uh good afternoon everyone um thank you all very much for coming a very warm welcome to everyone this afternoon oh sorry I knew as soon as we started I'm sorry there's been a little bit of confusion about the time of start as well but um uh I think pretty much everyone's here now so we we'll get going um it's a real pleasure to welcome you all to the inaugural of Professor Tony Lynch um Tony has an MA in modern languages from the University of Cambridge a post-graduate teaching diploma diploma in teaching English as a second language from the University of Leeds and then an MSE and PhD in Applied Linguistics from here at the University of Edinburgh and he was appointed to his personal chair of student learning English for academic purposes in August 2011 Tony's worked at the University in what's now known as the English language teaching Center since 1980 uh he's been a tutor teaching fellow a lecturer a senior lecturer and now a professor he's now head of the English for academic purposes section and in this role is responsible for the University's ever expanding program of foundation pression and in session courses to help International students this is an extremely important part of our work as a university especially as a a a thoroughly International University his research has focused on the communication between native and non-native speakers of English in academic settings and he's developed a good deal of teaching materials based on the insights he's gained from this research he's produced three books for language teachers uh from this research one called listening one called study speaking and another study listening and these have had a real genuine impact on the teaching of English for academic purposes and some of his recent papers have been focusing on International students informal listening strategies which I think we'll hear a little bit about today the linguistic benefits of recycling classroom communication tasks and the role of different forms of feedback in improving students spoken English all really important topics for us as as we work to develop students experience of excellent learning and teaching Tony's um very kindly agreed to answer some questions at the end of his lecture and then we'll all we're all welcome to a reception that we'll be holding just outside on the messine floor so I'm very warm welcome now to Professor Tony Lynch to give us his lecture on the importance of listening to International students uh thank you very much um before I begin my lecture I'd like to um acknowledge the professional debt that I owe to two groups of Staff within the university in particular uh firstly the teaching staff on the msse in Applied Linguistics in the old Department of Applied Linguistics where I did my msse in 1977 uh and secondly to the many colleagues that many colleagues in The Institute for Applied language studies where uh I worked for 30 years so my topic today is listening comprehension in the University context and specifically in relation to the experience of international students who are non-native speakers of English and the title of my talk can be read in two ways why listening is important to those International students and secondly why I think it's important to listen to what they have to say about their experience in edenburgh now in the lecture I'll be looking at the processes of listening uh how we normally resolve listening comprehension problems why listening matters for international students how they perceive the lectures that they attend in Edinburgh and ways of making lectures more accessible to them I'd like to begin with the sources of information that we use when we're trying to understand what somebody is saying to us so we have three levels of knowledge at the top we have schematic knowledge in the middle we have context and at the bottom we have language so schematic knowledge is our knowledge of the topic that's being talked about the content of what the person is telling us and about the process of communication contextual information involves the situation so who is talking where and when and the co- text so the other bits of language that precede and follow what we are currently listening to and also the visual information that we can use in the physical context and then at the bottom in this diagram we have language so our knowledge of vocabulary of grammar and of pronunciation now when we're listening to a foreign language it it's probably at the bottom level that we are aware of having deficiencies so not knowing the words that a speaker is using clearly strike us as a problem but it's also true that the same thing applies to us in our first language so when when somebody is using a variety of our own language that we're less familiar with we can have difficulty understanding what they said or meant for example about a week into my MSC course in 1977 I went into the cdale bank in Patrick Square this is in the days I think before we had holes in the wall so I wrote out a check to cash put it in the trough and the bank teller said how will I give you the money now I interpreted this that there was a problem um there was a screen between us maybe the trough was blocked and while I was thinking what to say she then said do you want it in fives or tens so I know that this was the first time that I was aware that some Scottish speakers of English use will where I would use shall in other words to make an offer or to offer a choice so that's language in other contexts it's in other contexts it's context which plays the main role um I'm going to show you a question that I was asked recently and I'm not going to give you any context to begin with so from those four words with the question mark and the sir you're probably