[senco-forum] Developing listening skills in secondary pupils

Yes of course, all of that is true and I would never deny a child in need a printed sheet and I encourage all the teachers to provide them and rage at the ones who don't.  But, this is about the building up of a skill that is difficult to quantify compared to reading, writing and speaking. I've never seen a standard score for 'listening age' and the only way to get better (and to prove it) is to do more of it.  The original thread was for mainstream secondary not just APD and I didn't recommend dictation instead of worksheet - wouldn't both be a good idea? then the child/teacher can see what the discrepancy is and the children have a safety net.  Ally 

	-----Original Message----- 
	From: senco-forum-bounces at lists.becta.org.uk on behalf of Olanys at aol.com 
	Sent: Fri 18/08/2006 15:53 
	To: senco-forum at lists.becta.org.uk 
	Cc: 
	Subject: Re: [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

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