their prior knowledge
and what they already know of the topic or events of the passage.
Give immediate feedback whenever possible. Encourage
students to examine how or why their responses were incorrect.
Sample while-listening activities
- listening
with visuals
- filling
in graphs and charts
- following a route
on a map
- checking off items
in a list
- listening
for the gist
- searching for
specific clues to meaning
- completing
cloze (fill-in) exercises
- distinguishing
between formal and informal registers
Using Textbook Listening Activities
The greatest challenges with textbook tape
programs are integrating the listening experiences into classroom instruction
and keeping up student interest and motivation. These challenges arise from the
fact that most textbook listening programs emphasize product (right or wrong
answer) over process (how to get meaning from the selection) and from the fact
that the listening activities are usually carried out as an add-on, away from
the classroom.
You can use the guidelines for developing
listening activities given here as starting points for evaluating and adapting
textbook listening programs. At the beginning of the teaching term, orient
students to the tape program by completing the exercises in class and
discussing the different strategies they use to answer the questions. It is a
good idea to periodically complete some of the lab exercises in class to
maintain the link to the regular instructional program and to check on the
effectiveness of the exercises themselves.
Integrating Listening Strategies With Textbook Audio and Video
Students can use this outline for both
in-class and out-of-class listening/viewing activities. Model and practice the
use of the outline at least once in class before you ask students to use it
independently.
1. Plan for listening/viewing
- Review the
vocabulary list, if you have one
- Review the
worksheet, if you have one
- Review any
information you have about the content of the tape/video
2. Preview the tape/video
- (tape) Use fast
forward to play segments of the tape; (video) view the video without sound
- Identify the kind
of program (news, documentary, interview, drama)
- Make a list of
predictions about the content
- Decide how to
divide the tape/video into sections for intensive listening/viewing
3. Listen/view intensively section by
section. For
each section:
- Jot down key words
you understand
- Answer the
worksheet questions pertaining to the section
- If you don't have a
worksheet, write a short summary of the section
4. Monitor your comprehension
- Does it fit with
the predictions you made?
- Does your summary
for each section make sense in relation to the other sections?
5. Evaluate your listening comprehension
progress
Assessing Listening
Proficiency
You can use post-listening activities to check
comprehension, evaluate listening skills and use of listening strategies, and
extend the knowledge gained to other contexts. A post-listening activity may
relate to a pre-listening activity, such as predicting; may expand on the topic
or the language of the listening text; or may transfer what has been learned to
reading, speaking, or writing activities.
In order to provide authentic assessment of students'
listening proficiency, a post-listening activity must reflect the real-life
uses to which students might put information they have gained through
listening.
- It must have a purpose other than assessment
- It must require students to demonstrate their level of listening
comprehension by completing some task.
To develop authentic assessment activities, consider
the type of response that listening to a particular selection would elicit in a
non-classroom situation. For example, after listening to a weather report one
might decide what to wear the next day; after listening to a set of
instructions, one might repeat them to someone else; after watching and
listening to a play or video, one might discuss the story line with friends.
Use this response type as a base for selecting
appropriate post-listening tasks. You can then develop a checklist or rubric
that will allow you to evaluate each student's comprehension of specific parts
of the aural text. (See Assessing Learning for more on checklists and rubrics.)
For example, for listening practice you have students
listen to a weather report. Their purpose for listening is to be able to advise
a friend what to wear the next day. As a post-listening activity, you ask
students to select appropriate items of clothing from a collection you have
assembled, or write a note telling the friend what to wear, or provide oral
advice to another student (who has not heard the weather report). To evaluate
listening comprehension, you use a checklist containing specific features of
the forecast, marking those that are reflected in the student's clothing
recommendations.
Teaching Speaking

Many language learners regard speaking ability as the
measure of knowing a language. These learners define fluency as the ability to
converse with others, much more than the ability to read, write, or comprehend
oral language. They regard speaking as the most important skill they can
acquire, and they assess their progress in terms of their accomplishments in
spoken communication.
Language learners need to recognize that speaking
involves three areas of knowledge:
- Mechanics (pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary): Using the right
words in the right order with the correct pronunciation
- Functions (transaction and interaction): Knowing when clarity of
message is essential (transaction/information exchange) and when precise
understanding is not required (interaction/relationship building)
- Social and cultural rules and norms (turn-taking, rate of speech,
length of pauses between speakers, relative roles of participants):
Understanding how to take into account who is speaking to whom, in what
circumstances, about what, and for what reason.
In the communicative model of language teaching,
instructors help their students develop this body of knowledge by providing
authentic practice that prepares students for real-life communication
situations. They help their students develop the ability to produce
grammatically correct, logically connected sentences that are appropriate to
specific contexts, and to do so using acceptable (that is, comprehensible)
pronunciation.