because this is what human beings do you're probably trying to work out a possible context where that makes sense I'm now going to tell you a bit more about the context it was January and it was the checkout at sa Center Cameron toll and it was the assistant who was checking through my goods who asked the question what is game sir now I understood this to mean something like what's your game so I thought I had probably done something wrong but that didn't seem to fit in with the sir um so now a bit more context the assistant was Indian and I could tell that by the name on his label and so I said pardon and he then said the same thing but this time he added the adjective British what is British games sir now at this point I know that schematic knowledge about British colonial history kicked in the great game Etc so maybe he was asking me to comment on the Raj so in the way that you do I said I'm sorry I don't understand and this time he raised his eyebrows jutted out his chin towards my shopping and said what is British game sir and at that point I remembered that one of the items I had bought was a casserole mix labeled British game so I was then able to answer his question say rabbit pheasant venis and that sort of thing and he was very grateful for me informing him what it was he just put through the the checkout now the the whole process I hope took only about 2 or 3 seconds but I think it's a very good example of the roots that we take when we're trying to make sense of what somebody has told us so we rarely go directly from our background knowledge to comprehension we use the context and language and our background knowledge we shuttle backwards and forwards so to speak between the different sources and we try to to make sense we're not normally aware of the routes we take unless there's some sort of obstacle such as it being in a foreign language that makes us conscious of the decisions that we're making and to communicate at normal speed we have to do this in parallel and quickly now when we're listening to a foreign language there's a tendency particularly at the lower levels of competence in the language to over rely on language on the bottom level here's an example from my learning of Spanish so I was in Spain in aurus and I was watching a TV program a news program male newsreader behind him there was the photograph of a young woman and he announced her as referred to her as Ladora deina now my language told me that lanthar is to throw Adora means someone who so a thrower kabali is a wild boar and Ena is a diminutive in fact it's a female diminutive in the north uh west of Spain so what I pictured was this woman um who was in the habit of hurling around young female wild boar piglets this seemed slightly odd uh and at that point behind the news reader there appeared a photograph of an Athletics stadium and it was then that I twigged that khalina was a javelin not as I suspected I had I do remember and I think it was at the time rather than later that I did wonder whether this might be a basque sport because the the Bas the basks are well known in Spain perhaps elsewhere by the laughter um for having games involving Feats of strength and endurance rather like the Highland Games but I was able to um correct myself in time now so far I've talked about things that happen inside our heads when we're trying to understand normally in conversation we resolve these problems through What's called the negotiation of meaning or sometimes referred to as conversational repair and what you find is that speakers particularly when they're speaking to non-native listeners make three main sorts of adjustment to input to interaction and to information and I'm going to say a little bit about each of those those so in the case of input speakers typically adjust the grammar by making their utterances which is spoken sentences shorter and less complex less complex in the grammatical sense and uh increased use of the present tense particularly when telling anecdotes that happen to them speakers to limited listeners in the language tend to put everything in the present tense rather than the past tense when it comes to vocabulary they tend we tend to use more common vocabulary to avoid idioms that we think may not be obvious to The Listener we also tend to repeat nouns rather than to refer to a person as he or she and then when it comes to pronunciation speakers tend to articulate more CL more clearly and more slowly to use a greater amount of stress to stress the really important words with heavier stress than normal and also to use a wider range of pitch and for nonverbal adjustments we tend to use longer pauses to give the listener time to process what what they've just heard we use more gestures and we increase our use of facial expressions now at this point I have to tell you a story the story concerns a hat seller what you see are the last two pictures in a six picture set so it was uh the scene is a tropical country and uh an old man who makes sombreros from uh straw was sitting in the shade of a tree waiting to sell his hats to passers by because it was hot he fell asleep up in the tree were a troop of monkeys who while he was asleep came down each took one of his hats went back up the tree and stuck the hats on their heads so when he woke up the old man saw his hats had gone and up in the Tre were monkeys wearing them he was very angry so he shook his fist at them and all the monkeys shook their fist at him he didn't quite know what to do so he scratched his head whereupon all the monkeys scratched their heads at which point between the two pictures he realized what he should do that the monkeys were copying him so he dropped his hat and the monkeys helpfully all dropped theirs now the reason