We spend a lot of class time talking to students. Explanations; questions and instructions all require students to comprehend what we are saying. How confident are you that everyone has understood?
We often assume that listening comprehension is simply a case of paying attention: if they listened, they would comprehend. But it’s more complicated than that. This post is about the poor listening comprehenders in your lessons. Some will be new to the country, and even your most fluent EAL students will have to work hard to comprehend explanations. Most still have vocabulary and grammar gaps which may not be obvious.
There are many students who struggle with language comprehension even if English is their first language. These poor comprehenders often have smaller vocabularies than their peers and may struggle with grammatical sentence structures. They generally find both listening and reading comprehension difficult (https://acamh.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/jcv2.12177) Generally, we can assume that 10-15% of students struggle with comprehension. This is likely to be much higher in some classes and some schools.
How Quickly Do You Speak in Class?
According to some sources, teachers talk to their classes at around 170 words per minute. That is pretty fast for any student trying to construct a mental model of a concept or series of instructions. Speaking more slowly and giving students processing time can really help.
Advice for teachers:
- Break any explanation or instruction into small chunks.
- Give students time to process new information.
- Support students to build mental models of each chunk of explanation. This could be by asking students to re-explain to their partner, answer a question or completing a short task which depends on understanding the chunk.
- Check for every student’s understanding. Mini whiteboards are great for this.
- Gradually build up the explanation, incorporating the previous chunks.
I hope that’s useful.
Ben
Reading for Learning 