Goals and Techniques for
Teaching Speaking
The goal of teaching speaking skills is communicative
efficiency. Learners should be able to make themselves understood, using their
current proficiency to the fullest. They should try to avoid confusion in the
message due to faulty pronunciation, grammar, or vocabulary, and to observe the
social and cultural rules that apply in each communication situation.
To help students develop communicative efficiency in
speaking, instructors can use a balanced activities approach that combines
language input, structured output, and communicative output.
Language input comes in the form of
teacher talk, listening activities, reading passages, and the language heard
and read outside of class. It gives learners the material they need to begin
producing language themselves.
Language input may be content oriented or form
oriented.
- Content-oriented input focuses on information, whether it is a simple
weather report or an extended lecture on an academic topic.
Content-oriented input may also include descriptions of learning
strategies and examples of their use.
- Form-oriented input focuses on ways of using the language: guidance
from the teacher or another source on vocabulary, pronunciation, and
grammar (linguistic competence); appropriate things to say in specific
contexts (discourse competence); expectations for rate of speech, pause
length, turn-taking, and other social aspects of language use
(sociolinguistic competence); and explicit instruction in phrases to use
to ask for clarification and repair miscommunication (strategic
competence).
In the presentation part of a lesson, an instructor
combines content-oriented and form-oriented input. The amount of input that is
actually provided in the target language depends on students' listening
proficiency and also on the situation. For students at lower levels, or in
situations where a quick explanation on a grammar topic is needed, an
explanation in English may be more appropriate than one in the target language.
Structured output focuses on correct form. In
structured output, students may have options for responses, but all of the
options require them to use the specific form or structure that the teacher has
just introduced.
Structured output is designed to make learners
comfortable producing specific language items recently introduced, sometimes in
combination with previously learned items. Instructors often use structured
output exercises as a transition between the presentation stage and the
practice stage of a lesson plan. textbook exercises also often make good
structured output practice activities.
In communicative output, the learners'
main purpose is to complete a task, such as obtaining information, developing a
travel plan, or creating a video. To complete the task, they may use the
language that the instructor has just presented, but they also may draw on any
other vocabulary, grammar, and communication strategies that they know. In
communicative output activities, the criterion of success is whether the
learner gets the message across. Accuracy is not a consideration unless the
lack of it interferes with the message.
In everyday communication, spoken exchanges take place
because there is some sort of information gap between the participants.
Communicative output activities involve a similar real information gap. In
order to complete the task, students must reduce or eliminate the information
gap. In these activities, language is a tool, not an end in itself.
In a balanced activities approach, the teacher uses a
variety of activities from these different categories of input and output.
Learners at all proficiency levels, including beginners, benefit from this
variety; it is more motivating, and it is also more likely to result in
effective language learning.
Strategies for Developing Speaking Skills
Students often think that the ability to
speak a language is the product of language learning, but speaking is also a
crucial part of the language learning process. Effective instructors teach
students speaking strategies -- using minimal responses, recognizing scripts,
and using language to talk about language -- that they can use to help
themselves expand their knowledge of the language and their confidence in using
it. These instructors help students learn to speak so that the students can use
speaking to learn.
1. Using minimal responses
Language learners who lack confidence in
their ability to participate successfully in oral interaction often listen in
silence while others do the talking. One way to encourage such learners to
begin to participate is to help them build up a stock of minimal responses that
they can use in different types of exchanges. Such responses can be especially useful for
beginners.
Minimal responses are predictable, often
idiomatic phrases that conversation participants use to indicate understanding,
agreement, doubt, and other responses to what another speaker is saying. Having
a stock of such responses enables a learner to focus on what the other
participant is saying, without having to simultaneously plan a response.
2. Recognizing scripts
Some communication situations are
associated with a predictable set of spoken exchanges -- a script. Greetings,
apologies, compliments, invitations, and other functions that are influenced by
social and cultural norms often follow patterns or scripts. So do the
transactional exchanges involved in activities such as obtaining information
and making a purchase. In these scripts, the relationship between a speaker's
turn and the one that follows it can often be anticipated.
Instructors can help students develop
speaking ability by making them aware of the scripts for different situations
so that they can predict what they will hear and what they will need to say in
response. Through interactive activities, instructors can give students
practice in managing and varying the language that different scripts contain.
3. Using language to talk about language
Language learners are often too
embarrassed or shy to say anything when they do not understand another speaker
or when they realize that a conversation partner has not understood them.
Instructors can help students overcome this reticence by assuring them that
misunderstanding and the need for clarification can occur in any type of
interaction, whatever the participants' language skill levels. Instructors can
also give students strategies and phrases to use for clarification and
comprehension check.
By encouraging students to use
clarification phrases in class when misunderstanding occurs, and by responding
positively when they do, instructors can create an authentic practice
environment within the classroom itself. As they develop control of various
clarification strategies, students will gain confidence in their ability to
manage the various communication situations that they may encounter outside the
classroom.