I've told you the story is because I'm going to focus on uh each of those pictures in turn for for different reasons to illustrate the sort of adjustment that I'm talking about so in the case of the left hand picture or rather between the left left hand picture and the right hand picture Okay this this data comes from a study I did in fact it was my PhD study where I was interested in the ways in which native speakers of English would or wouldn't adjust what they said to a series of individual separate listeners so what you see here is what one native speaker said to his or her native listener so he expressed the realization as the penny dropped so an idiom to the advanced listener this being a non-native speaker a learner of English he used a different idiom one that is arguably slightly more obvious it dawned on him to the intermediate listener he didn't use the IDM at all he said he realized and to the elementary listener he said and then he thought and he realized and then a long pause it was easy so here you have an example of the ways in which the same native speaker adapts for different levels of listener using the same data in each case The Listener had the same pictures as the speaker and the listener's task was to order the pictures they were jumbled up so those were adjustments of input that is adjustments of language the choice of words more important according to research is adjustments of interaction so the first type of thing that we do is a confirmation check that's when the L is listener s is speaker so when The Listener makes sure they've understood what the speaker means so he may say something like so you mean he lost his money checking that what I've understood is what the speaker meant a comprehension check is when the person who's speaking makes sure that the listener has understood and we may make that clear by saying do you follow do you understand is that clear or it might just be okay expecting the other person to confirm that they have understood a clarification request is where the listener asks the speaker to explain or to rephrase so when you said obstacles did you mean something like problems and repetition either party can repeat either their own words or the other person's words in order to check that what check that both parties are happy with what's been understood reformulation the speaker rephrases the content of what they have said very often language teachers are found to do this more than repetition so non-teachers talking to non-native listeners tend to repeat what they said before language teachers tend to reformulate completion The Listener completes the speaker's utterance intended to be helpful of course but there are people I'm sure we know them all who do this to us in our own language and inevitably are wrong um I find and then backtracking is where the speaker has been a problem and the speaker thinks okay I better go back to the point where she looked like she was understanding and we'll try that out and if that doesn't work we'll go back further and then there are adjustments of information choice this is something that I was particularly interested in um or became interested in because of the data that I found in my PhD research so I found that speakers used more descriptive detail more explicit logical links and also filled in what they assumed were gaps in the listener's sociocultural [Music] knowledge so back to the monkeys but the right hand picture this time no sorry the left hand picture this time the scratching of the head this is a different native speaker than the one you saw just now so to the Native Native listener the speaker said this is rather puzzling so he takes off his hat and scratches his head to the advanced learner he takes off his hat and scratches his head in confusion so you could say in confusion is just about the same as puzzling but again when it comes to the intermediate listener well the man doesn't know what to do he's very puzzled and so he scratches his head which means I don't know what to do implying assuming the listener doesn't know what head scratching indicates and again to the elementary old man's very puzzled and worried about how to get his hats from the monkeys and he takes off his hat and scratches his head as people often do when they feel puzzled so speakers also adapt adjust to their listener by the information they choose to highlight so I've talked about three sorts of adjustment as if they were separate but in fact they normally occur in combination so I'm going to uh by way of illustration show you a short transcript of a conversation between three of my past students uh Isabel is from Spain Yuko is Japanese and khed is from Malaysia and it's a point in the conversation where Isabelle who is from cevil is talking about cevil so I was telling one of my friends yeah we have all streets full of orange Tre trees and he asked me but don't you eat the oranges no they're very bitter it's impossible they're really bitter and uh Yuko then says must be a wild one wild orange tree Wild by the way the pluses indicate the length of the pores so when she says wild it's a repetition of course of what she said but it seems to be a comprehension check as well do you know what I mean by wild khed says which I would categorize as a minimal clarification request and Isabelle also says wild repetition yes so nobody tries to eat them the oranges from uh the street another completion the street yes no no but do you know why you why do you use that orange for and Yuko know so she says for marmalade and says what yes he was a man of few few words um so ma uh Yuko then says marmalade sweet sort of jam so she's repeating the word that KH had appeared not to know and she is then reformulating re using a