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PSC Staff Discuss Appeal and Learning Curiosity for Teaching Listening in an Online Workshop
As part of the Preparatory Study Centre’s (PSC) continued efforts to enhance its faculty members' professional competence, the Professional Development and Research Committee (PD&RC) at the Centre organized a workshop on " Appeal and Learner Curiosity: Factors for Teaching Listening Skills" on October 3, 2023. The session was presented by Ms. Valerie Ann Lewis and was attended by 33 PSC staff.
The ‘Teaching Listening Skills’ theme of this online presentation emphasized appeal and learner curiosity as potential factors for richer instruction. It foregrounded a bottom-up approach as a perhaps more practical and workable strategy to support student listeners. It proposed exploiting the Teacher’s Book transcripts as the most valuable tool for creating accessible, chunked content with a more complex and nuanced linguistic focus to better ground learners in listening. The presentation demonstrated the value of an investment in tailored class materials to consolidate a recursive, cyclical approach aiming at deeper exposure and more sustained listening to finely tuned input.
Overall, the session was an eye-opener to the participants regarding certain reasons for listening challenges faced by their learners and the effectiveness of a bottom-up approach to address them. Dr. Jayaron Jose, a PSC lecturer and PDRC member, hosted and concluded the session.