Developing Speaking Activities
Traditional classroom speaking practice often takes
the form of drills in which one person asks a question and another gives an
answer. The question and the answer are structured and predictable, and often
there is only one correct, predetermined answer. The purpose of asking and
answering the question is to demonstrate the ability to ask and answer the
question.
In contrast, the purpose of real communication is to
accomplish a task, such as conveying a telephone message, obtaining
information, or expressing an opinion. In real communication, participants must
manage uncertainty about what the other person will say. Authentic
communication involves an information gap; each participant has information
that the other does not have. In addition, to achieve their purpose,
participants may have to clarify their meaning or ask for confirmation of their
own understanding.
To create classroom speaking activities that will
develop communicative competence, instructors need to incorporate a purpose and
an information gap and allow for multiple forms of expression. However,
quantity alone will not necessarily produce competent speakers. Instructors
need to combine structured output activities, which allow for error correction
and increased accuracy, with communicative output activities that give students
opportunities to practice language use more freely.
Structured Output Activities
Two common kinds of structured output activities
are information gap and jigsaw activities. In
both these types of activities, students complete a task by obtaining missing
information, a feature the activities have in common with real communication.
However, information gap and jigsaw activities also set up practice on specific
items of language. In this respect they are more like drills than like
communication.
Information
Gap Activities
- Filling the gaps in a schedule or timetable: Partner A holds an
airline timetable with some of the arrival and departure times missing.
Partner B has the same timetable but with different blank spaces. The two
partners are not permitted to see each other's timetables and must fill in
the blanks by asking each other appropriate questions. The features of
language that are practiced would include questions beginning with "when"
or "at what time." Answers would be limited mostly to time
expressions like "at 8:15" or "at ten in the evening."
- Completing the picture: The two partners have similar pictures, each
with different missing details, and they cooperate to find all the missing
details. In another variation, no items are missing, but similar items
differ in appearance. For example, in one picture, a man walking along the
street may be wearing an overcoat, while in the other the man is wearing a
jacket. The features of grammar and vocabulary that are practiced are
determined by the content of the pictures and the items that are missing
or different. Differences in the activities depicted lead to practice of
different verbs. Differences in number, size, and shape lead to adjective
practice. Differing locations would probably be described
with prepositional phrases.
These activities may be set up so that the partners
must practice more than just grammatical and lexical features. For example, the
timetable activity gains a social dimension when one partner assumes the role
of a student trying to make an appointment with a partner who takes the role of
a professor. Each partner has pages from an appointment book in which certain
dates and times are already filled in and other times are still available for
an appointment. Of course, the open times don't match exactly, so there must be
some polite negotiation to arrive at a mutually convenient time for a meeting
or a conference.
Jigsaw Activities
Jigsaw activities are more elaborate information gap
activities that can be done with several partners. In a jigsaw activity, each
partner has one or a few pieces of the "puzzle," and the partners
must cooperate to fit all the pieces into a whole picture. The puzzle piece may
take one of several forms. It may be one panel from a comic strip or one photo
from a set that tells a story. It may be one sentence from a written narrative.
It may be a tape recording of a conversation, in which case no two partners
hear exactly the same conversation.
- In one fairly simple jigsaw activity, students work in groups of four.
Each student in the group receives one panel from a comic strip. Partners
may not show each other their panels. Together the four panels present
this narrative: a man takes a container of ice cream from the freezer; he
serves himself several scoops of ice cream; he sits in front of the TV
eating his ice cream; he returns with the empty bowl to the kitchen and
finds that he left the container of ice cream, now melting, on the kitchen
counter. These pictures have a clear narrative line and the partners are
not likely to disagree about the appropriate sequencing. You can make the
task more demanding, however, by using pictures that lend themselves to
alternative sequences, so that the partners have to negotiate among
themselves to agree on a satisfactory sequence.
- More elaborate jigsaws may proceed in two stages. Students first work
in input groups (groups A, B, C, and D) to receive information. Each group
receives a different part of the total information for the task. Students
then reorganize into groups of four with one student each from A, B, C,
and D, and use the information they received to complete the task. Such an
organization could be used, for example, when the input is given in the
form of a tape recording. Groups A, B, C, and D each hear a different
recording of a short news bulletin. The four recordings all contain the
same general information, but each has one or more details that the others
do not. In the second stage, students reconstruct the complete story by
comparing the four versions.
With information gap and jigsaw activities,
instructors need to be conscious of the language demands they place on their
students. If an activity calls for language your students have not already
practiced, you can brainstorm with them when setting up the activity to preview
the language they will need, eliciting what they already know and supplementing
what they are able to produce themselves.