different expression for it and Isabel then said yeah but for the queens of England but not for us we don't use it at home just to thre to each other and khed says through now I'm assuming that he's recognized that it was a verb it could be that he's actually saying the word t h r o u g h okay anyway he makes the sound through Yuko laughs and Isabelle yes it's true at Christmas I was having a party with my friend just a dinner very quiet and suddenly we went in the balcony mhm says Khaled somebody throws us an orange and Yuka says ha it went push to the wall and then HED says is that traditional way to celebrate something or what so he's asking for cultural background Isabelle says no and just he says just just to annoy so a confirmation check to bother us and then they laugh now there's nothing unusual about that conversation it just illustrates how three International students effectively sort out their communication problems as they arise in interaction so summarizing what I've said so far listening comprehensives can be complex we can fail in various ways as listeners we can not hear we can mishar we can misunderstand and we can not understand and the resources we use in one way listening where we don't have the chance to reply are made up of three types of knowledge which we apply as seems relevant when it comes to two-way listening to normal conversation listeners and speakers generally cooperate to make sense of each other and they use a range of interactive adjustments and all this is true of communicating in our first language but we're more aware of it when we're listening to a foreign language in fact we're more aware in particular things going wrong in the foreign language so the next question is why does listening matter for international students and I think it matters because students level of listening skill can either open up or close off access to two main types of experience there's the access to the academic knowledge in their program and there is the access to informal language learning potentially in the university community around them so I'm going to look at academic knowledge first um and at Edinburgh we measure the listening skills of some International students through uh a test called team test of English of matriculation and in the original version it had four sections vocabulary listening reading and writing and some years ago I did a study of team's validity that is it's predictive validity that is how well it predicts a student's eventual academic success in this case a year later so the data came from nearly 300 students who were on taught one-year Master's programs and I compared their team scores and other test English test scores with their academic outcome um a year later the suspense is Dreadful and what I found was that the overall relationship between the team test that is as a whole and the academic out out come was roughly 0.3 in other words roughly 10% of this variation the variance in students performance a year later could be statistically explained by their English ability and to give you an idea of um how other tests would would Fair the main two International tests of English so iot and TOEFL various studies um have tended to find that the correlation is very similar to that of the team test um around about 0.35 but within the team sections it was only listening that was statistically significant so almost all the predictive validity of the four tests was in fact carried by team Sorry by listening by the listening test so why should this be why listening and not the other skills because most people most students and probably most staff are aware of student success or failure through what they write rather than what they listen to writing is how you show what you've understood so I think that the reasons for the connection between listening on the team test and the academic outcome a year later are likely to be indirect so I think if you are a student with poor listening skills when you arrive in semester one you don't actually grasp all you need to of the content of your course you may well try to compensate for that by doing a lot of reading but the other students are doing reading as well and the other students are also getting better at listening so you can't actually ever catch up with the lack of grasp of the content secondly uh I know from what students have told me and my own experience in Spanish that there are psychological effects of poor listening you lose confidence you become anxious and one General finding about adult language Learners is most people think they are the weakest in the class [Music] but many International students in various surveys have reported finding it difficult to establish relationships friendships with Native students and the other thing is that there's a sort of a conflict a tension between the role of student student doing a course at University and being a language learner and I'm going to say a little bit more about that at this point I need to mention that the sort of a advice that second language researchers and therefore teachers tend to give to language Learners uh much of it is derived from what was called good language learner studies in the 70s uh among the the main um researchers in this area was uh evil in Hatch this is a quotation from what she wrote so she says Learners should practice saying her echoing parts of s es they don't understand they should be told to use um um or whatever fillers they can to show they really are trying if the learner gets to recycle the same topic several times with the same or different native speakers he will then have the vocabulary he can recycle the topic again with another person and pay attention to his syntax he should be taught not to give up in