Joel Swagman (Reviews / TESOL)

Thursday, July 06, 2023

Specific Information Questions for Reading and Listening

(TESOL Ideas--Stages of a Reading Lesson, Stages of a Listening Lesson)

In a reading or listening lesson, specific information questions (sometimes known as "finding specific information") are the easiest task after the gist task, and so usually follow the gist task in the task cycle. Sometimes, depending on the text, specific information questions can be done as the first task instead of a gist task, if the text doesn't lend itself to a gist question. (For more information about the task cycle, see here).

Specific information questions can take many forms (short answer questions, multiple choice questions, true or false questions, fill in the blank questions, etc). But what makes them specific information questions is that they are asking the students to pick out little bits of specific information in the text. The who, the what, the where, the when. (But not the why.)

Specific information questions only ask the students to find information that is explicitly stated in the text. They don't ask the students to make any inferences about the text. So don't ask students why something happened unless it is explicitly stated in the text.

Specific information questions are also usually about sentence level comprehension. They ask about information that is contained in one sentence, but they do not ask the student to comprehend multiple sentences.

Specific information questions are often (although not always) things like names of people or specific numbers that appear in the text--e.g. "How old is Tom?" "How many years has he worked as a teacher?" "Who is the principle of the school?" etc.

Below is a somewhat contrived example, but hopefully it serves to illustrate. Imagine students are given the following paragraph as part of a reading text.

"Tom was 52 years old. He had grey hair, and blue eyes. He was riding his bicycle home from work. Tom was a teacher. He had been teaching for 30 years. He was very tired. The students had been very difficult and noisy today. 'I can't wait until I retire,' Tom thought to himself."

Based on this text, the following could be specific information questions:

How old is Tom?

What color is Tom's hair?

What color are Tom's eyes?

What is Tom riding?

What is Tom's job?

How long has Tom been teaching for?

...etc.

The following would not be specific information questions:

How old was Tom when he started teaching? (This is a detailed comprehension questions, because it involves taking information from two separate sentences in the text, and understanding how they fit together.)

Does Tom like his job? (This is an inference question. It's not explicitly stated that he doesn't like his job, but we can infer that from the fact that he is looking forward to retirement.)

Would you like to have Tom's job? Why or why not? (This is a personalization question.)

Detailed comprehension questions, inference questions, and personalization questions are all valuable, of course. But they are also more difficult, so they would typically come in a later stage of the lesson. (Again, see the task cycle here).

Specific information questions involve picking out little details from the text, rather than understanding the whole text in detail. In a reading lesson, they can usually be answered by scanning through the text to find the answer, and for that reason, they lend themselves to scanning race games. They don't have to be done as a race, of course, but they can be if you have a class who likes games or who likes running around. Possible games include scanning race game, garbage man and quizziz.

****************************************

I once worked with a CELTA tutor who used the following example to demonstrate how not to make specific information questions.

The teacher trainees were instructed to "read the passage, and answer the questions below."

1. Kuka Johannes Wassermann on?

2. Miten hän tuli Hampurista Helsinkiin?

3. Mista hän ajoi omalla autolla Lappiin?

4. Mitä hän näki lapissa?

5. Missä hän kävi?

The point was, as you can probably already see, that it was possible to answer these questions without understanding the text at all. The text and the questions are written in Finnish, but I don't speak a word of Finnish and was still able to work out the answers for each question. For each question, you just look at the line, and see which word is omitted. So for number 1 "Kuka Johannes Wassermann on?", you just look at the first line, and see that the answer has to be "saksalinen".

And the whole point of this exercise was to make the trainees realize that if the purpose of the reading task is to guide students to greater comprehension of the text, then you want to avoid using questions that are worded exactly the same as the text.

So, just as a quick example, if the text said something like, "Tom worked as a teacher", then a specific information question like "What did Tom work as?" would be too easy. But you could paraphrase it just a little bit, and say something like "What was Tom's job?" or " What did Tom do to earn money?" et cetera.

That being said, however, in my opinion it depends on the level of the students. I've had some low-level classes where the students were so weak that they were struggling with the simple skill of just scanning through the reading text to find the answer--even if I used the same wording as the text. So for those classes, I didn't even bother trying to paraphrase the question until the students got a bit more confident just answering specific information questions generally.