Structured output activities can form an effective
bridge between instructor modeling and communicative output because they are
partly authentic and partly artificial. Like authentic communication, they
feature information gaps that must be bridged for successful completion of the
task. However, where authentic communication allows speakers to use all of the
language they know, structured output activities lead students to practice
specific features of language and to practice only in brief sentences, not in
extended discourse. Also, structured output situations are contrived and more
like games than real communication, and the participants' social roles are
irrelevant to the performance of the activity. This structure controls the
number of variables that students must deal with when they are first exposed to
new material. As they become comfortable, they can move on to true
communicative output activities.
Communicative Output Activities
Communicative output activities allow students to
practice using all of the language they know in situations that resemble real
settings. In these activities, students must work together to develop a plan,
resolve a problem, or complete a task. The most common types of communicative
output activity are role plays and discussions .
In role plays, students are assigned roles and put
into situations that they may eventually encounter outside the classroom.
Because role plays imitate life, the range of language functions that may be
used expands considerably. Also, the role relationships among the students as
they play their parts call for them to practice and develop their
sociolinguistic competence. They have to use language that is appropriate to
the situation and to the characters.
Students usually find role playing enjoyable, but
students who lack self-confidence or have lower proficiency levels may find
them intimidating at first. To succeed with role
plays:
- Prepare carefully: Introduce the activity by describing the situation
and making sure that all of the students understand it
- Set a goal or outcome: Be sure the students understand what the
product of the role play should be, whether a plan, a schedule, a group opinion,
or some other product
- Use role cards: Give each student a card that describes the person or
role to be played. For lower-level students, the cards can include words
or expressions that that person might use.
- Brainstorm: Before you start the role play, have students brainstorm
as a class to predict what vocabulary, grammar, and idiomatic expressions
they might use.
- Keep groups small: Less-confident students will feel more able to
participate if they do not have to compete with many voices.
- Give students time to prepare: Let them work individually to outline
their ideas and the language they will need to express them.
- Be present as a resource, not a monitor: Stay in communicative mode to
answer students' questions. Do not correct their pronunciation or grammar
unless they specifically ask you about it.
- Allow students to work at their own levels: Each student has
individual language skills, an individual approach to working in groups,
and a specific role to play in the activity. Do not expect all students to
contribute equally to the discussion, or to use every grammar point you
have taught.
- Do topical follow-up: Have students report to the class on the outcome
of their role plays.
- Do linguistic follow-up: After the role play is over, give feedback on
grammar or pronunciation problems you have heard. This can wait until
another class period when you plan to review pronunciation or grammar
anyway.
Discussions, like role plays, succeed when the
instructor prepares students first, and then gets out of the way. To succeed with discussions:
- Prepare the students: Give them input (both topical information and
language forms) so that they will have something to say and the language
with which to say it.
- Offer choices: Let students suggest the topic for discussion or choose
from several options. Discussion does not always have to be about serious
issues. Students are likely to be more motivated to participate if the
topic is television programs, plans for a vacation, or news about mutual
friends. Weighty topics like how to combat pollution are not as engaging
and place heavy demands on students' linguistic competence.
- Set a goal or outcome: This can be a group product, such as a letter
to the editor, or individual reports on the views of others in the group.
- Use small groups instead of whole-class discussion: Large groups can
make participation difficult.
- Keep it short: Give students a defined period of time, not more than
8-10 minutes, for discussion. Allow them to stop sooner if they run out of
things to say.
- Allow students to participate in their own way: Not every student will
feel comfortable talking about every topic. Do not expect all of them to
contribute equally to the conversation.
- Do topical follow-up: Have students report to the class on the results
of their discussion.
- Do linguistic follow-up: After the discussion is over, give feedback
on grammar or pronunciation problems you have heard. This can wait until
another class period when you plan to review pronunciation or grammar
anyway.
Through well-prepared communicative output activities
such as role plays and discussions, you can encourage students to experiment
and innovate with the language, and create a supportive atmosphere that allows
them to make mistakes without fear of embarrassment. This will contribute to
their self-confidence as speakers and to their motivation to learn more.
Teaching Reading

Traditionally, the purpose of learning to
read in a language has been to have access to the literature written in that
language. In language instruction, reading materials have traditionally been
chosen from literary texts that represent "higher" forms of culture.
This approach assumes that students learn
to read a language by studying its vocabulary, grammar, and sentence structure,
not by actually reading it. In this approach, lower level learners read only
sentences and paragraphs generated by textbook writers and instructors. The
reading of authentic materials is limited to the works of great authors and
reserved for upper level students who have developed the language skills needed
to read them.
The communicative approach to language
teaching has given instructors a different understanding of the role of reading
in the language classroom and the types of texts that can be used in
instruction. When the goal of instruction is communicative competence, everyday
materials such as train schedules, newspaper articles, and travel and tourism
Web sites become appropriate classroom materials, because reading them is one
way communicative competence is developed. Instruction in reading and reading
practice thus become essential parts of language teaching at every level.
Reading Purpose and Reading Comprehension
Reading is an activity with a purpose. A
person may read in order to gain information or verify existing knowledge, or
in order to critique a writer's ideas or writing style. A person may also read
for enjoyment, or to enhance knowledge of the language being read. The
purpose(s) for reading guide the reader's selection of texts.