any contact with a native speaker so that's what a leading uh applied linguist native speaker applied linguist in this case recommends we should be advising students to do now there's a wonderful essay by a Danish academic called Peter harder and he brilliantly captured the problem with this uh his his essay was subtitled um on the reduced person personality of the second language learner and this is what he said one gets the picture of a very well- defined social role when one imagines the learner assiduously repeating bits of the previous utterance blocking out interruptions by saying um um sticking Like Glue to unfortunate natives who said hello the picture that emerges is that of an utter Pest and this the learner unless he's an unusually callous or charming person is likely to be acutely aware of uh I have a shorter simpler quote from one of my students which I think says very much the same thing an undergraduate came to see me about his problems in understanding what the British students he was studying with were saying and when I said well don't you remember in our language classes in the summer you were very good at getting people to clarify he so looked World weary and he said yes but I'm the only foreign student so I can't ask very much so when it comes to the social side of things the learner cannot as it were chain everything chain all the discourse to learning he has to he or she has to play the role of being part of the group and not necessarily part of the group who is there because they want to improve their English so I was interested in finding out more about the ways in which International students manage to practice listening in informal settings so a couple of years ago I carried out a project I called ilsa which is um informal listening and speaking encounters so I asked Edinburgh postgraduates what type of speaking practice they engaged in outside the language classroom and what advice they would have for incoming students there are 105 responses and as you'll see just over half the students said they'd made less progress in lisening than they expected and most of the others said they hadn't made any more than they' expected so only about 10% of the group that I asked reported that they had made more progress than they uh predicted they would I asked them to estimate the times they spent each day uh listening or talking talking meaning listening and speaking and you'll see that the there's about half an hour's difference overall between those in the a group who reported less progress and the other two but there's no real difference in the overall figures of B and C however if you look at the red figure you'll see that there's a big difference in the amount of time that the C group reported talking so there's some evidence that although the overall time that students spend listening or talking is similar in B and C there is something about getting more practice in talking which is associated with feeling that you've made more progress going to give you a couple of quotes from the students that I interviewed as part of the study a Cuban PhD student I'll let you read it because you can read it faster than I can say it NOC says they don't correct you one of the complaints from International students to me personally but on behalf of the British nation is that we don't we don't correct them enough and of course for us if you correct somebody in a conversation a normal conversation unless you're a teacher in the classroom um it's socially marked you're listening not to what people are saying but to the way that that they're saying it but anyway he says don't isolate yourself this is a quote from a Chinese student so she is equally convinced that this is advice that should go to the students who are coming in um I leave you to work out which of the two had in fact made much greater progress than than the other but the point is students come with relatively fixed ideas which may be malleable uh as to how they're going to improve their listening outside the classroom so the implications of the inssa study seem to me that we need to persuade students that informal conversation is a valid and important way of improving your English it's not just talking and secondly we need to encourage students to listen out for potential learning points in the conversations we assume they're having with in English with other students an example I'm going to give you is of bottle a bottle of a bottle of Chinese student uh told me in a speaking class that she'd had great difficulty talking to her German flatmate because he often didn't understand what she said and she said he asked me what the book was I was reading and I told him it was a bottle of so I then said a bottle of what he said no no that's what he said it's not a bottle of what it's it's it's a bottle of there was some recognition smiles and at which point I said I went to my strategy of Last Resort and said can you spell it and she said yes a b o u t l o v e now potentially a little incident like that could alert the speaker to the fact that there are certain sounds that they need to make differently if they're going to stand a chance of being understood lastly listening to students at Edinburgh um under the internationalization strategy um it seems to me that the future success of the strategy is going to depend in part on the ways in which the university takes into account what today's students have to say and I think the basic issue that the university faces was night nicely neatly summed up by this thai student who said I'm a non-native speaker student in fact the language problem might be a problem just for me but the university is likely to increase Foreigner students by about 30% maybe so implying that in her