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Abstract
This article describes a weekly listening task using TED Talks designed for low-intermediate proficiency English for Academic Purposes students that utilizes a metacognitive pedagogical sequence. Students were instructed to listen to a TED Talk, make notes about what they heard, check their comprehension using the English and translated transcripts, and to write reflections on five mis-hearings or misunderstandings and why they occurred. I designed it with the intention of encouraging greater learner autonomy in their deliberate listening practice, and to make them aware of the errors they were making in both bottom-up and top-down processing while listening to authentic, lecture-style English.
Keywords: Authentic texts, EAP, L2 learner autonomy, listening journals, metacognition, TED Talks
Introduction
The purpose of this paper is to describe a supplemental listening task using TED Talks that I created to address the deficiencies my students and I encountered in the textbook-centered curriculum of an EAP (English for Academic Purposes) listening course. Much of the teaching of the often overlooked skill of second language (L2) listening employs what Field (2008) calls the comprehension approach in which the teacher prepares a series of questions about what a speaker is saying and the students listen and write answers to the questions. These activities tacitly assume that the concepts targeted by the questions are the most essential to every learner's language development, they demand little initiative on the part of the learner, and they provide no insight for the teacher or the learner as to why the learner understood or misunderstood the text. At the opposing end of the spectrum are activities oriented towards extensive listening (EL) for pleasure. Both varieties of activities are important and have their place in a listening class, but the development of listening skills to encourage learner independence should be included among the desired outcomes. The pedagogy described in this paper does exactly that. It invites the learner in to be an active participant in their learning by utilizing scaffolding that enables them to realize their own errors, the reason they made those errors, and the strategies they can make use of in the future.
In my discussion of the literature that applies to this task, I first review what we know of the nature of listening, the cognitive...