Started: Getting Things Done by David Allen (This book has been on my shelves since May 14, 2023)

Started: Getting Things Done by David Allen

How to Teach Listening by J.J. Wilson: Book Review

(Book Review--TESOL Books)

Started: May 08, 2023

Finished: July 05, 2023

(This is my first time reading this book, so according to my new rules, I'm doing this as a video only review.)

How to Teach Listening by J.J. Wilson: Book Review

For a different opinion, see a Youtuber who really liked this book. https://youtu.be/JcFQA4fgg6w

Also, I forgot to mention this in my review, but the prose of this book is totally readable and effortless. So that goes in the positive column.

Commonplace Book:

* p.83 Bingo

* p.95 Word Grab

Weekly Reading Vlogs:

May 14, 2023 How to Teach Listening p.1-46

May 21, 2023 How to Teach Listening p.46-56

May 28, 2023 How to Teach Listening p.56-86

June 4, 2023 How to Teach Listening p.86-100

June 11, 2023 How to Teach Listening p.100-110

June 18, 2023 How to Teach Listening p.110-112

June 25, 2023 How to Teach Listening p.112-122

July 02, 2023 How to Teach Listening p.122-130

Playlist HERE:

Wednesday, July 05, 2023

Prediction and Check for Reading and Listening

(TESOL Ideas--Activities that Can Be Used with Any Reading Text , Activities That Can Be Used with Any Listening Text)

Sample activity: docs, pub

Yesterday I wrote about Gist Tasks. An alternative to gist tasks is getting students to predict the content of the reading/listening text, and then read or listen to check their predictions.

Prediction is done before reading or listening, but of course you want to give the students some clue as to what text will be about, so they know what they are making predictions about. Teachers commonly show the students the title of the reading/listening, and maybe draw their attention to any pictures that are in the textbook. Possibly you may even read the first paragraph, or listen to the section of the text. And then students make predictions about what will be in the rest of the text.

A common technique is to turn the title of the text into a question, and then get students to predict the answer to that question.

Here's an example from my own classroom. Q: Skills for Success: Reading and Writing 4: Unit 3 Reading 1: The Good Teen p.65-70

The title of the reading was "The Good Teen".

I asked my students: "What do you think are the characteristics of a Good Teen?"

I asked my students to close their textbooks, and in groups, students brainstormed ideas and wrote their predictions up on the white boards.

Then, I told them to open up their books, read the text, and check which of their predictions were in the text. I gave them a red marker so that they could go back to the white board and check which of their predictions were actually in the text.

Sometimes students miss things on an initial reading, of course, so I also monitored and gave hints. (e.g. "You're missing one. Check paragraph 6 again. One of your predictions was in paragraph 6.")

Listening predictions could be done in a similar way, although if students missed a prediction, the teacher might need to help by replaying the relevant section of the audio.

Prediction-and-Check tasks, by their very nature, have to be done as an initial task. So they would be done instead of a gist task.

For years, I thought prediction tasks were a type of gist task, but then when I was working with a CELTA tutor, he set me straight on this. Prediction-and-Check tasks can be gist tasks if they're focused on the main idea of the text. So, for example, if there's a story, and students have to predict the ending, and then they read/listen to check their prediction. Because this is predicting the main idea of the text, it's a gist task.

But in the case mentioned above, where I asked the students to predict all the characteristics of a Good Teen, this is actually a "Finding Specific Information Task", because the students are not checking the text simply for the main idea, they're checking to see which specific characteristics are mentioned.

[To put it simply: If you're asking students to predict the main idea of a text, and then check, it's a gist task. If you're asking students to predict specific information, and then check, then it's a specific information task.]

So, depending on the type of prediction, it's either a gist task or a finding specific information task. If it's used as a finding specific information task, that's okay--you can sometimes substitute finding specific information for gist as the first task in the task cycle. (Finding specific information is still one of the easier tasks in the task cycle--easier than tasks like understanding the text for detailed comprehension and understanding inferences in the text.)

As the CELTA tutor told me, you have to think about what tasks the text lends itself to. (You also consider the level of the students, motivation of the students, et cetera.)

