Alastair Graham-Marr
Hamamatsu: Create Bldg. on January 11 18:00-20:00
Shizuoka City: at Azaria on January 12 13:30-15:30
The Effect of Listening Skills Development on Motivation and SLA
This interactive forum will focus on how feelings of inadequacy negatively impact our students’ decisions to engage with English. Participation is invited to discuss how and why Japanese and other Asian learners suffer from weak listening comprehension skills, how this effects motivation and engagement, and what we can do to overcome this.
Feelings of inadequacy quite obviously negatively impact our students’ decisions to engage with English, both in and out of the classroom. And when students choose not to engage with the language, learning opportunities are lost or kicked down the road. A majority of our students feel that their L2 listening comprehension skills are insufficient, leading to feelings of anxiety, which in turn negatively impact the desire to willingly engage with the language, which if unchecked will continue in a negative cycle. The cause of these L2 listening comprehension difficulties can be found in the huge phonological differences between Japanese and English. Students need to be actively coached and taught these differences, and be encouraged to keep on with a regime of listening practice that might be quite different from how we might approach, extensive reading, for example. This talk will look at both pedagogical approaches and recent research in SLA. Participants are also welcome to contribute to the discussion.