The purpose for reading also determines
the appropriate approach to reading comprehension. A person who needs to know
whether she can afford to eat at a particular restaurant needs to comprehend
the pricing information provided on the menu, but does not need to recognize
the name of every appetizer listed. A person reading poetry for enjoyment needs
to recognize the words the poet uses and the ways they are put together, but
does not need to identify main idea and supporting details. However, a person
using a scientific article to support an opinion needs to know the vocabulary
that is used, understand the facts and cause-effect sequences that are
presented, and recognize ideas that are presented as hypotheses and givens.
Reading research shows that good readers
- Read
extensively
- Integrate
information in the text with existing knowledge
- Have a flexible
reading style, depending on what they are reading
- Are
motivated
- Rely on different
skills interacting: perceptual processing, phonemic processing, recall
- Read for a purpose;
reading serves a function
Reading as a Process
Reading is an interactive process that
goes on between the reader and the text, resulting in comprehension. The text
presents letters, words, sentences, and paragraphs that encode meaning. The
reader uses knowledge, skills, and strategies to determine what that meaning
is.
Reader knowledge, skills, and strategies
include
- Linguistic
competence: the ability to recognize the elements of the writing system;
knowledge of vocabulary; knowledge of how words are structured into
sentences
- Discourse
competence: knowledge of discourse markers and how they connect parts of
the text to one another
- Sociolinguistic
competence: knowledge about different types of texts and their usual
structure and content
- Strategic
competence: the ability to use top-down strategies (see Strategies for Developing Reading Skills for descriptions), as well as knowledge of the
language (a bottom-up strategy)
The purpose(s) for reading and the type of
text determine the specific knowledge, skills, and strategies that readers need
to apply to achieve comprehension. Reading comprehension is thus much more than
decoding. Reading comprehension results when the reader knows which skills and
strategies are appropriate for the type of text, and understands how to apply
them to accomplish the reading purpose.
Goals and Techniques for Teaching Reading
Instructors want to produce students who,
even if they do not have complete control of the grammar or an extensive
lexicon, can fend for themselves in communication situations. In the case of
reading, this means producing students who can use reading strategies to
maximize their comprehension of text, identify relevant and non-relevant
information, and tolerate less than word-by-word comprehension.
Focus: The Reading Process
To accomplish this goal, instructors focus
on the process of reading rather than on its product.
- They develop
students' awareness of the reading process and reading strategies by
asking students to think and talk about how they read in their native
language.
- They allow students
to practice the full repertoire of reading strategies by using authentic
reading tasks. They encourage students to read to learn (and have an
authentic purpose for reading) by giving students some choice of reading
material.
- When working with
reading tasks in class, they show students the strategies that will work
best for the reading purpose and the type of text. They explain how and
why students should use the strategies.
- They have students
practice reading strategies in class and ask them to practice outside of
class in their reading assignments. They encourage students to be
conscious of what they're doing while they complete reading assignments.
- They encourage
students to evaluate their comprehension and self-report their use of
strategies. They build comprehension checks into in-class and out-of-class
reading assignments, and periodically review how and when to use
particular strategies.
- They encourage the
development of reading skills and the use of reading strategies by using
the target language to convey instructions and course-related information
in written form: office hours, homework assignments, test content.
- They do not assume
that students will transfer strategy use from one task to another. They
explicitly mention how a particular strategy can be used in a different
type of reading task or with another skill.
By raising students' awareness of reading
as a skill that requires active engagement, and by explicitly teaching reading
strategies, instructors help their students develop both the ability and the
confidence to handle communication situations they may encounter beyond
the classroom. In this way they give their students the foundation for
communicative competence in the new language.
Integrating Reading Strategies
Instruction in reading strategies is not
an add-on, but rather an integral part of the use of reading activities in the
language classroom. Instructors can help their students become effective
readers by teaching them how to use strategies before, during, and after
reading.
Before reading: Plan for the reading task
- Set a purpose or
decide in advance what to read for
- Decide if more
linguistic or background knowledge is needed
- Determine whether
to enter the text from the top down (attend to the overall meaning) or
from the bottom up (focus on the words and phrases)
During and after reading: Monitor
comprehension
- Verify predictions
and check for inaccurate guesses
- Decide what is and
is not important to understand
- Reread
to check comprehension
- Ask
for help
After reading: Evaluate comprehension and
strategy use
- Evaluate
comprehension in a particular task or area
- Evaluate overall
progress in reading and in particular types of reading tasks
- Decide if the
strategies used were appropriate for the purpose and for the task
- Modify
strategies if necessary
Using Authentic Materials and
Approaches
For students to develop communicative
competence in reading, classroom and homework reading activities must resemble
(or be) real-life reading tasks that involve meaningful communication. They must therefore be
authentic in three ways.