I find a Prediction-and-Check activities to be a useful way to build interest in a text. However, everyone's favorite EFL contrarian Russ Mayne has a blog post on why Prediction activities don't actually work.

Russ Mayne is always entertaining. Read his post. I love the way he's constantly trying to strip away the dogmatism that has grown up in this industry.

But, that being said, if you read Russ Mayne's post, I think it's evident that he's arguing against teaching prediction as a skill. I primarily find prediction-and-check activities useful for building interest in the text. Particularly if you have a group of demotivated students who don't want to be in the classroom, are not interested in the content of the text, and don't want to read it. (We've all been there, right?) In these cases, it can increase motivation slightly to have students input their own ideas first, and then reading the text to check the ideas they themselves have selected.

Below is a sample activity for a listening Prediction and Check that I used for Reflect Listening & Speaking 5 Unit 8 Listening: No Time to Choke p.136-140:

	My ideas	Ideas from the listening
What causes choking?
What can people do to stop choking?

Update February 19, 2025: Since Russ Mayne has deleted his blog, I've updated the links to the version preserved on Internet Archive.

Gist Task

(TESOL Ideas--Activities that Can Be Used with Any Reading Text , Activities That Can Be Used with Any Listening Text)

I realized that I've been referring to "gist" in a lot of my posts recently (including the previous post), but that I've never actually defined my terms. And since I don't know who's reading this blog, I can't assume everyone has the same training and background that I do, so I figured I should take a minute to talk about what I mean by "gist".

The gist task is part of what Scrivener calls the task cycle, which is used for reading and listening lessons (i.e. receptive skills lessons). The idea is that the same reading text or listening text (*) is used multiple times for different tasks. Each time the teacher sets the task for the reading or listening text. Then the students read or listen to the text with the object of completing the task. Then they usually check their answers with a partner. Then there's an all class feedback session in which the teacher evaluates whether or not the learners could successfully complete the task. If the learners have not successfully completed the task, then they try again (probably with more guidance from the teacher). If they have successfully completed the task, then the teacher goes on to the next task, in which the same listening/reading text is used, but the difficulty of the task is increased.

Learning Teaching p.253

A commonly used order of difficulty is

Gist--easiest

Finding Specific Information in the text--slightly harder

Understanding the text for Detailed Comprehension--even harder

Understanding Inferences in the text--most difficult

Personalization (Students' own opinions about the text)--a good way to finish off

Not all of these need to be used with every text (and indeed, not every text will lend itself to all five of these tasks), but the basic idea is that in reading or listening lesson, the students will read or listen to the same text at least 2 or 3 times, with different tasks each time, and the tasks will start out very easy, and get progressively more challenging.

[An assumption behind the task cycle is that the texts are very short. For example, Scrivener says that listening texts shouldn't be longer than 2 minutes. If you're using textbooks that have longer texts, then the task cycle doesn't always work very well. In English for Academic Purposes courses, the texts are usually longer, and then you can't always do the task cycle. For example, when I was teaching out of Q: Skills for Success: Listening and Speaking 5, some of the listening texts were mini-lectures that were up to 11 minutes long, and my students would have mutinied if I had tried to make them sit through those listening texts 2 or 3 times.]

The gist task is the first task in the task cycle. It is supposed to be the easiest task. The point of the gist task is not to challenge the students, but just to give them an opportunity to understanding the main idea of the text. (Hence the name "gist"--the students only need to understand the gist of the reading or listening.) You also want to make the gist task nice and easy to build the students' confidence. The more challenging questions will come later.

Gist tasks usually revolve around understanding the main idea of a text. So, for years, I would often use "What is it about?" as my standard gist question. (e.g. "Listen to the conversation. What are they talking about?")

However, a few years ago I was working with a CELTA tutor, and he told me it's not usually a good idea to simply ask: "What is the listening/reading about?" These types of questions are too open ended, and also it can be difficult for learners to summarize the whole text. After all, gist questions are supposed to be easy.

You can still do the "What is the text about?" questions, but make it a multiple choice answer rather than asking the students to provide the summary themselves.

