EFS 689E: Week 2

EFS 689E - STANFORD UNIVERSITY

Learning English on Your Own

Week 2

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EFS 689E

Week 2

0. (from last week): Some key elements of effective motivation (revised version of concepts from Oxford and Shearin, 1994)

Your attitude: toward the English language and its speakers and toward the importance of learning
Beliefs about yourself: confidence in success, ability to see your actions as leading to your objectives, and your level of anxiety about the process
Your goals: the ability to see your goals as concrete, relevant and achievable
Your involvement in the learning process: the intensity with which you engage in the language learning process and find it rewarding
Support: from teachers, friends, family, colleagues and others
Your personal attributes: language learning aptitude, age, first language, previous language learning experiences

You may be used to having teachers take responsibility for your motivation--now it's your turn: see learning on your own (below)

I. Review from last week: key points (see Week 1)

A. Course Objective

B. Meetings

C. www.elllo.org assignment: discuss in groups

1. What parts of ELLLO did you try?

2. What do you think ELLLO can help you with?

3. What are some effective ways to use ELLLO?

II. What is listening? (see below)

III. Dedicated learning sites:

English Language Listening Lab Online: www.elllo.org

English, Baby!: www.englishbaby.com

Randall’s Cyber Listening Lab: www.esl-lab.com

English trailers- examples of movie advertisements: www.english-trailers.com/index.php

FlashACE: www.stanford.edu/dept/lc/efs/FlashACE/

IV. Authentic (native speaker) listening sites audio/video with transcripts

Scientific American Frontiers: www.pbs.org/saf/

CNN Student News: www.cnn.com/studentnews/

This I Believe audio/text essays: www.thisibelieve.org/view_featured_essays.php
PBS Online News Hour: www.pbs.org/newshour/
Captioned videos at http://video.google.com/videocaptioned

V. A typical listening lesson: Example from the News Hour archives: www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/science/jan-june03/dna_04-25.html.

    A. Pre-listening: The title is DNA's 50th Anniversary: What is DNA? What do you know about its discovery?
    B. While listening: Pause occasionally (more often if you're having trouble) and try to recall what you know up to that point; jot down a note of the time for interesting or difficult parts
    C. Post-listening: What do you remember? What should you do next?
        - Listen again to the full story for comprehension
        - Listen to selected parts for comprehension
        - Look at the transcript for comprehension help and/or to focus on vocabulary building
        - Try a written or oral dictation of a segment, or some other task to support processing of the language forms

VI. Techniques and tools for listening

Media players: controls, resizing, speed,

Online dictionaries: Google definitions; Babylon; Longman Learner's Dictionary
Options for dedicated materials (with quizzes): hide multiple choice; try the quiz first before listening

VII. Advice for selecting listening materials (general--there are lots of exceptions)

Material you're interested in
Material you know something about
Material at about the right level (not too hard)
Good sound quality
Video over audio only
Material with transcripts
Material with captions

HOMEWORK

1) Work on your individual project (the one we agreed on during our first meeting) and be prepared to discuss it at your second meeting. Bring along any materials (or your computer) if needed. If you aren't sure what you're supposed to do, check with me after class or email me (efs@stanford.edu).

2) Try at least one of the dedicated ESL sites in (III) above and two of the native speaker sites in (IV). Spend a minimum of 15 minutes on each one. For each site, take notes about a) how useful the site might be for you and b) what you think would be a good way to use it.

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What is Listening?

I. Three types of listening activity

A. Learning to comprehend more effectively

§ Getting the meaning

§ Retaining important points (notes & memory)

§ Interpreting and integrating

B. Improving processing

§ Comprehending faster speech

§ Comprehending a range of accents

§ Making processing more automatic: improving accuracy, speed, and capacity

C. Increasing language knowledge

§ Sound system

§ Vocabulary (words and phrases)

§ Grammar

§ Discourse

II. Some elements involved in effective listening

A. Attention to the context

B. Discrimination/identification of sound forms (words)

C. Comprehension of words and propositions

D. Retention of meaning; association with existing knowledge

E. Recognition and retention of new forms (words, phrases)

F. Recognition of differences between grammatical forms and internal rule

system (note: this one's pretty hard)

G. Automatic processing

III. A processing approach to listening comprehension

A. Top-down elements

1. Activation of attention

2. Activation of background knowledge

3. Focus on meaning

4. Recognition and use of physical context

5. Recognition and use of discourse context

B. Bottom-up elements

1. Sound system knowledge

2. Grammar knowledge

3. Vocabulary knowledge

4. Focus on form

5. Speed, clarity and familiarity of signal

6. Sentence processing skill: grammatical, lexical, and phonological

C. Interactive approach

1. Blends strengths of top-down & bottom-up

2. Affected by cognitive resource limitations: the more that is automatic, the better

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Learning on your own

Last modified: July 9, 2008, by Phil Hubbard