Humanising Language Teaching
Year 6; Issue 1; January 2004

Listening to People: Chapter 3 of THE CONFIDENCE BOOK

Paul Davis

( The following nine exercises are taken from Paul Davis' THE CONFIDENCE BOOK, originally published in the Pilgrims-Longman series. The book, sadly, has been out of print for about 8 years.
Listening is one of the areas in which students typically feel fear. This chapter is about dealing with such fear.)

You're in a crowded room, with lots of conversations going on at once. Over a deafening hubbub of voices you're managing to listen to the interesting words of the person you're chatting to. Suddenly your attention switches to the far side of the room. Someone has whispered your name. Maybe they're gossiping about you or paying you a compliment. You want to hear. And you can.

It's clear that listening is about more than understanding the words that are used. In this chapter we try to deal with other aspects of successful listening - paying your best attention, empathy with the speaker, observation, feeling you are being respected, having space for people to listen to you. When we say to ourselves 'nobody ever listens to me' we don't mean that they don't understand the words we use. The exercises in this section are about listening not just to language but to content, not to tapes but to people.

ONE-MINUTE MONOLOGUE

3.1
Level Post-beginner+
Time 15-20 minutes
Materials None
Preparation None

In class

1. Pair the students and explain that each of them will have sixty seconds to speak to the other. The topic is open. Explain that after the paired monologues they will report one thing the other said to the whole group. During each monologue the listener is to respond without speaking.
2. Ask them to decide who will speak first. Time the first minute. When it's over ask the second speaker to start, again for sixty seconds.
3. Each students reports one thing said by their partner to the whole group.

RATIONALE

Offering a time limit to a person speaking a foreign language will often reduce their anxiety. It can't be that bad if I only have to speak for a minute.
The exercise as outlined above is good a) as an icebreaker and b) as a way for you to gauge the group's mood. For both these purposes it is good to leave the topic open.

VARIATIONS

1. You can also use the exercise to focus students in on a topic or on a significant area of it. Suppose the theme proposed by the coursebook you are using is 'pollution', you could usefully organise one-minute monologues on 'ways people in my family pollute the environment'.
2. We have also used the exercise as a preparation for oral exams.
3. After you've done this exercise two or three times for one minute and the students have got used to the format, gradually increase the time limit to two minutes, then three, then four. This is an excellent way of providing fluency work for beginner/ elementary classes or classes of a higher level who find extended speech a problem.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

We first came across this type of exercise through a co-counselling course run by Fenella Butler.

REPORTED SPEECH CONVERSATION

3.2
Level Post-beginner+
Time 10-15 minutes
Materials None
Preparation None

In class

Pair the students and invite them to have a conversation on a topic of their mutual choice. A starts talking. Before B can intervene and make the point they may want to make, they have to paraphrase/repeat what A has just said. B should start off with a reporting verb and continue without backshift: 'You said you feel a bit anxious about these exams because 'B then carries on the conversation until A wants to intervene. This intervention is preceded by a repetition of what B has just said, and so on.

RATIONALE

Exercises in reflective listening like the one above allow students to notice the other person from the other's point of view, a full and stimulating experience.

VARIATIONS

You can introduce this kind of reformulation procedure into a traditional debate. The first speaker moves the motion: This house believes that Blairism makes the poor poorer. When the person opposing the motion stands up to speak, their first task is to summarise the first speaker's ideas to their satisfaction. They then proceed with their own speech. The third speaker, seconding the motion, has to summarise the opposition arguments to the opposer'satisfaction, etc.

It has been seriously suggested that this procedure would remove fifty per cent of the areas of disagreement at superpower negotiations. The suggestion is that fifty per cent of their disagreements are mis-reading of the other side's words.

PUTTING PEOPLE DOWN

3.3
Level Lower intermediate +
Time 15-30 minutes
Materials None
Preparation None

In class

1. Put these 'model conversations' up on the board:
   1. Nobody cares whether I am dead or alive.
   2. I do, I wish you were dead.
   1. I don't know enough words.
   2. Oh, you mean vocabulary.

