[senco-forum] Developing listening skills in secondary pupils

Eddie,

You may not gain financially from the materials but you yourself declared a  
commercial interest in them. Your finances are none of my concern.

"About the value of dictation you write -' but it does not prove  the child 
has understood a word of it.  ' You are of course well  aware that I have 
made no claim that dictation enhances comprehension and  your inferring that 
I do make such a claim is crudely  dishonest."
 I did not say you infer this, just that my view is that anything  that 
encourages listening without ensuring comprehension is  pointless so I asked if 
your program covers this... and you have just  confirmed that your program does 
nothing to enhance comprehension, which was the  point I was trying to make. 
You do however claim that dictation enhances  listening?

 I agree with Clare that:

 "Listening has to be meaningful and dictation can be fairly  meaningless. It 
is simply writing down a representation of what we hear without  necessarily 
understanding it. Listening involves extracting some sort of meaning  from 
what is 'heard'. "

The ability to listen without comprehension is worthless. The ability to  
take down dictation without comprehension is pointless.  

To cure listening problems by the excessive addition of writing is  confusing 
the issue. If a child cannot take dication there can be  many reasons for it 
beyond mere ability to listen. A child can listen  without being able to take 
dictation or take dictation perfectly well without  any comrehension.

You need to find out WHY the child cannot appear to be listening, is it a  
problem with listening or comprehension? It's like treating a child  with poor 
phonological comprehension with more and more phonics, which you also  
endorse...if it doesn't work the first time it's like flogging a dead horse. Can  you 
see a pattern emerging here? Blame the child and make them work harder,  if 
they cannot conform to the way they are taught, give them more of the same to  
do. Would you make a child with poor vision write more? It's this very attitude 
 that causes many children to remain barely literate and extremely  
frustrated.

In order to understand and aid listening, you have to fully understand the  
impact of auditory processing on listening and comprehension ability, which  
you clearly do not, as you have stated yourself on this very forum. 

" Later on this evening, I will prepare an outline description of the  
strategy unless the list moderator advises me that this would an inappropriate  use 
of the forum."

I suspect  promotion of one's products is very much against the rules, as is 
referring  to someone's post or "contribution" as"a pile of junk". I also 
suspect  nothing will be done about it. 

Best  wishes,
Aly

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