Miguel Guhlin Another Think Coming Challenge Claims, Uncover Reality

by mguhlin

MyNotes: ListenWise, Part 2

EdTech

Welcome to Part 2 of MyNotes on ListenWise, a fantastic book by Monica Brady-Myerov. Her book, ListenWise: Teach Students to Be Better Listeners, is a great read for any educator, whether you decide to use the National Public Radio (NPR) audio-based service, ListenWise, in your classroom. Whew, there is so much amazing content in this book, it’s guaranteed to stay close at hand. I highly recommend it.

This is part of the two blog entries featuring her book share great strategies that jumped out at me. Be sure to read Part 1. 

Here are my takeaways or “my notes” from the book. 

My Notes

These notes include my takeaways from the book, as well as instructional strategies (wow!) included. I’ve split them up below.

Read Part 1 of this blog entry, where I cover quotes from the text. Lots of great ideas shared and underscore the fact that the book is worth reading, whether you get ListenWise or not.

Instructional Strategies

In her book, Monica covers a variety of listening strategies. As I worked my way through the book, I took notes in a yellow tablet (some shown right) since that is what I had at hand. 

As such, my notes may be a little incomplete or fail to capture an idea as well as Monica shared it in her book. If you encounter that error (all mine), I strongly encourage you to get her book (see link at top of this blog entry) so that you can read it in full.

  1. For Discriminative Listening, make a 3-column chart with these column headers:

  2. What I Hear

  3. What I Visualize

  4. Where This Is

  5. Precise Listening: Focus on clues, color, size, shape, location, texture or function

  6. Strategic Listening: Use the SWBS Approach by Kylene Biers (see cultural update). This generally goes like this:

  7. Make a chart with these column headers: Somebody | Wanted | But | So

  8. Somebody column refers to one character in the story.

  9. Wanted column refers to what a character wanted to do or wanted to obtain

  10. But column refers to a challenge or problem a character faced

  11. So column refers to what a character did to address the challenge

  12. Playing a Story: This involves the following:

  13. Play for gist

  14. Play for vocabulary

  15. Use graphic organizers to listen for who the characters were, what they wanted, challenges faced, how they responded, and what happened in the end

  16. Critical Listening

  17. Review: Students review what they hear, consider…

  18. What surprised them

  19. What challenged what they believe

  20. What changed how they think

  21. What confirmed what they already knew

  22. Reflect: When students reflect they consider how they feel based on what they heard.

  23. Do they feel calm or angry?

  24. Do they agree or disagree?

  25. Do they feel confident or confused?

  26. Respond: When students respond, they should:

  27. Consider if they’re responding to an opinion or a fact

  28. SW/BST: Allows for students to interrogate audio they listen to

  29. Somebody wanted: What are characters trying to get?

  30. But: What challenges did the characters face on their quest to get what they wanted?

  31. So: How did the characters react? What did they do? What choices did they make in response to the challenge they faced?

  32. Then: Finally, what was the result of the actions the characters took

  33. SLANT by Doug Lemov

  34. This helps students remember what behaviors they can use to be better active listeners

  35. The acronym SLANT looks like this:

  36. S: Sit up

  37. L: Lean toward speaker

  38. A: Ask questions

  39. N: Nod your head

  40. T: Track speaker with your eyes

  41. Guidelines for Teaching Listening:

  42. Before Listening

  43. Set a goal

  44. Build background

  45. Prepare the environment

  46. Introduce Listening Strategies

  47. During Listening

  48. Note-taking strategies, including use of a listening organizer 

  49. Listening organizers can include 

  50. T-Charts, 

  51. Venn Diagrams, 

  52. Problem-Solving Strategies

  53. After Listening

  54. Reflect on audio story

  55. There are three core components of listening:

  56. Identifying the main idea

  57. Recognizing literal meaning

  58. Making inferences

  59. Cognitive Listening is the understanding or comprehending part of listening

  60. After listening to a 3-min story, can students understand WHAT the story is about and identify the main idea?

  61. Metacognitive listening is monitoring the listening process

  62. Can students use the surrounding context to decipher an unfamiliar word (metacognitive)?

  63. Better listeners make better readers. Studies show that listening skills have been linked to literacy at an early age. Teaching listening as a method of developing literacy skills in K-12 schools is largely overlooked.

