[senco-forum] Developing listening skills in secondary pupils

"Pre-printed sheets are lovely to revise from but don't actually  provide any 
development of the individual"

Copying down what is readily available on paper is a needless task that  
children will only need to use at school, often due to lack of resources such as  
textbooks to take home to work from or because the  teacher hasn't had  time 
to copy things or prepared a lesson (don't tell me this doesn't happen  becuase 
I have witnessed it personally, at secondary school). 

In a mainstream classroom a child who has problems with processing -either  
auditory or visual- will not be able to write down dictation correctly, they  
will also be caught up in efforts to use correct spellings, trying to keep up  
neat handwriting for fear of retribution for both misdemeanours. 

For a child with APD, every sentence they may have heard may contain  errors 
in the first few words and maybe not processed the end of the sentence at  all 
or they may have missed words out in the middle or misheard the words  
totally and may be unable to keep up. They will be too embarrassed to keep  asking 
for repetition, they will be distressed and disadvantaged by the whole  
process. If they then rely on these incomplete and often incorrect notes to  revise 
from, they will be at a further disadvantage. What will the child have  learned 
in that lesson? What personal development will have been achieved? 

I have supported many such children who were given the sheets to read from  
while the rest of the class took the dictation and wwere then able to 
understand  the lesson. The children who were encouraged to "try" to master dication 
were  unable to keep up and had not processed or understood a word of the text  
they were copying. these children were then stressed and overloaded and this 
had  an impact on the next lesson they attended, often unable to process much 
of that  at all.

The art of dictation in improving listening is better applicable to those  
that can process what they hear. For those that cannot it simply makes their  
lives unnecessarily harder as it is a skill many will never master and will lose 
 out on valuable learning time in the effort to do so.  

Best wishes,
Aly

Chair Auditory  Processing Disorder in the UK/APDUK
www.lacewingmultimedia.com/APD.htm 
www.apduk.org