particular course maybe she was the only person with problems but then thinking ahead something the university needs to think about so I collected some data on International students perception of lectures um the acronym is isole I collected the data in the Autumn of last year and it was collected from students who had taken the team test and I got 126 replies what I did was I gave them a a two-part questionnaire in the first part I listed 12 pieces of adice device commonly given to lecturers who teach International students uh and they were derived from work by uh Teresa Morel in Spain so these are the first five and these are the other seven the orientation of the study was to regard the students I was asking as experts in listening or rather people with a growing expertise in listening to Second Language lectures what I asked them to do was to look through the 12 items in the list and to indicate which three they thought were the most important and to mark them one two three and in the second section of the questionnaire I said is there any other advice you would give your lecturers which isn't covered in the 12 points so um this shows you the first four items that were ranked in first place and you'll see that perhaps not surprisingly control your speed of speaking was chosen by practically twice as many students as the next most frequently first place advice here are a couple of students comments and again this is a student who appears to be in a group that is largely British so he says maybe the teachers aren't aware of the speed they don't notice it another point of view from somebody who suggests several things slowing down I wish they'd slow down a bit uh I wish they could repeat and emphasize what the main information is and an interesting point at the beginning of the semester that is semester to one it would be good if lecturers controlled their speed of speaking a suggestion that lecturers should be conscious particularly conscious at the start of the year that their listeners may not be able to follow them very easily now this is a slightly different picture this shows the cumulative totals for items that were ranked one or two or three and you'll see that speed still emerges as the first of the as the most mentioned item but now the second ranked item is look out for signs of difficulty nobody said wrote what those signs of difficulty were so it seems that students assumed that lecturers will know what the signs of difficulty are and we'll do something about it I know for example that uh in a big room I can't actually look out for frowns but it's quite easy to see one student turning to look at another student's notes which to me is a suggestion that the student who's looking is not sure that they've understood but presumably there is a wide range of signs of difficulty but interestingly none of the students said what they were it was just assumed that they were going to be visible and then the next most frequently uh chosen advice was about selecting and adapting examples two comments here from different students both referring to cultural difference asking lecturers to make sure that they take care that the the examples that they may be used to using from years before are actually going to be ones that are accessible to International students when it came to creating a relaxed atmosphere um two opposite views students saying lectures should be humorous and then one saying please don't always tell jokes only understood by British and Europeans this reminded me of an email that I was sent a couple of years ago here it is from a Chinese student I eventually got my answer down to 25 words I'm willing to send it to you if you want to know what it was now among the other issues mentioned by the students the ones that they had literally empty space for on the questionnaire they mentioned timing largely the fact that lecturers t try to cram in too much material into 50 minutes something on supplementary materials there was a bit on the use of language which tended to be that they felt lecturers were using language that was too formal um which surprised me I would have thought it would have been too informal for a student uh International students point of view and then something on the assumptions of shared knowledge I'm just going to mention the assumptions of shared knowledge don't assume that all students have the same background on the subject matter second quote I suppose lecturers should introduce the background of some important technical concept then we'll probably more quickly keep this knowledge in memory so this seems to be different from cultural assumptions culturally weighted examples it's actually about what lecturers assume students know within the subject area so my conclusion the the the pointers that I think we can pick up from the is poll data clearly speaks slower lecturers should keep an eye out for signs of listening distress ensure that examples are accessible and create opportunities for students uh questions now at First Sight you might think that those are relatively uncontroversial but if we assume that lecturers are open to the advice that we should reduce our speed of speaking and also encourage students to contribute questions The Logical con con sequence of those two adjustments is that we have to be prepared to cover Less in the standard 50-minute lecture this would actually be in line with some Recent research in Sweden a couple of studies there concluded that the implication of really taking International students into account is that less information can be delivered in lecture form so one way to do that would be to follow the recommendations by SE several of the students which is to put more material to make more material available online