2. Pair the students and ask them to produce a couple of 'put-down' dialogues like the ones above in which B is hostile to and totally out of tune with A. Ask them to practise saying them convincingly.

3. Get the pairs to play the dialogues to the whole group.

RATIONALE

This exercise focuses on empathetic listening by having students explore its opposite. You may want to use it in conjunction with more conventional activities from this section.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

We learnt this exercise and the one that follows at a workshop on 'Six Category Intervention Analysis' run by James Kilty and Sharon Kilty, from the University of Surrey.

I AM A PERSON WHO

3.4

Level Post-beginner+
Time 20-30 minutes
Materials None
Preparation None

In class

1. The students work in pairs and one of them speaks for four minutes while the other listens without interruption. Each of the speaker's sentences opens with: ' I am a person who ' . You time the four minutes.

2. The listening students then have four minutes to reproduce (not necessarily in the same order) all the sentences produced by the speaker. The reproduction should be in the first person so that they are acting as a mirror to the speaker. You can expect the listener to remember nearly all the sentences.

3. Repeat the exercise with the roles reversed.

RATIONALE

This is a very simple exercise that boosts students' confidence in their own powers of recall. People are amazed at how much they are able to remember.
The insistent refrain 'I am a person who' strongly affirms personhood. If the speaker is poorer at the target language than the listener, some effective language correction takes place when the listener feeds back the sentences, effective because it is usually unintentional and therefore unthreatening.

QUESTIONS WORTH ANSWERING

3.5 Level Post-beginner+
Time 10-15 minutes
Materials None
Preparation None

In class

1. Ask the students to work in threes with A facing B and C. For a timed minute A asks B and C as many questions as they can on a topic given by the teacher. B and C's task is to listen and remember as many of the questions as possible. They do not take notes. The topic could be you as a student, you as a worker, you as a family member.

2. B and C then have three timed minutes to answer any of A's questions they want to. A's task is to listen to the answers attentively and without interruption.

3. Repeat the exercise with B and then C taking on the questioner role.

RATIONALE

This exercise combines attentive listening with medium term remembering. If, as A, you have asked a stream of questions and B and C have remembered and decided to answer several of them, you feel confirmed. By answering, they are validating your thinking. It enhances self-esteem to feel that another person has listened to you carefully and bothered to remember what you said.

CONTROLLING THE QUESTIONS

3.6
Level Lower intermediate+
Time 20-30 minutes
Materials None
Preparation None

In class

1. Working on their own, students jot down twelve roles they have or had in life e.g. sister, lacrosse captain, comforter, colleague, aunt. This list is private to each person.

2. From the twelve roles, ask them to choose six they are willing to share information about. They write two questions addressed to themselves about each of the six roles. The questions should be ones they can give interesting answers to.

3. Ask them to work in pairs, swapping questionnaires, so that A puts B's questions To B and vice versa.

RATIONALE

This is one of a number of exercises around the interrogative forms in which the person answering the question controls the content of the question. It is a self-disclo-sure exercise in which the subjects have plenty of time to decide how much to show of themselves. Having control tends to breed confidence.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

We first encountered this type of activity in Caring and Sharing in the Foreign Language Classroom (Moskowitz 1978).

HEADCHATTER

3.7
Level Lower intermediate+
Time 10-15 minutes
Materials None
Preparation None

In class

1. Pair the students and ask A to speak for ninety seconds on a topic chosen by B. It must be a topic A feels happy with.

2. While A talks, B has a pencil at the ready. They make a mark on the paper every time they think of anything that leads them away from what A is saying. This could be a train of thought started by A's speech, it could be a background noise and an association with it, it could be a totally unconnected own thought.

3. When A finishes the minute and a half, B tells A all the distractions and sideways thoughts they have had.

4. Repeat the exercise the other way round.

RATIONALE

To share with another the degree to which you find it hard to follow their train of thought establishes a basis of trust.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

We learnt the exercise above from Mike Lavery (See Bibliography for details of published work).

