Active Listening Series, Part I: Listening for Quality

Being an active listener is an essential habit of mind for success in school, relationships and throughout life. What I'm talking about here isn't simply listening to the teacher (although that is definitely something we all want!)...the key here is to teach students to listen to each other.

What are the benefits of teaching students to listen to each other in the context of a world language class?

• Authentic Communication in the Target Language Every speaker deserves a listener. Communication only occurs when a sent message is received. 
• Comprehensible Input In order to learn a language, students need to hear it. Although I love to get students speaking French on the very first day of school, noted linguist Stephen Krashen explains that it is still much more valuable for students to actively listen until they are ready to produce the language. Read Krashen's views on listening here.
• Raise the Stakes Require students to memorize their presentations. And then have students hold each other accountable. And then watch the magic happen! When I ask students to write a conversation, it needs to be memorized and presented before the class as soon as the next day. And it needs to be good. 
• Cultivate Classroom Community Studying a new language is inherently risky business. When students listen to each other and learn to give constructive criticism related to spoken language quality, they became each others' accent coaches, but they also become a team. The teacher is no longer the only one who knows how the language should sound. What I love is to watch 40 minutes of memorized French presentations, calling on students to share their critiques and only intervening when a necessary point wasn't raised. When students learn to actively listen to each other, they realize that they have knowledge and insight to share that they can use to help each other improve. It is so empowering for students to feel some authority over a subject that is inherently "foreign" to them.
• Self and Peer Editing Novice language students often protest that they don't know enough of the language to give each other coaching or to edit each others' work. Not so! If all students are using what has been taught, then all students have access to the same language. They are able to comment on the quality and content of presentations in order to improve each others' accents, syntax, word choice, and public speaking skills. When you empower students to teach each other, the knowledge is shared, and a stronger sense of ownership and engagement results.                                              

Here is one of my strategies for teaching students to listen for quality and offer peer evaluations during presentations. 

1. Teach students the language (either in English or in the target language) that you want them to use when they give constructive criticism. Require specific and clear feedback. "It was good" is far too general to be of any use to a peer who wants to improve!

2. Model it. 

3. After each student presentation, call on peers to share their feedback. Do not always choose the same students; call on those who don't have their hands raised to remind them that their listening is an essential part of helping the class improve! 

4. Require students to complete the written evaluation during each and every presentation. Collect it. Check it thoroughly, especially the first few times, so that the procedure becomes ingrained as a class expectation. 

Click here for the document. Feel free to modify it for your language.

Please comment below to share your thoughts on how or why to teach students to listen actively to each other!