which students could either study before or after the lecture and another would be to encourage students to ask for clarification by using what I have called uh question pauses these will be pauses of two to three minutes at a couple of points in the lecture where by announcing the question pause the lecturer marks the fact that questions aren't just allowed but they're also expected and by making these two relatively simple adjustments I think we may may allow the natural mechanisms of conversational repair negotiation of meaning to come into play into the lecture theater as they do in conversation I have one last quotation I agree with that but then I would because I wrote it uh 20 years ago so my feeling is if if we don't make the sort of institutional adjustments that I've mentioned there's a risk that International students are going to remain as it were audience members rather than participants and what I'm really proposing is that we need to find ways of making our lectures more like academic conversations in which listeners help speakers to make themselves better understood thank you very much well I think that was a a model of clear uh a clear lecture um I'm sure there were no signs of distress throughout that from the audience and I think also you gave us some very important messages for how we might improve the way we um managed to teach all our students uh from the analysis of what you've done with International students we do have some time for questions and I've got some roving mics here so if I could ask you to put your hand up and wait for the microphone before you answer the question so hi thanks for the talk I teach on the MC in economics here and we have a problem with our International students where students who are from a country where there are lots of other people from that country will often sort of segregate and their language doesn't improve as much as people who you know if you come from I don't know what Bhutan no one else speaks bhutanese you you mix and you learn and you move on better and I wonder if you have more suggestions on how we can sort of stop that behavior I I sort of get the feeling that students think at the beginning well it's just a bit easier you know my English isn't so good right now I'll learn it later and then they get trapped and they sort of never really improved so I wonder if you have any suggestions about that um it's very difficult uh it's particularly difficult now because as far as I can see I mean the main international student group now are Chinese and I think they are much more dominant numerically than say the Japanese were 20 years ago or Arabic speakers were 30 years ago um I'm also aware that there's a much stronger at least it seems to me I'm an outsider but I think there's a much stronger informal Network among Chinese students now here also linked with Chinese students who have been in here before and I think for uh I mention Chinese because they are the dominant group at the moment I think it's as you say it's very easy for them to slip into habit of going to their own fellow language speakers for help um as I hinted I think British students would actually do the same if they were foreign language students even if they're foreign language students not students of other subjects in other countries from a practical point of view there needs to be a good reason if you like I think why a student doesn't um mix all the time with their own nationality um and one reason could be that they join a student society which is in whatever the thing is that they're most interested in because if you encourage students to join uh a society they go to that Society because that's the reason for for going there they don't actually go uh there for the purpose visibly ostensibly of improving their English but they would um and I think that I think partly it is a question of numbers larger numbers than than we've had before but also um I feel from my point of view um in the ELC as I said one thing we need to persuade our International students to do is talk socially to other speakers of English you know we need to persuade them that doing that is not just waste a waste of time it's actually a way in which they can improve their their informal learning of English other questions uh thank you very much for that talk Andy Thompson politics um one of the issues you raised right in the early stages was the evidence you had that listening seemed to be the most important Dimension uh to language uh learning and obviously taking in the subjects that studying you conclude by saying we should cover Less in the lectures and move more material online now I presume you mean here not simply material to be read uh otherwise that would seem to be self-defeating in a way or not self-defeating but it wouldn't actually encourage the listening aspect are you uh suggesting therefore that the materials should as much as possible be material which they would listen to uh which would encourage them to speak as well uh I would yes the students who suggested it weren't thinking about listening because they were talking in various of their comments they talked about texts that they could read but I'm aware that it takes time to record something which you may be recording only for the people who are going to access the place where you're going to put it it's extra load onto the the teaching um but I think more generally other than only focus students attention on the content of of their course they would be missing out on a wide range of audio material on the net not specifically in their subject but in a sense listening to anything improves the psycho motor skills of coping with language at speed so provided they're listening to something that's of interest to