Listening in EFL, what’s the snag?

As far off as my memory can go -about a quarter of a century back- I can say it out loud that teaching listening has not improved at all. Some say it is the least motivating lesson for a class. Others believe it is alienating to both teachers and students.

Others reckon that pre- and post- listening activities take over the real and major task ie. listening. Shocking, isn’t it?

To address this issue, we should hold the bull by the horns.

Before we start, let’s have an overview of the teaching scene without makeup brushes.

If you are not a teacher of English, just fancy this!

This happens in a listening session.

- As a teacher, you are a ‘cassette-operator’ who winds, rewinds, adjusts sound…

- In front of you a class of some 30 students scattered at random in the classroom

- Three or four rows of fixed or unmovable seats

- In your hand a cassette-recorder with one speaker and most of the time without a counter

- A classroom with no sound-proof walls

- The classroom large windows open on the noisy school playgrounds and /or street where trucks, tractors, buses, silencer-free motorbikes never stop buzzing.

- Some hammering – over your head in an urgent roof-repair or from an active construction site nearby

- Other jam-packed classrooms around you with students probably taking a test.! With all due respect to a ‘don’t-disturb-test-taking class’…

You are about to play the tape now.

- You peep! Where’s the socket? Here it is. Fine so far…

- Where will you keep the cassette? No problem, you can snatch half of the pupil’s place. Or be ‘the cassette custodian’ and hold it high on your own hands during the listening session.

- Surprise! The socket is not fused.

‘Why don’t you keep a fuse with you all the time?’ suggested the school electrician.

Why not? Another teaching aid for listening sessions!

Will that fuse work in other classrooms? Of course not! An assortment of fuses is needed. Different brands of sockets are installed at school.

- You turn into a magician; you wave your wand and get out of your pocket some batteries. ‘Keep them at hand teacher! You will need them the next lesson’. Got it!

Don’t get bored with this, guys! The setting is not complete.

I forgot to tell you that this is about the end of the 1^st decade of the 3^rdmillennium. Just one more detail and then we will get started in a moment.

Windows closed! Door closed! Lend me your ears!

You impose a complete silence in the room.

After winding and rewinding, you finally start playing the tape.

A knocking on the door.

- Yes!

- ‘ Mr X told you to turn down the sound’, the first ‘envoy’ from the classroom next door tells you.

- Without disturbing the reverent atmosphere you have imposed before starting, you turn the sound down.

Students now claim their full right to have the sound turned up

- ‘Save your lesson. Do it!’ the voice of reason tells you.

You decide to turn the sound up.

A knocking on the door again.

- Yes! ‘ Mr X told you the sound is still high’, the second envoy informs you.

- ‘Don’t do it!’ The voice of reason tells you.

Without hesitation, you decide to keep it high. You are in your classroom. You are not trespassing and the students are focused on the task after all.

A knocking on the door again.

‘ I can’t work in these conditions. This is unbecoming of you! You’re being inconsiderate. Turn the sound down or else I will call the principal’, shouts angrily the Maths teacher.

- ‘To cut it short, you close the door and finish your lesson’………………………..

This is what practically takes place in every listening session.

You find me very sarcastic. Yes, I am. The situation is surreal. How many times has the lesson been interrupted? Are we really conducting a listening lesson? Are we equipping students with listening skills?

With this tiny cassette, how much will students get?

How many students of that large class will grasp the meaning and use the skills you as teacher want to pass on to them?

You will tell me ‘silence gives consent. You have been doing it for ages, why raise the issue now?'

You’re right. Simply I saw some people putting the cart before the horse. A language lab (Software and hardware) has been installed in almost every CREFOC targeting language teaching. The millions of Euros spent on labs -not yet functional after one year of lingering expectations- could have provided thousands of CD-players to schools and repaired the thousands of dilapidated classrooms, broken windows and of course the never-working sockets.

To my mind, this is putting spoke in wheels. Somebody wanted to prove that they were serving the country’s well-being, innovating education by being the vanguard of themselves.

The reality is down; why should we turn our eyes up and jump over it?

Let’s not speak in riddles… This is the fact of the matter:

- The conditions in schools are precarious.

- The average class in secondary education is 30 to 33

- The substandard attainment recorded every year in national exams is alarming.

