Idea — Connected speech features — linking, elision, assimilation, weak forms — cause more listening failures than vocabulary gaps. Example — ‘What are you going to do?’ becomes ‘Whatcha gonna do?’ at natural speed. Understanding…
Idea — Effective note-taking captures key ideas and numbers using symbols and abbreviations — not whole sentences. Transcribing causes learners to miss the next idea. Example — Symbol set: ‘>’ for ‘led to’, ‘≠’ for…
Idea — A gist task must be answerable from one listen or read, simple enough to capture overall meaning, and specific enough to require real processing. Example — Vague: ‘What is the text about?’ Better:…
Idea — A lead-in activates prior knowledge, builds interest, and prepares students for the topic. It comes before any task and never reveals the text content. Example — For a listening about food markets, ask:…
Idea — Prediction activates background knowledge and creates a purpose for engaging with the text. It primes the brain to recognise incoming information faster. Example — Before a listening about nutrition, students write three things…
Idea — Scanning means moving through a text at speed to locate one specific piece of data, then stopping. The learner does not process the whole text. Example — Finding a train departure time in…
Idea — Top-down processing uses background knowledge and context to predict meaning. Bottom-up processing builds meaning from individual sounds or words. Example — Hearing ‘gate 7 … delayed … boarding’ at an airport triggers top-down:…
Idea — Receptive skills — reading and listening — involve decoding meaning from input. The learner receives language; they do not need to produce it. Example — A student watches a short video clip and…
Idea — The goal of pronunciation in production is intelligibility — being understood by the intended listener — not native-speaker accuracy. Many native-speaker features are unnecessary for communication (Levis). Example — A learner who adds…
Idea — Dictation is often dismissed as old-fashioned, but it activates listening, spelling, punctuation, and grammatical knowledge simultaneously. Dictogloss makes it genuinely productive. Example — In dictogloss, learners hear a short text twice, note key…