Increasing EAP Students’ Motivation and Independence by Letting Them Lead Some of heir Listening Lessons

Hatice Sarıgül Aydoğan, Turkey

Hatice Sarıgül Aydoğan has been teaching at tertiary level since 1999 with the last seven years being at Sabancı University, Turkey. She is interested in the personal and professional development of herself and her students. More specifically she's fascinated by and interested in creative approaches to teaching. Connected to these interests she gained a Sabancı University Certificate in Teacher Training and carries out classroom based research on an ongoing basis.
E-mail: hsarigul@sabanciuniv.edu

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Introduction and my aims
A summary of how it worked in my class
TED talks – student led sessions: Instructions
Some feedback from students
How it can be set up

Introduction and my aims

In spring 2010 I applied something that I called my “TED TALKS session Project” since it worked quite well I wanted to share it with the wider ELT community, especially those who teach at intermediate and higher levels might consider trying it out more or less as it is if they and their students have access to computers and the internet, however I believe also teachers at lower levels might apply the same idea by adapting some of its aspects and using it with other materials.

Since our students at the Upper intermediate level usually need to do extensive note-taking practice from listening, they often ask for resources they can listen to outside classes; as it is also a fact that I am a big fan of the wonderful, informative and inspiring TED talks (www.ted.com) on topics such as technology, health, entertainment, global issues, and the like, and have been trying to include them more regularly into my lessons, I came up with this idea that made it possible for me to marry quite a few of my objectives.

My aims were to:

• give the students some control over lesson content while still also following the coursebook and syllabus, and thereby motivating them as they would feel more of an ownership of the lessons due to their active part in the decision making process,
• familiarise them with this wonderful listening source which has great speeches that they often find interesting, also hoping that they would listen to them even when it wasn’t necessarily their turn to prepare the questions,
• train them in listening without having ready made questions and them making up their own questions, thereby becoming more autonomous in their approach to practicing listening
• give them more listening practice from an authentic source,
• motivate them by giving them free choice of topic,

A summary of how it worked in my class

There were 15 students in this class and they each did their talks spread out over approximately 9 weeks time, and each session lasted about 30-40 minutes, depending on the length of the talk and the question type, this all added up to about ten hours where students were in charge of the lesson content and tasks, they decided what to do in a useful and meaningful way for about half a weeks’ worth of lessons. They did do a very good job with this, they all selected interesting talks and prepared their own questions for these.

Below you can see the instructions they were given (as a reminder / checklist) after going through a full sample TED talk session of my choice with pre- and post- discussions, and after going through the whole Project together and spending some time together to explore the site.

TED talks – student led sessions: Instructions

A. Listen to several TED TALKS over the next few days and choose one you’d like to use in your session by _____19.03.2010_________ and inform Hatice.

You can choose a TED TALK you’d like everyone to listen to because you think it’s:

• Interesting and / or fun
• or more info about the topics we study
• Good listening practice – good pace / use of language / structure
• ?
• ?

B. In preparation to your session

1. Listen to the Talk and take notes
2. Listen to the Talk again and check your notes – do they seem correct / is anything missing?
3. Looking at your notes decide if it’s more suitable as a while-listening or a note-taking practice.
4. If you decide it could be a a. note-taking practice – try to break it up into a couple of Headings – an outline – and then prepare your questions ( aim for 8-10).
b. while-listening practice – prepare some questions that might be answered while we listen to it (aim for 10-15).
5. Listen to it one more time to check if your questions are “answerable” and to create your answer key.
6. Also come up with 1-2 questions you’d like to ask your friends before they start listening to your chosen Talk and a couple of questions we might want to discuss / share ideas on after the Talk. You can be as creative as you like for these stages.
7. Show your questions to Hatice / Denise to get a bit of feedback at least 2 days before your session.
8. There is a penalty if you show up with no session… for your info…

C. Enjoy being the teacher of your session who has decided on the topic and the questions for that lesson.

Some feedback from students

As their end of course feedback revealed, they all liked to choose their own speech to be shared with their peers; all but one student liked to listen to their friends’ choices; it seemed to have a refreshing effect and they expressed appreciation for that; furthermore the majority said that they did listen to these speeches even when not instructed to do so, which was assuring for me since that was one of my ulterior motives.

How it can be set up

1. Familiarise yourself with the site yourself first, it’s very user friendly, you can search by:
   • Typing in a topic or name into the search box on the right top corner and try your luck
   • Themes
   • Clicking on the examples provided on the homepage and checking out other talks on similar topics
   • Clicking on options such as inspiring, funny, informative from the menu on the left to narrow your search

   (Beware though, you might end up spending hours watching one talk after another – don’t explore this site when you’re very tight in terms of time…)

2. Choose one talk that you think is appropriate to your class. Prepare your usual lesson around that talk with a nice lead-in to it, some listening and a follow-up tasks.
3. Do the lesson you prepared in step 2 with your students.
4. Go through the steps of the Project – explain to them what you’d like them to do very clearly by referring back to the model lesson you just did with them. If you have a projector you can pull up an adapted version of the instructions above and /or give them hardcopies…
5. Ask them to get online and go through the steps of searching for a talk together, show them the different options through the projector and have them do it on their laptops, also show them the “interactive transcript” and “subtitle” settings, etc… do some exploring together.
6. Now give them some time to explore individually, let them look up potential topics they might want to do their “session” on. Provide help if needed.
7. Either show them a schedule with each student already assigned a certain day for their session or alternatively give them a schedule with the dates fixed but let the students choose when they want to do their session.
8. Ask them to inform you about the title of the talk they want to use in class and also ask them to show you their questions beforehand.
9. Then sit back each time it’s a students’ session – let them take over the classroom, be there to help with technical issue, you’ll be surprised to see how well they’ll do it.

I’m pretty sure that this can be done with other listening materials, too – so, especially if having online access is a bit of an issue, you wonderfully creative teachers will surely find a way…

Please check the Teaching Advanced Students course at Pilgrims website.