(e.g. "Listen to the conversation. What are they talking about? a) shopping, b) planning a vacation c) booking a hotel or d) cleaning the garage)

Other typical gist tasks involve things like choosing the correct title for a text from a list of options, or ticking which topics are mentioned, or ordering 3 or 4 pictures. Gist tasks can also be related to attitude or tone (e.g. Did they like the film?) You could also ask a personalized question (e.g. "Do you agree with the speaker?") provided you don't expect the students to come up with fully detailed justifications.

Gist tasks can also be prediction tasks--i.e. get the students to predict the content of the text, then they read/listen to check their prediction. This is provided the students are predicting the main idea of the text, and not the specific details of the text. (Otherwise it becomes a finding specific information task. More on prediction in a future post.)

Ideally, you want all the students to be able to answer the gist task very easily.

For listening texts, gist tasks are relatively straightforward. You set the task, you play the audio, and students answer the task.

But reading lessons are a bit more problematic, because the students are all reading at their own individual pace. Some students read quickly, some students read slowly. And some students, if left to their own devices, will read very slowly, agonize over every unknown word, and might even get out their dictionaries to look up all the words that they don't know. And you don't really want that in a gist task, because the whole point is that they're supposed to be just reading for the main idea. Thus, teachers often force the students to skim the text for the gist task.

Many students are reluctant to skim the text. They want to read it word by word, like they normally do. But if you want them to read it quickly, the most common way is to give them a time limit. 2-3 minutes is common.

(There are other techniques. In the past, I've known teachers who trained students in skimming techniques, such as trying to train students to quickly run their eyes over a text. Or training students to run a finger down the text quickly, and keep pace with their finger as they skim. Or one of my old managers even used to give out strips of paper for the students to cover up the left and right margins of the text, so that they physically couldn't read every word, even if they wanted to, and thus had to just rely on skimming to get the main idea.)

This emphasis on skimming techniques for gist reading has become very prominent in certain areas of ESL (i.e. CELTA courses, and other places associated with CELTA methodology.)

Recently, there's been some pushback against it. See, for example, Russ Mayne's excellent blog post in which he argues against teaching skimming and scanning techniques.

I personally have never liked forcing students to skim a text under timed conditions. I think it's unnecessarily stressful for everyone involved.

But (and here I part company from Russ Mayne somewhat) I do believe that gist tasks are useful because I believe that it's helpful for students to understand the main idea of the reading/listening text first before you start asking them the hard questions. So when I set a gist reading task, I'll give my students what I think is an appropriate amount of time to read the text under normal conditions. (This will vary with the length of the text, of course, but typically around 5-6 minutes for a short ESL text.) And, as I mentioned in the previous post, if the coursebook has an audio recording of the reading text, I'll typically play the audio and ask the students to follow along to help students keep an appropriate pace during the gist reading.

Footnotes:

(*) I'm using "text" here in the technical linguistic sense, meaning an extended piece of written or spoken discourse. So a "listening text" in this sense is just the listening audio track that you play for the students.

Update February 19, 2025: Since Russ Mayne has deleted his blog, I've updated the links to the version preserved on Internet Archive.

Finished: How to Teach Listening by J.J. Wilson

How to Teach Listening by J.J. Wilson: Book Review

Tuesday, July 04, 2023

Listen and Read

(TESOL Ideas--Activities that Can Be Used with Any Reading Text)

In my experience, almost all ESL textbooks published nowadays have an audio track that accompanies the reading. So it is now very easy for teachers to do "listen and read" activities.

The audio track will usually be in a CD accompanying the textbook, or (much more common nowadays) an audio file that can be played from the classroom computer.

A number of these audio files also make their way onto Youtube--see for example HERE. Mostly, I suspect, this is in violation of their copyright. But nonetheless, if you are ever teaching from a book, and you don't have the audio track on your school's drive, try searching Youtube.

If you still can't find the audio (or if you're teaching from an older textbook that just plain doesn't have an accompanying audio) you can always create the audio yourself by reading the text aloud for your students.

The activity is pretty much exactly as it sounds. The students open their textbooks up to the reading passage. The teacher says something like, "Now, I'm going to play the audio. I want you to listen and follow along in your book." Then, the teacher plays the audio track (using the classroom speakers) and the students listen and follow along with the reading text.

