Presentations and Listening Tasks
My students do a lot of activities in oral communication. Up to now, we've had presentations, discussions, interviews and even a debate. However, up to now, presentations and discussions have been on prepared topics. Starting a week from now, students will attempt their first improvs. Each student will be given a choice of three topics. They will then have two minutes to think and prepare, after which they'll have to speak about that topic. I'm hoping to do improv role-plays in the future as well.
For presentations, a big question has been: What should the other students be doing while a student is making a presentation. Obviously, they should be listening, but we all know that junior high school students don't always do what would seem obvious to an adult. The question, though, is what tasks could we give students that would keep them on task, reinforce the skills we use when we listen to a presentation, and not turn the presentation into a merely academic exercise. In other words, I want the students to listen, but I want the students to perform tasks that reinforce the way we would listen 'in real life'.
As such, I have devised three listening tasks that we're going to start using in our oral communication classes during presentations.
1) Re-communication. What's one of the things we do with newly acquired information? We pass it on. The first task will be for students to paraphrase the main points of the presentation: in other words, to re-communicate what they have learned.
2) Assessment. What do we do when we listen? We assess. We think 'Is this something I really want to know? Is this something that is important to me? Is this true? Do I trust the information this person is giving me? Do I agree or disagree?' In a larger sense, we can learn from the WAY a presentation is made. 'What was good about this presentation? Is there something here that I'd like to do in the future when I give presentations? Is there something here that's not working, something I should pay attention to and learn not to do?' Assessment is a natural activity when we listen, so I want students to be conscious of ways to assess a presentation, and different things they can focus on when they assess newly acquired information.
3) Response. How often do people give us new information and we simply accept it? How often do we have a question, but are too shy to ask? One important skill is learning how to request clarification, request more information, fill-in the gaps, and most importantly: learn to challenge weaknesses, inaccuracies and fallacies that could damage the effectiveness of new information. I want my students to learn how to formulate response to what they hear. However, I want to emphasize with students that a response need not be critical. Sometimes a valuable response is to ADD information, reinforce the things that were good or right in the presentation, and encourage the speaker to present more.
By implementing these listening tasks, I hope to help students develop some very important listening and analysis skills.
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Date: 2008⁄02⁄09 12:37｜Permalink｜Author：nelp