1. The reading material must be authentic:
It must be the kind of material that students will need and want to be able to
read when traveling, studying abroad, or using the language in other contexts
outside the classroom.
When selecting texts for student
assignments, remember that the difficulty of a reading text is less a function
of the language, and more a function of the conceptual difficulty and the
task(s) that students are expected to complete. Simplifying a text by changing
the language often removes natural redundancy and makes the organization
somewhat difficult for students to predict. This actually makes a text more
difficult to read than if the original were used.
Rather than simplifying a text by changing
its language, make it more approachable by eliciting students' existing
knowledge in pre-reading discussion, reviewing new vocabulary before reading,
and asking students to perform tasks that are within their competence, such as
skimming to get the main idea or scanning for specific information, before they
begin intensive reading.
2. The reading purpose must be authentic:
Students must be reading for reasons that make sense and have relevance to
them. "Because the teacher assigned it" is not an authentic reason
for reading a text.
To identify relevant reading purposes, ask
students how they plan to use the language they are learning and what topics
they are interested in reading and learning about. Give them opportunities to
choose their reading assignments, and encourage them to use the library, the
Internet, and foreign language newsstands and bookstores to find other things
they would like to read.
3. The reading approach must be authentic:
Students should read the text in a way that matches the reading purpose, the
type of text, and the way people normally read. This means that reading aloud
will take place only in situations where it would take place outside the
classroom, such as reading for pleasure. The majority of students' reading
should be done silently.
Reading Aloud in the Classroom
Students do not learn to read by reading
aloud. A person who reads aloud and comprehends the meaning of the text is
coordinating word recognition with comprehension and speaking and pronunciation
ability in highly complex ways. Students whose language skills are limited are
not able to process at this level, and end up having to drop one or more of the
elements. Usually the dropped element is comprehension, and reading aloud
becomes word calling: simply pronouncing a series of words without regard for
the meaning they carry individually and together. Word calling is not
productive for the student who is doing it, and it is boring for other students
to listen to.
- There are two ways
to use reading aloud productively in the language classroom. Read aloud to
your students as they follow along silently. You have the ability to use
inflection and tone to help them hear what the text is saying. Following
along as you read will help students move from word-by-word reading to
reading in phrases and thought units, as they do in their first language.
- Use the "read
and look up" technique. With this technique, a student reads a phrase
or sentence silently as many times as necessary, then looks up (away from
the text) and tells you what the phrase or sentence says. This encourages
students to read for ideas, rather than for word recognition.
Strategies for Developing Reading Skills
Using Reading Strategies
Language instructors are often frustrated
by the fact that students do not automatically transfer the strategies they use
when reading in their native language to reading in a language they are
learning. Instead, they seem to think reading means starting at the beginning
and going word by word, stopping to look up every unknown vocabulary item,
until they reach the end. When they do this, students are relying exclusively
on their linguistic knowledge, a bottom-up strategy. One of the most important
functions of the language instructor, then, is to help students move past this
idea and use top-down strategies as they do in their native language.
Effective language instructors show
students how they can adjust their reading behavior to deal with a variety of
situations, types of input, and reading purposes. They help students develop a
set of reading strategies and match appropriate strategies to each reading
situation.
Strategies that can help students read
more quickly and effectively include
- Previewing:
reviewing titles, section headings, and photo captions to get a sense of
the structure and content of a reading selection
- Predicting: using
knowledge of the subject matter to make predictions about content and
vocabulary and check comprehension; using knowledge of the text type and
purpose to make predictions about discourse structure; using knowledge
about the author to make predictions about writing style, vocabulary, and
content
- Skimming and
scanning: using a quick survey of the text to get the main idea, identify
text structure, confirm or question predictions
- Guessing from
context: using prior knowledge of the subject and the ideas in the text as
clues to the meanings of unknown words, instead of stopping to look them
up
- Paraphrasing:
stopping at the end of a section to check comprehension by restating the
information and ideas in the text
Instructors can help students learn when
and how to use reading strategies in several ways.
- By modeling the
strategies aloud, talking through the processes of previewing, predicting,
skimming and scanning, and paraphrasing. This shows students how the
strategies work and how much they can know about a text before they begin
to read word by word.
- By allowing time in
class for group and individual previewing and predicting activities as
preparation for in-class or out-of-class reading. Allocating class time to
these activities indicates their importance and value.
- By using cloze
(fill in the blank) exercises to review vocabulary items. This helps students
learn to guess meaning from context.
- By encouraging
students to talk about what strategies they think will help them approach
a reading assignment, and then talking after reading about what strategies
they actually used. This helps students develop flexibility in their
choice of strategies.
When language learners use reading
strategies, they find that they can control the reading experience, and they
gain confidence in their ability to read the language.
Reading to Learn
Reading is an essential part of language
instruction at every level because it supports learning in multiple ways.
- Reading to learn
the language: Reading material is language input. By giving students a
variety of materials to read, instructors provide multiple opportunities
for students to absorb vocabulary, grammar, sentence structure, and
discourse structure as they occur in authentic contexts. Students thus
gain a more complete picture of the ways in which the elements of the
language work together to convey meaning.
- Reading for content
information: Students' purpose for reading in their native language is
often to obtain information about a subject they are studying, and this
purpose can be useful in the language learning classroom as well. Reading
for content information in the language classroom gives students both
authentic reading material and an authentic purpose for reading.
- Reading for
cultural knowledge and awareness: Reading everyday materials that are
designed for native speakers can give students insight into the lifestyles
and worldviews of the people whose language they are studying. When
students have access to newspapers, magazines, and Web sites, they are
exposed to culture in all its variety, and monolithic cultural stereotypes
begin to break down.
When reading to learn, students need to
follow four basic steps:
1.
Figure out the purpose for reading. Activate
background knowledge of the topic in order to predict or anticipate content and
identify appropriate reading strategies.
2.
Attend to the parts of the text that are
relevant to the identified purpose and ignore the rest. This selectivity
enables students to focus on specific items in the input and reduces the amount
of information they have to hold in short-term memory.
3.
Select strategies that are appropriate to
the reading task and use them flexibly and interactively. Students'
comprehension improves and their confidence increases when they use top-down
and bottom-up skills simultaneously to construct meaning.
4.
Check comprehension while reading and when
the reading task is completed. Monitoring comprehension helps students detect
inconsistencies and comprehension failures, helping them learn to use alternate
strategies.
Developing Reading Activities
Developing reading activities involves
more than identifying a text that is "at the right level," writing a
set of comprehension questions for students to answer after reading, handing
out the assignment and sending students away to do it. A fully-developed
reading activity supports students as readers through prereading,
while-reading, and post-reading activities.
As you design reading tasks, keep in mind
that complete recall of all the information in a text is an unrealistic
expectation even for native speakers. Reading activities that are meant to
increase communicative competence should be success oriented and build up
students' confidence in their reading ability.
Construct the reading activity around a purpose that has significance
for the students
Make sure students understand what the
purpose for reading is: to get the main idea, obtain specific information,
understand most or all of the message, enjoy a story, or decide whether or not
to read more. Recognizing the purpose for reading will help students select
appropriate reading strategies.
Define the activity's instructional goal and the appropriate type of
response
In addition to the main purpose for reading,
an activity can also have one or more instructional purposes, such as
practicing or reviewing specific grammatical constructions, introducing new
vocabulary, or familiarizing students with the typical structure of a certain
type of text.
Check the level of difficulty of the text
The factors listed below can help you
judge the relative ease or difficulty of a reading text for a particular
purpose and a particular group of students.
- How is the
information organized? Does the story line, narrative, or instruction
conform to familiar expectations? Texts in which the events are presented
in natural chronological order, which have an informative title, and which
present the information following an obvious organization (main ideas
first, details and examples second) are easier to follow.
- How familiar are
the students with the topic? Remember that misapplication of background
knowledge due to cultural differences can create major comprehension
difficulties.
- Does the text
contain redundancy? At the lower levels of proficiency, listeners may find
short, simple messages easier to process, but students with higher
proficiency benefit from the natural redundancy of authentic language.
- Does the text offer
visual support to aid in reading comprehension? Visual aids such as
photographs, maps, and diagrams help students preview the content of the
text, guess the meanings of unknown words, and check comprehension while
reading.
Remember that the level of difficulty of a
text is not the same as the level of difficulty of a reading task. Students who
lack the vocabulary to identify all of the items on a menu can still determine
whether the restaurant serves steak and whether they can afford to order one.
Use pre-reading activities to prepare students for reading
The activities you use during pre-reading
may serve as preparation in several ways. During pre-reading you may:
- Assess students'
background knowledge of the topic and linguistic content of the text
- Give students the
background knowledge necessary for comprehension of the text, or activate
the existing knowledge that the students possess
- Clarify any
cultural information which may be necessary to comprehend the passage
- Make students aware
of the type of text they will be reading and the purpose(s) for reading
- Provide opportunities
for group or collaborative work and for class discussion activities
Sample pre-reading activities:
- Using the title,
subtitles, and divisions within the text to predict content and
organization or sequence of information
- Looking at
pictures, maps, diagrams, or graphs and their captions
- Talking about the
author's background, writing style, and usual topics
- Skimming to find
the theme or main idea and eliciting related prior knowledge
- Reviewing
vocabulary or grammatical structures
- Reading over the
comprehension questions to focus attention on finding that information
while reading
- Constructing
semantic webs (a graphic arrangement of concepts or words showing how they
are related)
- Doing guided
practice with guessing meaning from context or checking comprehension
while reading
Pre-reading activities are most important
at lower levels of language proficiency and at earlier stages of reading
instruction. As students become more proficient at using reading strategies,
you will be able to reduce the amount of guided pre-reading and allow students
to do these activities themselves.