  64. Listening comprehension is a fundamental building block of learning to read.

  65. Word Recognition/Decoding x Listening comprehension = Reading Comprehension

  66. Reading aloud or listening to podcasts makes complex ideas more accessible and exposes children to vocabulary and language patterns that are not part of every day speech

  67. Directed Listening Thinking Activity (DLTA)

  68. About DLTA

  69. This helps engage students in listening to identify the main idea of a story.

  70. The ability to make and confirm predictions is an important comprehension strategy. It helps students determine the speaker’s main points.

  71. Before listening

  72. State the objective. This is to better comprehend an audio story by making/continuing predictions).

  73. Divide a piece of paper into four squares.

  74. Square 1: Photo. Prediction of story based on a photo. What will it be about?

  75. Square 2: Words. Show vocabulary words in story. “Based on these words, what do you predict story will be about?”

  76. Square 3: Title. Predict from the title.

  77. Square 4: Think-Pair-Share

  78. Process:

  79. Show kids a photo.

  80. Show vocabulary words

  81. Show title

  82. Think Pair Share

  83. Two columns: My Predictions on the left, Other’s Ideas on the right

  84. Include a Summary row at the bottom

  85. Using visual aids is key to helping students understand a new language. Showing photos, graphics, slides, posters, and other visual representations of the words that students be learning can help with comprehension.

  86. Five Key Practices

  87. Before Listening

  88. PreTeaching Vocabulary

  89. Activating Prior Knowledge and building Background Knowledge

  90. Teaching Language and context togther

  91. During Listening

  92. Scaffolding instruction for listening

  93. After Listening

  94. Encouraging speaking practice to deepen listening comprehension

  95. BICS vs CALPS

  96. Basic interpersonal communicative skills (BICS) and cognitive academic language proficiency (CALP) was introduced by Cummins ( 1979, 1981a) in order to draw educators’ attention to the timelines and challenges that second language learners encounter as they attempt to catch up to their peers in academic aspects of the school language. 

  97. BICS refers to conversational fluency in a language while CALP refers to students’ ability to understand and express, in both oral and written modes, concepts and ideas that are relevant to success in school.(source: Jim Cummins, external citation to ListenWise)

  98. Academic language is about vocabulary, grammar, syntax and other language elements

  99. Listening can help build language facility and sentence variety muscles (source: Jeff Sziers as cited in text)

  100. Zwiers suggests assigning students to listen to four podcasts on a similar topic because that would reinforce vocabulary and sentence structures that help build language.

  101. Unscripted podcasts or interviews use more BICS than CALPS.

  102. Preteaching words improve student comprehension. There are three tiers of classifying vocabulary:

  103. Tier 1: Words that are frequently used in English conversation and probably known in L1

  104. Tier 2: Words that include academic language frequently used in different contexts across disciplines.

  105. Tier 3: Words used less frequently in speech and are often specific to the context of a story. The words are key to understanding the discipline specific concepts in English

  106. Collocations: pair or group of words such as “take a nap” or “easy money”

  107. Nonfiction podcasts are good to use because there are a number of Tier 2 words in the stories

  108. 2020 WIDA Framework:

  109. Multilingual learners develop content and language concurrently

  110. Academic context is the context for learning and language as a means for learning academic content

  111. Teachers are encouraged to use multiple means of communications including speaking, images, gestures, and other means.

  112. Content-based Teaching: two types of CBT.

  113. In the story approach, the primary goal is to leanr context with the secondary goal of becoming fluent in the language

  114. Explicit instruction in listening skills when accompanied by interactive tasks in a context-based language learning program can improve English instruction.

  115. Listening organizers: Create an organizer with three columns:

  116. Fact: Record interesting or useful factual information.

  117. Question: Write questions as they occur as they listen

  118. Response: Make a list of responses to the story.

  119. Clarification: 

  120. An answer to a question a reader had

  121. A reaction with examples based on categories of:

  122. What surprised you?

  123. What confirmed something you knew?

  124. What was something confusing you heard?

  125. What’s something that made you think differently?

  126. What’s something you found hard to believe?

Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin’s blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure