I'M ONLY TRYING TO HELP: A ROLE FOR INTERVENTIONS IN TEACHING LISTENING

http://llt.msu.edu/vol11num1/pdf/rost.pdf

Michael Rost is a teacher trainer and a author who has traveled all over the world and has met different teachers with different resources and backgrounds. One of the refrains that he always hears is that teachers fell that they lack of technological resources to teach effectively and that students do not take advantage of the extra learning opportunities that are given to them. That is why he titled I'M ONLY TRYING TO HELP to this comment because teachers feel underappreciated for their efforts.

According to Norman (2004) technology should help us teach better than we already do. If
it doesn’t, we simply shouldn’t use it. In addition, Norman says, for any new technology to be widely adopted, it must appeal to the emotions as well as to reason. If people don’t enjoy using a particular technology, no matter how logically useful it may be, they will tend to shun it.

Rost present three articles that provide frameworks for evaluating technology in the teaching of listening:
1.- Help options and multimedia listening refers to the importance of interaction and the amount of input teachers should give their students. Interaction promotes language acquisition, that is, if interaction, specifically repair-motivated interaction, promotes comprehension, and if comprehension promotes acquisition, then interaction promotes acquisition.
2.- Are They Watching? provides a study of listener behavior in video-based test taking situations. The author talks about the importance of videos on listening comprehension and that the students focus more on images than on audio, and even if they are not watching they can still listen, but also if they are not watching they can still listen especially in monologues. It is important to give more than one choice when teaching listening that is why it is important for the author to present activities with video and audio.
3.- Using Digital Stories to Improve Listening Comprehension with Spanish Young Learners of English the article refers to a new technology online where students and teachers can be more interactive, students take an active role in the listening comprehension and require teachers to take a more active role in teaching listening.

Rost takes the most important aspects of each article and suggest types of interventions that can help learners develop listening. These tables are designed to show which listener's goals, or goal-driven processes, (in Column 1) may be focused upon through types of interventions, or instructional plans (in Column 2). Instructional design tools (in Column 3) are learning concepts that may be useful in planning interventions.
Tables 1-3. Component Processes, Goals, and Interventions for Teaching L2 Listening
Table 1. Component Process: Decoding

Goals	Interventions	Instructional design tools
• Create an adequate phonological, grammatical, and lexical map of incoming speech • Recognize a critical mass of lexical items • Retain unknown lexical items in short-term memory for possible processing later	• Give user control over input speed, pausing and replay functions • Make lexical pushdowns available; allow for "pronounce and compare" options • Supply elaborated and amplified input options • Provide subtitling options: key word, stress group, full text	• 3-D technology to view animated speech production (see Massaro, Cohen, Tabain, Beskow, & Clark, 2005) • Speech recognition tools and graphics (see http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/; Chun, 2002) • Input Processing tasks (vanPatten, 2004) • Lexical pushdown options; hyperlinked annotations to target words (e.g. Al-Seghayer, 2001) • Online cues for noticing grammar patterns (Chapelle, 2003; 2005) • Automated parsers and translators (e.g. Othero, 2006; Somers and Sugita, 2003)

Table 2. Component Process: Comprehension

Goals	Interventions	Instructional design tool
• Identify salient propositions in discourse to anchor mental representations • Build internal model of developing discourse • Test hypotheses about meaning	• Use guided online summarizing tasks • Provide graded questions, based on listener response • Furnish pop-up feedback loops on listener responses	• Pop-up explanations and cues to aid inferencing; feedback loops and "instant replays" for incorrect responses (Rost, 2003) • Chatterbots to simulate discussion with learner about what the learner has nderstood and misunderstood. (e.g., http://www.Jabberwacky.com, see Fryer and Carpenter, 2006)

Table 3. Component Process: Interpretation

Goals	Interventions	Instructional design tools
• Work out relevance of discourse • Get necessary clarification of ideas • Experience validation of your role as a listener	• Allow for direct or simulated interactions with speaker • Create collaborative application and response tasks • Provide links for follow-up learner presentations	• Participation in global cybercommunities working on common projects (e.g. Belz, 2002) • Involvement in video-mediated collaborations (Anderson, 2006) • Chatterbots to simulate conversation about texts using speech recognition (http:// www.alicebot.org, see Anderson, 2006)

We can teach listening with, video, audio, internet, we have many possibilities but what is important is to know your students and to figure out what works best for them in order to help them. With technology we can offer our students different kind of input that will suit them better depending on their intelligences and personalities.