Doing Listen and Read activities are controversial in some circles. A few years ago, when I was at a new school, and was getting observed for the first time, I did a Listen and Read activity, and my manager lowered my observation grade because of it. "When students are listening and reading at the same time," he explained to me, "then they're not doing either, really."

So, the moral of the story is, not everyone approves of this activity, and if you're in a new school, check with the manager first before doing a Listen and Read activity.

Despite some people's reservations about this activity, the potential advantages of Listen and Read are:

1) Listening and reading at the same time can enhance the input, and make the grammatical and vocabulary features more noticeable for the students.

2) If the voice actor on the audio is sufficiently talented (and in professional published materials a lot of them are), they can infuse the words with some dramatic intonation. This can not only help to convey the meaning of the text, but it can also make it more interesting for the students.

3) It can increase reading speed fluency, by forcing the students to try to keep their reading speed in sync with the audio.

4) If you're trying to get the students to read a text quickly for gist (in preparation for a second, more detailed reading to follow), and you don't want the students to stop and puzzle over unknown words yet, then the audio can help keep the pacing of a gist reading.

5) Possibly it might help students learn about sound/spelling correspondences. And possibly it might even help them acquire the pronunciation of words in cases where the pronunciation is not obvious from the written form alone (e.g. syllable stress, silent letters, etc.). Although in my experience, in practice during Listen and Read activities, the students are so focused on the written text that the aural form of the word doesn't seem to stick. (It has long been observed that in cases where students are presented with both the written form and spoken form of the word, the written form seems to override the spoken form. I've noticed the same thing with myself when I am studying Vietnamese.)

In my own classroom, I used to use Listen and Read activities a lot when I was doing Graded Readers as in class reading.

Nowadays, I use the audio as an aid to readings from the textbook. I primarily use it to increase student interest in the text, and also to help keep the pace for the gist reading.

I will typically assign either a gist reading question, or a prediction and check activity before playing the audio. Then I'll play the audio, and the students will either listen and read to answer the gist question, or listen and read to check their predictions.

Although, I should add a small caveat here: I have noticed that often students will get so involved in the activity of following the words with the audio that they will often not be focusing on the meaning of the text, and subsequently are unable to answer the gist question (or the prediction check) at the end. When I remind them of the gist question (or the prediction check) after the audio has finished, sometimes I can see on their faces that they completely forgot about the task, and then they quickly skim the text again to find the answers.

But in spite of this, I still feel like the Listen and Read activity has some value in getting the students through the first initial reading, before I ask them to examine the text in more detail.

Monday, July 03, 2023

Identifying Reference Words in the Listening

(TESOL Ideas--Activities that can be used with any listening text)

Sample Activity: slides, pub

I mentioned this at the end of the previous post, but I think it's worth also highlighting here as a separate activity, because this one can be used by itself.

The idea is simply. Give students a reference word from the listening text (e.g. "it", "this"), play a section of the listening text, and students have to tell you what the word refers to.

Below is an example of this activity from Reflect Listening & Speaking 5, No Time to Choke p.136-140.

The time stamps at the top are for my reference (so I know where to skip to in the recording.) I play the audio at the time stamp, and ask the students what the reference word on the slide refers to.

As I mentioned in the previous post, I did this in my class as a follow up activity to the transcript activity student editors. But it could also be used independently. In which case, I think, it would work best as a post-listening activity (i.e. after the students have already processed the listening text for gist and for detail.)

It's a useful activity for aiding students in general listening comprehension.

It's also useful for exam prep courses, since IELTS exam style questions often test whether students can identify the meaning of reference words in a text.

Sunday, July 02, 2023

Student Editors (changing the reference words into their referents): Listening Transcript

(TESOL Ideas--Using the Transcript after Listening)

Example Activity: docs, pub

I mentioned this activity before when talking about reading activities, but it also works great as a listening transcript activity.

To quote from my previous explanation, the basic idea (as it was originally presented to me), is:

Choose a short text that can be copied into a word document for editing. It should have a good number of reference words. Before the activity, edit the document by changing the reference words into their referents. Share the text with learners and ask them to read. They should notice that without the reference words, the text is repetitive and lacks fluency. Ask learners to improve the text by changing repetitive parts of the text with appropriate reference words. When done, show the learners the original text and compare them.

