Basic Skills Forum

A Penny for Ur Thoughts?

Adapting Penny Ur’s “Teaching Listening Comprehension” for math basic skills.

—– Penny Ur (1984). “Teaching Listening Comprehension.”
—– Cambridge University Press.

This book is still one of the greats on specific ways to teach basic listening – TPR and all its cousins. How can these techniques be adapted for math?

A first area is “listening for perception” (pp.35-46). I think we do this already. Our Beginning One texts certainly have students circling 13 or 30 as they listen to a script. Extensions to this are given in later chapters: students are given a series of pictures and asked to pick the one being described, or put them in the order that they are described.

In “Detecting Mistakes” (pp. 80-83), students are given a picture. The teacher (or video) describes the picture, but makes mistakes, which students must spot. For us the mistakes could be math related. They can also be given a written text which differs from the audio one, and they have to spot the differences. Or for math, they are given a completed check register, and must spot when the aural story deviates from the register. It would not be hard to go through the beginning texts, and make up a math cloze for every chapter.

Cloze exercises (pp.83-84) would certainly work here. Students get a script with blanks and must fill in the blanks while listening. They could be listening for items, prices, and/or quantities. Or distances to travel. Or baseball scores. Or recipe info. In another form of this, students get a complete script, but there are mistakes that they must correct as they listen. (In the above paragraph, the aural text was wrong; here the written text is wrong). Add some calculation to each. Again, this could be done for every chapter.

Ur discusses grids as well (pp. 116-123). There’s a lot we could do here: Students listen to a story that includes plenty of numbers and fill in the numbers. Perhaps they are a disaster relief agency getting donations of canned goods, shoes, etc. and they must log in the quantities and total it up. Or it could be sports scores, or small business expenses.

An extension of these activities is to then have students tell the story to each other, using only their grids. This forces them to paraphrase (pp. 129-132).

In “jigsaw listening” (pp.152-160) different students listen to different texts and get information, as in the above sections. This then becomes the basis of an information gap activity, as students put the information together with others. For example: each student in the group is a member of the family, and has had a couple sources of income and written a few checks. They must combine their info to get a household budget. They may need to categorize income – pay, gifts, refund check – and or expenses – rent, utilities, food, etc. Similar exercises could be done for a class party or a business.

A few final thoughts I want to add before I forget them:

First, we could add an unknown to the above activities – someone’s receipts are missing and must be added in later. This works towards an important concept for higher math – variables.

Second: I think spreadsheets are very important for these activities. This will help with check records, bank records, business, higher math, etc.

Third: let’s incorporate real bank statements as well.

Fourth: we need to get out of the easy ruts – grocery shopping, etc.

Fifth: we need to incorporate fractions, decimals, and American measurements.