them I would say we should be encouraging them not just to focus on any material whether it's audio or reading that is put up online for them but they should be taking the opportunity to listen into who knows lectures like this but also um other events in Edinburgh as well as what they can listen to on the net okay thank you for the talk attorney which I enjoyed very much can you hear me yes um some years ago in the N I'm thinking of the 1980s there was a fashion for testing English in according to its specific purpose the Els test the precursor of ielt is a very good example of that do you think that was a good idea and does team operate in that way and if not why not okay uh no it doesn't in fact team uh is design it's it's not a commun it isn't a communic test of of communication and it's not related to student subject in fact fact although I haven't yet gone into detail the team listening test is if I'm being deil Devil's Advocate is the most unrealistic test of listening that one might imagine namely it is a once only dictation test yet its results correlate well as well as overall figures from iot and tofl with academic outcome and I think that's because although dictation is a test of listening it is classically uh an integrated skills test because it also tests one's ability to write to identify words as well as the a general language competence so arguably the reason why the team listening section is does provide a reasonable predictor of academic outcome a year later is because it's actually within itself is a general language proficiency test delivered as a speaking test but unrealistic in the sense that um native speakers might not score 100% on the test um so it doesn't test a student's ability to extract information it tests their ability to replicate what they hear we do allow semantic equivalence so if the word problems is actually in the dictation text they hear if a student writes difficulties we count it right because that's what native speakers do we understand the meaning of something we don't retain necessarily the physical form so that would be my answer that team is definitely a different test from from I and tofl um or else um but seems somehow to tap into something that seems to be an underlying competence students need in order to do well over the course of the next 12 months hi there Tony it's um Sarah Henderson from the College of Medicine I was just it's actually a follow on um from a previous question um as I'm sure you appreciate the College of Medicine has um s the largest proportion of online distance learning programs at the University many many of which um and I think possibly related to the importance of listening speaking and interaction with other students and of course many of our students on online distance learning programs don't have any day-to-day um interaction with people that are native speakers um especially those that are on programs that are particularly focused towards International students some that are have entire um cohorts of students for example in various African countries I was wondering what advice you could give to any of the program director that are in similar situations given the importance of listening um interaction with other students and speaking and academic performance and of course in an online environment quite a lot of that element is removed from the teaching situation um so the you're sorry just checking you were asking about this confirmation check um what advice I would give to the the distance learning directors to give to their students to improve their listening okay so um I have to try to remember what it was I wrote yesterday because yesterday I don't think you know I wrote a unit on listening intended for the distance learning students in particular who would be coming to Edinburgh but wouldn't have access to direct social interaction so I think I would say um what they need to to do is to compensate to find a way of compensating for the fact that they won't have face-to-face um communication practice in the same way that uh students uh doing a conventional course would and I would think I would say I mean as you all gathered my interest is in listening I tend to see listening as a possible answer to quite a lot of things um so if the students are not going to get practice in face Toof face listening I would say we need to maximize what they know about the opportunities that they have on the net for listening in even to discussions um lectures seminars related to the topic that they're doing for their degree there there's now a fantastic range of specialist academic lectures freely available where students can get I think practice like the experience they will have I assuming that on the distance learning courses the students will be listening to lectures some yes and some no okay and I guess some of them may be watching video lectures yeah so again um there are various websites they always seem to be funded by um very religious Americans um nevertheless uh there are certain sites which despite their fun seemed to provide what I regard as very good range of um subjects and topics and I think directing alerting students to the possibilities that are out there um and each time I update my teaching materials I find that there's more out there than there was when I updated it 6 months before I think that is the the way for that I suggest that they advise their students to go questions no well I think now is the time to practice our speaking and listening skills over wine um so I'd like once more to thank Tony Lynch very very much for such an interesting lecture and welcome you all into the reception thank you once [Applause] [Music] again this production is brought to you by the University of Edinburgh