I've indexed this in my Activities That Can Be Used with Any Reading Text section, but the truth is, it doesn't work equally well with any reading text. You want a reading text that has a lot of reference words in it. You also, ideally, want a mixture of easy reference words, and some more complicated referencing--i.e. reference words that refer to a whole clause or sentence. The reason is that most reference words are very easy to identify from context, and it is only the problematic cases that require training.

The same is true when using this activity for listening transcripts. But if you have a listening transcript that has a lot of reference words, and some of them refer to whole clauses or sentences, then this activity can work great as an awareness raising activity.

The example activity linked to above comes from Reflect Listening & Speaking 5, No Time to Choke p.136-140.

As an example of how it mixes reference words that refer to a single thing, and reference words that refer to clauses, see this excerpt. The original, with the reference words underlined, is here:

First, he turned around. Then, he watched the ball, and then he dropped his bat. Only then did he start to run, but it was too late and South Africa lost the match and was out of the tournament. “My legs felt like jelly,” Donald later said. “It was a dreamlike sequence, almost in slow motion.”
This incident is one of the more famous examples of what is called choking in sports.

And the re-written version is here:

First, Donald turned around. Then, Donald watched the ball, and then Donald dropped Donald’s bat. Only after Donald dropped Donald’s bat did Donald start to run, but after Donald dropped Donald’s bat was too late and South Africa lost the match and was out of the tournament. “Donald’s legs felt like jelly,” Donald later said. “Having my legs feel like jelly was a dreamlike sequence, almost in slow motion.”
The Donald not running incident is one of the more famous examples of what is called choking in sports.

Understanding the meaning of reference words can be just as important in listening comprehension as in reading comprehension, so this activity is just as useful to do with a listening lesson as it is in a reading lesson.

In fact, I did this activity with one of my classes because they had taken a practice listening exam and the results came back that said they had scored the lowest on questions which required them to identify the meaning of reference words. (IELTS exam style questions often test whether students can identify the meaning of reference words in a text.)

In my class, I did this as a post listening activity.

After the students had already listened to the text for gist and for detail, I showed them the edited version of the transcript on the projector. I then asked them if they noticed anything strange about it. After some prodding, they noticed that there was some unnecessary repetition of words in some of the sentences. I then asked if they could fix this, and showed them how to underline words, and write the reference words above them.

To gamify this, I made this into a competition. Students were put into teams, and told that it was a game. They would get one point for each reference word they could correctly re-insert into the text.

I gave each group a copy of the edited transcript on an enlarged A3 paper, and groups were told to write their final answers on the enlarged paper. But I also gave each student a smaller size transcript for their own reference.

Because this was a listening lesson, I made good use of the audio. I played it once at the beginning of the activity, to aid students in noticing where the reference words where (and to help them notice that several whole clauses can be replaced by reference words.) Then I let them work on it for a while in their groups, and played the audio again at the end for a final check of the answers.

Then, I had them trade papers with another group, and handed out the answer sheet (page 2 of the google docs). They corrected the other group's paper, and gave one point for each reference word that was correctly inserted. Points for each group were tallied, and the winner was congratulated.

Student engagement with this activity was relatively high. The students enjoyed the challenge of puzzling out where the reference words were. I think they also enjoyed the novelty of it as well. It was an activity they hadn't done before, so it helped to mix up the lesson. (To keep the novelty fresh, I think this is the type of activity that words best in small doses--I use it once a term, but not twice a term.)

One final note:

This is a great activity to raise awareness of referencing in a listening text. But because it's transcript work, it's more reading skills than listening skills. So to follow it up, I play some excerpts from the same listening text, and ask students to identify the reference word.

Below is an example. It's from the same listening text that I used for transcript work above. (That listening text was 5 minutes long, so the transcript work only covered the first 2.5 minutes.) The time stamps at the top are for my reference (so I know where to skip to in the recording.) I play the audio at the time stamp, and ask the students what the reference word on the slide refers to. It's a great way to finish off the lesson by giving students some practice identifying the reference words in when listening to the text.