- The rate of school dropouts is soaring

- School equipment is seedy-looking

- Internet rooms have been hijacked by the administration and transformed into classrooms

- Violent friction at school involving all parties – teachers, administration and students- is common place

In this hellish misery, the school atmosphere is gloomy and tense. The expectations of students and teachers are low; their relationships are intoxicated and communication between them is barred.

Priority should be given to the urgent daily necessities not to the fantasies of some whimsical high officials who have never left their comfortable seats and air-conditioned offices to see closely the vicissitudes of the education systems.

Is our network flimsy?

Fast technological progress and globalization have made one thing perfectly clear: Advanced training is a requirement for professional success. Nowadays, there are institutions for advanced training that promote programs to enable continual learning. Internet plays an important role in their endeavor. People can participate in advanced training courses worldwide even from their homes.

           Almost all universities in the world have websites and maintain their database updated. As an aspect of modern education, those universities build up their reputation by granting scholarships and by keeping their doors open for foreign students. They also insure a reliable 24-hour-connection for distance learning.

           University portals carry information and give courses on daily, weekly or monthly basis. Apart from the on-the-spot courses, the web-based seminars and video-conferencing are in the center of attention. It is an easy-going e-learning in a virtual environment, at the fingerprints of learners. Age is never a handicap for learners. Neither are time or space.

           The know-how which was topical few years ago is obsolete today. Keeping up with the latest developments in one's field of expertise requires continuing education and the application of acquired skills. This guarantees state-of-the-art expertise and the ability to master theoretical and practical job challenges.

However, some of our universities seem to be lagging behind time and knowledge age. Pop round their sites, make your query… Surprise! All the absurd defects that make netters edgy are there. The pages are slow, the links are broken, the database is obsolete, and the supposed-to-be dynamic forums are not functional…Your query is therefore fruitless and your nerves uptight.

Even the institutions dispensing distance-learning courses are still using snail-mail, and charge the learners high mail service. You don't need to be expert in accountancy to spot the difference if the documents are sent by e-mail. Let alone the waste of time.

 Time is money, and money is wealth. Is this equation a misconception for us? What others think -and reiterate- about us is that we are not time-conscious.

Isn't this evidence that corroborates their belief?

 During the two or three days- to be optimistic- the documents take to reach you, you can do quite a lot of things.  By sending documents by e-mail, they could have saved our time and money.

The snag is not with e-mail connection. The e-mail is hale and hearty but the network is flimsy, the human network I mean. We feel there are still many people who bask in an ocean of misconceptions and don't want to reap the benefits of knowledge age, an opportunity that will not last forever.

 It is high time we embarked on a revitalizing program for every body, came up with a plan of action for tangible progress. There are many people who command a wealth of experience waiting for a chance to excel. Let them have it.

L'ironie du sort!

 Les seules bonnes copies sont celles qui nous font voir le ridicule  des méchants originaux.

           A maxim of Duc de Rochefoucauld

 

15 years of toil for Lakhdar, day and night, devotion, diligence, and assiduity. Add whatever you like of that lexis, they will always tally with dad’s persona.

 In the graveyard, the employer was lying at the foot of the employee. That’s what I discovered when I went to the cemetery for a requiem on my father’s soul... 

Cold stones covering dad’s fragile body with a Death Licence Plate showing his last name, his last date of birth and the fresh date of death. A date that is a stop mark for everything he did, for every breath he inhaled or exhaled…

At the foot of my father’s tomb, I read ‘Here reposes Lakhdar…’ My father’s boss lying under his feet! L’ironie du sort, say French people.

That sight gnawed into my peace of mind. Is that Equity in Death? Death is the only ungraduated scale on earth. Wealth, health, honour, power can’t adjudicate you higher. Death is death for everybody. The pharaohs, the kings, the emperors all suffered the same death. There is no death for this and another for that. Filling the sepulchres of old Egyptians with gems did not prevent their rotting.  Mummification was a devious attempt to allocate eternity to human bodies. In the graveyard titles vanish.

From dust to dust, all reduced to dust…How true! An idea  reiterated by all religions. Costumes, jewelleries, social worth cannot ornament your tomb or make it more luxurious.

