My fellow Pakistanis, lend me your ears

In Pakistan, teachers use this method to complete the prescribed curriculum on time to satisfy themselves, the students and the parents. Strict adherence to this traditional style is one of the main reasons for the deterioration of our educational standards. Use of the lecture method only, is a sign that the majority of the instructors do little to prepare lesson plans, incorporate group activities or inspire students to be life-long learners.

Some teachers are working with a heavy course load, or working multiple jobs, and therefore do not have much time to put together a proper lesson before a class.Worse yet, many teachers do not make plans organized because of negligence and sheer ignorance. This is often because of the mentality of such instructors who consider the act of educating as part of their job descriptions and lack of passion to impart knowledge. Instructor's manual is like the program, the lesson plan and an end in itself. On the other hand, effective teachers leading the objectives of the lesson and then develop a lesson plan incorporating these goals.These lessons contain critical thought out and planned content and learning beyond any textbook, and are designed to achieve more than just the ears.

The individual and group activities are used in lessons to reinforce learning and provide motivation. Activities by nature are not part of the lecture method and if students have to think and act rather than passively listening and receiving. It is essential for teachers to integrate individual and group activities based on the objective of their lesson and students' ability.Students who have experienced an activity-based learning to go in life to become better learners and adapters for different environments. Activities often require basic materials such as in the case of the model building exercises is to build towers, bridges, dams or the use of teaching aids such as images and multimedia. Product group activities in class or at home can even be displayed in the classroom or the hallways.

Learning takes place throughout the life of an individual and provide teachers opportunities through formal education to encourage students to be self-learners. Very little outside the school is black and white, and while listening and taking notes are both important skills, life requires its own learning which the lecture cannot provide. In the lecture method, the teacher is in charge of learning, in other methods such as learning by doing, hands on learning and discovery learning, the student himself/herself takes charge. For example, a science teacher who plans an excursion where students search for insects and then continue their field research with computer resources would be encouraging her/his students to be more independent during the learning process. Students themselves begin to discover that there are insects with and without wings, some have exoskeletons, some have segmented bodies, all insects have six legs, not all bugs are insects etc.

A framework for planning a listening skills lesson ...

Listening is one of the most challenging skills for our students to develop and yet also one of the most important. By developing their ability to listen well we develop our students' ability to become more independent learners, as by hearing accurately they are much more likely to be able to reproduce accurately, refine their understanding of grammar and develop their own vocabulary.

In this article I intend to outline a framework that can be used to design a listening lesson that will develop your students' listening skills and look at some of the issues involved.

The basic framework on which you can construct a listening lesson can be divided into three main stages.

When we listen in our everyday lives we hear language within its natural environment, and that environment gives us a huge amount of information about the linguistic content we are likely to hear. Listening to a tape recording in a classroom is a very unnatural process. The text has been taken from its original environment and we need to design tasks that will help students to contextualise the listening and access their existing knowledge and expectations to help them understand the text. When we listen to something in our everyday lives we do so for a reason. Students too need a reason to listen that will focus their attention. For our students to really develop their listening skills they will need to listen a number of times - three or four usually works quite well - as I've found that the first time many students listen to a text they are nervous and have to tune in to accents and the speed at which the people are speaking.

Ideally the listening tasks we design for them should guide them through the text and should be graded so that the first listening task they do is quite easy and helps them to get a general understanding of the text. Sometimes a single question at this stage will be enough, not putting the students under too much pressure.

The second task for the second time students listen should demand a greater and more detailed understanding of the text. Make sure though that the task doesn't demand too much of a response. Writing long responses as they listen can be very demanding and is a separate skill in itself, so keep the tasks to single words, ticking or some sort of graphical response.

Tolerance and Empathy in Today's Classroom, Building Positive Relationships Within the Citizenship Curriculum for 9 to 14 Year Olds

Resources for performance-based education

Perceptual-motor lesson plans, level 1, basic and "practical" lesson plans for perceptual-motor programs in preschool and elementary grades

Kodály today, a cognitive approach to elementary music education

Perspectives on listening