DESCRIBING THE OTHER

3.8
Level Intermediate+
Time 10-15 minutes
Materials None
Preparation None

In class

1. Pair the students. Tell them they are going to spend seven minutes observing things about each other, imagining things about each other and checking out if their observation and imagining is felt to be accurate by the other person.

2. A starts off and after a few seconds looking carefully at B, might say: I observe you are looking upwards and tapping your foot. I imagine this means you are feeling a bit bored and embarrassed. After each of A's statements, B either affirms by nodding or disagrees by shaking their head. B does not need to use words for this.

3. They then work the other way round, with B observing A. They do as many rounds of observing and imagining as they can in the seven minutes.

4. Allow time for people to discuss the exercise in their pairs or in larger sub-groups.

RATIONALE

This kind of work enhances group cohesion and allows people to break through an embarrassment threshold. The first time you do this exercise there is likely to be a certain amount of self-consciousness and silliness. For some it may be the first conscious introduction to the world of the non-spoken.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

We learnt this exercise at a workshop on 'Six Category Intervention Analysis' run by James Kilty and Sharon Kilty from the University of Surrey.

THE POWER OF LISTENING

3.9
Level Teacher training
Time 50-60 minutes
Materials None
Preparation None

In class

While all the other activities in this chapter are aimed mainly at helping students to become better listeners, this one is for sensitising teachers to arguably the most important part of our trade: empathetic listening. The aim of this training session scenario is to introduce the concept of listening to the person and not simply to the message at its surface level.

1. Ask people to work in groups of three. Tell them to spend thirty to sixty seconds bringing to mind everyday life situations in which they take pleasure in listening, in which listening is not a strain or an effort. Give them an example of your own. Explain that each person will speak for ninety seconds on pleasurable listening situations - the task of the listeners is to pay as much attention as they can, to stay with the speaker and not to get sidetracked. The listeners may want to prompt the speaker but it is vital they help them to follow their train of thought, not the listeners' own. Each person will have a ninety-second turn at speaking.

2. Ask each group of three to choose the first speaker. Each person in the group speaks for ninety seconds, which you should time accurately. Start and finish everyone at the same time. Then ask everybody to spend three to five minutes writing a diary entry on how well or badly they listened, on what stopped them listening, on the bits that were easy to listen to, etc. Tell them the diary will be private.

3. The trainees now make new groups of three. They spend thirty to sixty seconds silently bringing to mind how they organise their own listening in class. Again model, telling them some of what you do to organise your listening in class. Now ask them to speak and listen again following the same system as above. Then ask everybody to spend three to five minutes writing another private diary entry about how they felt as speaker in both the above sessions. Did they talk equally to both listeners, how much did they feel attended to, what physical indications made this plain to them?

4. Now form new groups of three. Ask them to think of instances in their everyday life in which intense empathetic listening has a strong positive effect on those round the listener. Offer the group an example from your own life. The trainees again speak and listen in three sessions of ninety seconds. They write a diary entry on what they feel about this odd form of timed counselling listening they have been engaged in.

5. Each person now picks a partner of their choice and goes off for a feedback walk and finally, the session ends with a general plenary discussion.

RATIONALE

By listening fully to students, teachers can give them added confidence - the message is clear: I am really paying attention because what you are saying is inevitably significant at one level or another.

VARIATIONS

We have used the same frame with language students. We asked them to speak about the following themes in four 'rounds': childhood, teenage, middle age and old age. The diary suggestion was that they should briefly note down the ideas in the two other people's speaking that had most interested them after the first session - the last diary entry was about the feelings the exercise left them with. The frame is a useful one with uneasy late teenage classes. Everybody speaks - some people listen for some of the time.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Both the content and the process of the teacher training exercise is with attention listening. You are doing and reflecting on precisely the same thing. We found this concept hard to grasp when we first met it. Here's another example: PEN TA SYL LA BIC has five syllables and means five syllabled. The form of the word and its meaning content are identical. We learnt the idea of applying two-levelledness from Models and Metaphors in English Language Teaching (Woodward 1990).