But, who is lying under the feet of the other? Well, that’s after death but it is still a sign. Father died with no retirement pension, no annuity, no insurance…

I don’t bear anybody a grudge, but follow me and figure out. The D-day, death day, let’s stay here on earth, only a dozen people followed Lakhdar’s ruined corpse. A sully sight… The deluge was that day. Lakhdar’s haughtiness, his arrogance, his prestige, his money  have not driven people out of their miserable habitations to come and honor his corpse. After all, his own children, scattered all over the world have not honored him either.

My father’s procession was a success. All the healthy people in the village came to follow his corpse. The sunny day might have encouraged people to come and have a walk and enjoy the quietude of the cemetery, a luxury they cannot afford on other week days. Some have certainly used it as a motive to leave their workplace. The intention doesn’t matter, villagers will reiterate this to their kids,  “ Kbaier’s procession was like a market day”. (Kbaier is my father)

In the village, you can’t have that crowd save on market days. My father spent more than 50 years working to make ends meet, and left behind him a shabby type of habitation and eleven kids.  

Adapt or die!

The obsessive leitmotiv of today's culture is change, flexibility, updating but also obsolescence…Our ears are bombarded daily with this lexis. ‘Time to change’ is the credo today. Change is shown as the only prospect of life and the sign of viability. However, the change we witness today appears as a waste of time and energy, a derailment from the natural process.

 

Every now and then, some influential people are coaxed with an idea and surreptitiously make out of it their raison-d'être and defend it vehemently as an absolute truth. No sooner had they started talking about it that it became a trend, an option, a necessary change…with an army of advocators and fervent devotees.

 

Even in the field of education, shifting from an approach to another is like changing jackets. It is undemanding! Just tailor-make it so that it suits the body, with some quick brush strokes for the make up…it is done.  It looks beautiful, it is fascinating…It is a TREND. Too much ink about it makes it sound and unequivocal.

 

What was a truth yesterday becomes a fallacy today. The same lips that muttered the hundreds of arguments to defend yesterday's approach falsify it today and torment those who do not abide by the new trend. "The truth has to be defended"; they say. But we know that great talkers are never great doers.

 

Self-righteous as usual, they require teachers to behave differently with their students. Students are now seen as "full" human beings able to decide, to comprehend, to analyze…Nice words, unquestionable facts, an undeniable truth. 

Weren't they so before? Were we teaching brutes, zombies or extraterrestrials?

 

The magician waves his wand, cries abracadabra, and zombies turn into humans. How easy! How great! The magician is talented but what about the human-zombies?!

 

It is not thanks to the magician's contrite heart, that yesterday's zombies will be trained, refined, and cultured into humans. It is the conjuncture of events. It is the bittersweet reality, the winds of change that are sweeping clean all the fortified bastions

To survive, the bastion dwellers --the magician's endeared disciples --have to initiate an adjustment in their thinking, in their behaviour…to convince themselves, and give the illusion to outsiders, that they are viable in this wobbly world.

 

Those who recall their past are seen as antiquated. But man has the peculiar faculty of calling up again, at least in his mind, the echo of past experiences, of going over them again.

-Isn't it a blessing?

-No, No, No, mind your words! On the contrary, it is a cuuuurse!

 

We tend to persuade ourselves that life indeed would be dull if there were no difficulties. But deep down we feel that these difficulties are not genuine. They are far-fetched, and sometimes prefabricated. It is a part of the make-believe, to give the impression that there is no gain without pain.

 

The watchword is: ‘more efforts are required’, ‘Keep them panting’, ‘don’t give them time to think’... It’s a good way to make them mind their own business. Why should they waste their time and energy thinking? Not them anyway.

 

Each man's belief is right in his own eyes, but when that belief concerns the fate of a nation, it has to be discussed publicly and meticulously. 

 

The wand of the magician cannot always be righteous. People who find themselves unable to trace the waving of the magician's hand ultimately turn to gullibility. They take everything for granted.

Great! The objective is reached…

 

A society like this produces spoof scholars and pseudo-thinkers. How true! Those fake figures willingly become the mouthpiece of the magician and propagate his art.  As for the rest of people, it seems they are following many hares at the same time. We know for sure they will catch none.