This week, we’re listening!

Just over a year ago, I wrote a post for the Cambridge English Teaching Together Blog on Training your listening skills.

In the post, I recommended the Ted talk by Julian Treasure:  5 ways to listen better.

Julian Treasure is one of my favourite Ted speakers.    He definitely recommends making our listening a conscious activity.  I think that his advice could be useful to everybody, but especially maybe for students in our classes who find listening a difficult activity.  Maybe if they train their listening, then their ability to understand spoken English will also improve?

The word cloud below shows the words used in the talk.  (I generated the word cloud by pasting in the transcript of Julian’s talk onto this website:https://www.jasondavies.com/wordcloud/#)

The word cloud really highlights the messages in his talk.

His suggestion at the end of the talk of being a better listener by receiving ideas, information from the people we’re listening to (by paying attention), showing our appreciation of what they’re saying (by making little noises like mm, or by using words like ‘Right!’), summarising what we’ve heard (so, what you mean is ….?), and asking questions (e.g. – Are you feeling better now? if someone has just told us that they’ve been ill).  RASA – receive, appreciate, summarise, ask!  might be a good way to approach post-listening in the classroom.

I’ll be writing more posts about listening this week, with useful tips, language and websites for students at different levels.  I hope you’ll find the suggestions useful!