Match while-reading activities to the purpose for reading
In while-reading activities, students
check their comprehension as they read. The purpose for reading determines the
appropriate type and level of comprehension.
- When reading for
specific information, students need to ask themselves, have I obtained the
information I was looking for?
- When reading for
pleasure, students need to ask themselves, Do I understand the story line/sequence
of ideas well enough to enjoy reading this?
- When reading for
thorough understanding (intensive reading), students need to ask
themselves, Do I understand each main idea and how the author supports it?
Does what I'm reading agree with my predictions, and, if not, how does it
differ? To
check comprehension in this situation, students may
- Stop at the end of
each section to review and check their predictions, restate the main idea
and summarize the section
- Use the
comprehension questions as guides to the text, stopping to answer them as
they read
Using Textbook Reading Activities
Many language textbooks emphasize product
(answers to comprehension questions) over process (using reading skills and
strategies to understand the text), providing little or no contextual
information about the reading selections or their authors, and few if any
pre-reading activities. Newer textbooks may provide pre-reading activities and
reading strategy guidance, but their one-size-fits-all approach may or may not
be appropriate for your students.
You can use the guidelines for developing
reading activities given here as starting points for evaluating and adapting
textbook reading activities. Use existing, or add your own, pre-reading
activities and reading strategy practice as appropriate for your students.
Don't make students do exercises simply because they are in the book; this
destroys motivation.
Another problem with textbook reading
selections is that they have been adapted to a predetermined reading level
through adjustment of vocabulary, grammar, and sentence length. This makes them
more immediately approachable, but it also means that they are less authentic
and do not encourage students to apply the reading strategies they will need to
use outside of class. When this is the case, use the textbook reading selection
as a starting point to introduce a writer or topic, and then give students
choices of more challenging authentic texts to read as a followup.
Assessing Reading Proficiency
Reading ability is very difficult to
assess accurately. In the communicative competence model, a student's reading
level is the level at which that student is able to use reading to accomplish
communication goals. This means that assessment of reading ability needs to be
correlated with purposes for reading.
Reading Aloud
A student's performance when reading aloud
is not a reliable indicator of that student's reading ability. A student who is
perfectly capable of understanding a given text when reading it silently may
stumble when asked to combine comprehension with word recognition and speaking
ability in the way that reading aloud requires.
In addition, reading aloud is a task that
students will rarely, if ever, need to do outside of the classroom. As a method
of assessment, therefore, it is not authentic: It does not test a student's
ability to use reading to accomplish a purpose or goal.
However, reading aloud can help a teacher
assess whether a student is "seeing" word endings and other
grammatical features when reading. To use reading aloud for this purpose, adopt
the "read and look up" approach: Ask the student to read a sentence
silently one or more times, until comfortable with the content, then look up
and tell you what it says. This procedure allows the student to process the
text, and lets you see the results of that processing and know what elements,
if any, the student is missing.
Comprehension Questions
Instructors often use comprehension
questions to test whether students have understood what they have read. In
order to test comprehension appropriately, these questions need to be
coordinated with the purpose for reading. If the purpose is to find specific
information, comprehension questions should focus on that information. If the
purpose is to understand an opinion and the arguments that support it,
comprehension questions should ask about those points.
In everyday reading situations, readers
have a purpose for reading before they start. That is, they know what
comprehension questions they are going to need to answer before they begin
reading. To make reading assessment in the language classroom more like reading
outside of the classroom, therefore, allow students to review the comprehension
questions before they begin to read the test passage.
Finally, when the purpose for reading is
enjoyment, comprehension questions are beside the point. As a more authentic
form of assessment, have students talk or write about why they found the text
enjoyable and interesting (or not).
Authentic Assessment
In order to provide authentic assessment
of students' reading proficiency, a post-listening activity must reflect the
real-life uses to which students might put information they have gained through
reading.
- It must have a
purpose other than assessment
- It must require
students to demonstrate their level of reading comprehension by completing
some task
To develop authentic assessment
activities, consider the type of response that reading a particular selection
would elicit in a non-classroom situation. For example, after reading a weather
report, one might decide what to wear the next day; after reading a set of
instructions, one might repeat them to someone else; after reading a
short story, one might discuss the story line with friends.
Use this response type as a base for
selecting appropriate post-reading tasks. You can then develop a checklist or
rubric that will allow you to evaluate each student's comprehension of specific
parts of the text. See Assessing Learning for more on checklists and rubrics.
Material for this section was drawn from
“Listening in a foreign language” by Ana Maria Schwartz, in Modules
for the professional preparation of teaching assistants in foreign languages (Grace Stovall Burkart, ed.; Washington,
DC: Center for Applied Linguistics, 1998)
Strategies that can help students read more quickly and effectively