Listening comprehension summer course: Links for EFL learners!

Greetings from our summer courses!

For more than a decade our school has organized high school summer courses in various subjects such as English, Swedish, Finnish, Biology, Geography, Health Studies, History, Chemistry and Mathematics. This summer we had 24 courses with approximately 25-35 students per course. Now this is what I call motivation! 

Here in headphone land. Photo thanks to clemsonunivlibrary 

This summer I was in charge of the listening comprehension courses which are one of my favourite ones (well, they all are to be honest). To cut a long story short, the during the two-week-course the students practised for the up-coming national examination. We covered all possible exercise types listed by the National Board of Matriculation Examination. This includes:

• multiple choice questions both in English or in the language of instruction ie. Finnish or Swedish

• open questions in English or in the language of instruction

• a summary based on what you hear

I enjoyed planning and teaching this course. All EFL teachers in Finnish high schools know that it is seldom possible to concentrate on one particular area throughout the whole course, but with this course it was possible. The main focus was to improve students' listening skills and expand their vocabularies. The students who took the course were there for this specific reason so clearly they were very motivated and ready to learn.

Our school organised 24 summer courses for high schoolers in June 2015.

We concentrated on one exercise type at a time and students had the opportunity to test different techniques when carrying out the exercises. In addition, we practised previous years' listening comprehension test. The students had a chance to listen to the tests independently at their own pace, which got great feedback from them. They also frequently commented how they feel more confident to face the challenging exam now that they are prepared for it and know what to expect.

The national listening comprehension test. You can also find them on the net.

We also used some material on the net. Here are some links with brief descriptions of each site. I think they are great for practising listening skills and expanding vocabulary:

• BBC Learning English: Words in the news video stories: A great site for EFL and ESL learners scroll down a bit for the video stories and see for yourself!

• English in a minute: Short videos that explain idioms and often also their origins.

• BBC Learning English: The English we speak: Dialogues that shed light on the English idioms and colloquial expressions. I advise students to listen to these with the scripts.

• Yle news in English. Yle is a national Finnish broadcasting company.

• LBC 97,3: A talkradio that focuses on everyday news and issues.

• An example of the national matriculation examination test. This test is from 2006, soon this test type will be in history as the national exams will be reformed starting from autumn 2016.

• English Lab: Students can choose the level they want to practise: easy, medium, difficult

• For students preparing for the Finnish matriculation examination there are also a variety of listening comprehension exercises available. One of the best known is probably abitreenit.

There is an excellent blog for preparing students for the national exam, it also includes a posting on listening skills. Studying this was one piece of homework in our listening course (the blog is in Finnish). Additionally, if students wanted to practise test-related vocabulary, they could do that with the help of Quizlet. 

After these intensive courses it feels great to start the summer holidays!

Wishing you all a lovely summer! See you again in the autumn!

Have a relaxing summer!

Part II: More steps towards going paperless - Using Fronter

Part II: Some highlights from the previous school year

I mentioned Fronter in my previous posting. It is the platform our school uses. In fact, as far as I know, it is the platform all schools in Helsinki use. So there :) I have a course room for each course that I am teaching. (yes, the courses are called rooms and school subjects are called corridors). Fronter has many handy tools, especially the test tools are being developed all the time, and the students enjoy practising some key elements with them. I also like the conversation forums and the possibility to embed videos. The tool for shared documents is also handy (until some student accidentally deletes the document, this happened luckily only once last year).

Last term I wanted to see what would happen if the students took the course exam on Fronter. That was a pretty exciting experience. This was the first time ever I conducted an online course exam, so in the beginning I was full of questions. However, it all turned out to be fine. I allowed my students to use all online dictionaries and help they could possibly get. Some of them found this confusing: “Really? Are you sure?” “Yes, I am sure :)” The actual planning and creating the exam took some time, but it was well worth it. The test tools automatically corrected the structured vocabulary and reading comprehension tests and I was left with evaluating the essays, which I like doing anyway. 

I know there are many teachers in Finland who use online testing regularly. I wish I’ll have time to learn more from their experiences in the coming school year. Whichever platform we are using for creating online exams, it would be so great to join our forces and share the tests. 

One more note about our persistent friend Fronter. I have also taught many online and distance learning courses using the platform. If you want to see one example in more detail, click here to see what I wrote about it last December.

This is how the home page of my online English introductory course looks like.