Abstract:

This presentation examines how teachers can develop and use interactive materials that facilitate student engagement in the academic listening classroom. It will look at the theoretical rationale behind these activities and discuss how these materials allow students to become more engage in the listening activities. Which, in turn, allows them to become better academic listeners. It will also look at how materials created in Adobe’s InDesign can be used as both traditional paper based materials as well as interactive Flash materials to allow students of different levels to improve their listening ability both in the classroom and at home.

This is an important topic because, in the EFL curriculum, listening is one of the least understood skills and the most challenging to design and create materials for. According to Vandergrift (2004) "Listening is probably the least explicit of the four language skills, making it the most difficult skill to learn." Because of this it is important that teachers and course coordinators plan their academic listening class in a way that gives students the opportunity to become familiar with all of the skills necessary to become good academic listeners. However, many teachers have a "narrow interpretation of academic listening as ‘listening to lectures and taking notes’." (Lynch, 2011) This view of listening overlooks the challenges involved in the academic listening environment in which students are expected to not only understanding and responding to the spoken language, but also “to interact with multiple sources of knowledge and to form collaborative relationship with other students.” (Roast, 2011)

This presentation looks at how teachers can use interactive materials created on the computer to help facilitate their students’ abilities to engage and interact with listening tasks. It will include an examination of current research in the field of academic listening and look at how this research can be used to develop effective materials for the academic listening class. This will include a demonstration of materials created in Flash, InDesign and HTML that were developed for a 2 year academic listening program at a university in Japan. The theoretical framework behind the different activities will be explained and the students reaction to the activities will be discussed. It is hoped that this will enable teachers to better understand the types of skills students need to become better listeners and present teachers with activities they can use to allow students to practice these skills in the language classroom.

Keywords:

EFL, ESL, Academic Listening, Listening, Material Development, InDesign.