Editorial
This article is the third in a series on using the CGE in class. Please also see articles by Simon Mumford July 2007, Chaz Pugliese September 2007 and Simon Marshall February 2007.

Exercises from Companion to Cambridge Grammar of English - Listening Section

Mario Rinvolucri, UK

Mario Rinvolucri teacher, teacher trainer and author. He has worked for Pilgrims for over 30 years and used to edit Humanising Language Teaching. Regularly contributes to The Teacher Trainer Journal. His recent books include: Creative Writing, with Christine Frank, Helbling, Multiple Intelligences in EFL, with Herbert Puchta, Helbling, Unlocking Self-Expression through NLP, with Judy Baker, Delta Books, New edition of Vocabulary, with John Morgan, OUP, Humanising your Coursebook, Delta Books, Using the Mother Tongue, with Sheelagh Deller, Delta Books, Ways of Doing, with Paul Davis and Barbara Garside, CUP, Imagine That with Herbert Puchta and Jane Arnold, Helbing, Creative Writing with Christine Frank, Helbing. Mario's first CD Rom for students, Mindgame, was written with Isobel Fletcher de Tellez, and engineered and published by Clarity, Hong Kong in 2000. E-mail: mario@pilgrims.co.uk

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Introduction
Listen for things you don't normally say
Transcribe!
Dramatise!

Introduction

The listening activities outlined briefly below have all been tested using native speakers brought into the classroom. By using ten different natives over a two week course, students, who were encouraged to note down everything the natives said but which they, the students, would not say in their normal speech, produced a sort of mini-corpus of spoken English and this was a mini-corpus linked to people whom they had met in flesh and blood and humanly appreciated.

Listen for things you don't normally say

Ask your students to listen to the dialogue twice, each time noting down any words or phrases they would not use themselves while speaking English. Do the exercise yourself too. ( your idiolect will be different from the speaker's for reasons of class, gender, age and regional and conscious linguistic choice)

Ask them to compare what they have noted down.

Share your notes with the students, stressing your differences from the speakers , but also bringing out the main oral features of the language, e.g. softening, ellipsis, short utterances that stack up etc….

Transcribe!

Make individual recordings of a dialogue available to your students ( this could b e of a native speaker they listened to last week and whom you recorded) . Give them 30 minutes to listen and re-listen to the dialogue. Tell them to transcribe ( word –for-word) those snatches of the text that they like for whatever reason.

Group them in fours to re-read their written texts and explain why certain bits of the dialogue attracted/interested them.

Let them compare what they have written to the professional transcript or to the recording you made of the native

Dramatise!

Choose 8-12 utterances and give the students the professional transcription.
If there are three speakers in the conversation, ask the students to work in groups of three, to decide on the situation and on how the speakers are standing, sitting etc…. Ask them to rehearse the conversation as it seems to them from the transcript.

Ask them the turn the transcript over. Now they listen to the CD several times and take down what is being said. ( the purpose of this dictation phase is to internalise the music of the conversation.)

Now ask them to rehearse the conversation again with the original speakers' voices strong in their ears.

The idea of these listening exercises is to allow students to begin to internalise the auditory patterns of oral English and to take oral grammar on board non-analytically. We feel that this section of the book is a vital one.

Please check the Pronunciation course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the What's New in Language Teaching course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Methodology for Teaching Spoken Grammar and Language course at Pilgrims website.