Using multisensory activities to adapt your coursebook for learners with SpLDs.

Dr Anne Margaret Smith

In 2016, two articles were published here relating to the workshop we ran on ‘Adapting your coursebook for learners with SpLDs’. The first of these articles outlined the main ideas that came out of it, including page layout, the amount of material to be covered, and classroom activities. The second article followed up with a more detailed discussion of how to adapt coursebook activities, looking at the four language skills as well as vocabulary and grammar activities. This article focusses even more closely on listening tasks, and considers how multisensory teaching techniques can be used. (NB: multisensory activities are those in which more than one sensory channel - and preferably several - are activated at a time. It is not the same as the ‘learning styles’ approach, where learners were designated as being ‘visual’, ‘auditory’ or ‘kinaesthetic’ learners and directed to tasks that used only that one channel. Multisensory activities are useful for all learners, and form an integral part of inclusive teaching practice.)

As pointed out in the previous article, listening activities in coursebooks are often more about testing comprehension than really teaching learners how to listen. When working with neurodiverse learners, whose phonological processing and memory may not be strong, it is important to help them develop strategic listening skills. Pre-listening activities will help them focus, and activate the appropriate areas of vocabulary, but there is much more we could do to help them with holistic listening techniques, such as being active listeners, drawing on what they know about the world to support them in guessing what they might be hearing, and tuning in to the words and syllables that are stressed in utterances, in order to get the main ideas.

One thing that I have discovered as a language learner, as well as a teacher, is that second language conversations are much harder to follow when there is a lot of background noise. Unfortunately, in the real world, students need to be able to filter out the distractions, and focus on the language. This is not easy for many neurodiverse students, but if we give them opportunities to practice this in class, they will get better at it. We can start by asking students to close their eyes and really focus on what they can hear, thereby developing active listening skills. Give them a minute to notice all the other sounds going on around them (e.g. a clock ticking, a car going past on the road, birds singing, other people moving), then ask them to first share with a partner what they heard, and then contribute to a class list of the ambient sounds. Play a sound track of ambient sounds from other locations (e.g. a café, a road, a shopping centre) and ask them to identify where they are, by picking out what they can hear (using, for example, materials in Evens and Smith, 2019). This also encourages them to draw on their world experience to make sense of what they can probably hear. Once they have become aware of these strategies, it is time to apply them to language use, and encourage them to listen through the background noise to focus on the words that are being said, for example on the coursebook listening activity sound track. In real life, people’s actions often help us to understand what they are saying to us, so role-plays are a great way to reassure learners that they don’t have to understand every single word. They might start by predicting the kinds of things they might hear in different contexts, and then progress to putting together a dialogue with a partner, which they can perform with the ambience soundtrack as a background, for other members of the class.

Tuning in to intonation patterns, and especially identifying words that are stressed, is also a key skill in listening, and one that we can make more accessible to all our learners. Stressing a word (or a syllable) in English requires the speaker to make some subtle changes to the pitch (usually slightly higher to draw attention to it), the volume (usually slightly louder) and the duration (usually very slightly longer). This needs to be explained explicitly to some students.

In every class there will be some learners who do not easily perceive changes in pitch, volume or duration in speech, but these are all elements found in music, too, which means that they are probably not entirely unfamiliar to our learners. It is worth isolating them, and focusing on each one in a musical context, before putting them all together in the speech context. For example, we could play two notes (or sing, whistle, or hum them) and ask the students to decide if the second note is higher or lower than the first. Using hands to indicate this can be helpful, providing a physical and visual aspect to the activity. Add another note to the melody – does it rise or fall? Or does it go up and then down? Students can practice this targeted listening in small groups, too, producing little melodies for each other to track with their hands. The same can be done with volume and duration, giving learners time to work on both recognition and production of these important aspects of speech in a non-linguistic context.

Listening for the most important words allows learners to get the gist, even if all the words are not fully understood. Once they can process these small differences that indicate stressed words in English speech, the coursebook listening tasks can be used to apply this awareness, and learners can practise picking out the key words in the utterances, and perhaps clapping the rhythm of the speech as they listen. If your learners produce their own dialogues, and role-play them for the other students, you could encourage them to not actually say the words, but to hum instead (or replace the words with ‘la la la’). It is interesting to see how much of the conversation can be understood from the intonation and stress, supported by the context and the actions.

For many neurodiverse students, fear of failure is a significant barrier to their learning. By helping them to develop their own strategies and reassuring them that we don’t need to understand every word, we can help them to take a more holistic approach to listening, that will probably suit them better, thereby increasing their confidence, their motivation, and ultimately, their success.

References
Evens, M. & Smith, A.M. (2019) Language Learning and Musical Activities. Morecambe; ELT well

 

Dr. Anne Margaret Smith

Dr. Anne Margaret Smith has been teaching English for 30 years and is also a dyslexia assessor. Her company, ELT well, aims to bring these two fields of education closer to-gether, by sharing good practice from both sides in the form of professional development and resources for teachers. Anne Margaret is the co-ordinator of the IATEFL Inclusive Practices and SEN SIG.

Presentation during the 19th Cyprus International Publishers Exhibition

  • A MULTISENSORY APPROACH TO LANGUAGE TEACHING (Professional Presentation)

Saturday, 7 March 2020, 14.30-15.20, Kantara Room, The Landmark Nicosia Hotel

Entrance to the above presentations is free of charge

To register visit:  www.ip-exhibitions.eu

 

Workshop during the 19th Cyprus International Publishers Exhibition

  • ADAPTING YOUR COURSEBOOK TO INCLUDE DYSLEXIC LEARNERS

Saturday, 7 March 2020, 17.00-20.00, Kantara Room, The Landmark Nicosia Hotel

Participation fee for the above workshop: 35 euros

To register visit:  www.des.org.gr