2010 Year 4 Listening and Speaking

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Listening activities:

Listening is making sense of oral language. Teachers should engage students in listening with a purpose, and support and encourage them to do this. Many opportunities for teaching listening skills and strategies can be incorporated into daily classroom language experiences.

The following activities enhance students' listening skills and strategies (as well as supporting the other language strands): reading along, choral reading, tape recordings, and sing-alongs.

It is important to give students guidance and explicit instruction that develop active listening skills and strategies. Balance direct instruction, guided listening, and independent listening.


- Reading Aloud: Read aloud every day to students. It is an important means of teaching listening and a powerful means of developing and expanding students' language repertoire and vocabulary. It is also important for modeling reading strategies

- Establish a practice of reading to the class from a variety of fiction and nonfiction books at least once a day.

- Read interesting articles from newspapers, magazines, and resources relevant to studies in other subject areas. Students, as a follow-up, should summarize what they have heard, put events in order, dramatize the story, answer questions about who did what, or participate in other activities to support their learning.

- Read aloud a poem each day (i.e., poetry pauses) to help students develop an awareness of the language, rhythms, and imagery of poetry.

- Provide many opportunities for students to hear a range of oral texts including: announcements, apologies, awards, concerts, conversations, dialogues, directions, discussions, dramas, explanations, speeches, songs, illustrated talks, improvisations, instructions, interviews, introductions, invitations, jokes, meetings, monologues, newscasts, oral interpretations, proverbs, problem-solving groups, puns, radio plays, reader's theatre, rebuttals, riddles, rules, slogans, songs, speeches, storytelling, sports casts, talking circles, testimonials, tributes, voice mail messages, weather forecasts, and others.

- In Talking and Sharing Circles during SRC meeting time: Give students, in small groups or as a class, an opportunity to share and discuss their ideas, stories, puppet plays, and written work. In turn, they give their peers an opportunity to practise listening behaviours and to provide helpful feedback.

- Use Listening and Media Centres (DVD sets, Hairy MacLary): The Smartboard can be used in addition to reading aloud to students. It gives students opportunities to experience a text a number of times. Using a Smartboard, students can use DVDs to listen for enjoyment, to listen as they "read along" with the text.

- Use Listening Games: Listening games can help students focus their listening, concentrate, and learn a number of listening skills and strategies

Our class listening includes:

Before Listening

What is the speaker's purpose?
What is my purpose for listening?
Will I need to make notes?
Which strategies could I use?
Which one would work best?

During Listening

Is my strategy still working?
Am I putting information into categories?
Is the speaker giving me clues about the organization of the message?
Is the speaker giving me non-verbal cues such as gesture and facial expressions?
Is the speaker's voice giving me other cues?

After Listening

Do I have questions for the speaker?
Was any part of the message unclear?
Are my notes complete?
Did I make a good choice of strategies? Why or why not?

Speaking Activities:

- speeches, can include: Demonstrate a science experiment, magic trick, hobby,
sport, or favorite recipe.
- book reports
- debates
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In evaluation speaking/communication skills, consider the capacity to learn and understand new ideas and ways of working quickly by:

- expressing ideas succinctly

- ustifying, qualifying and explaining what they say

- using language in ways that reflect an appreciation of the knowledge and interests of specific audiences;

- ability to take on demanding tasks – researching, comparing and synthesising information from a range of different sources, including ICT;

- ability to argue and reason.

In Year 4: