Cycle 2

We thought about a way that we could show them pieces of evidence of the importance of listening skills and how these skills can affect their performance.

Then we prepared a formative assessment connecting listening skills and the content of the unit we were covering, a set of 8 questions about the content and 2 survey questions about listening skills, 1- How can you rate listening skills in your team ? 2. How good listeners are you during PHE class?

Only 2 students say that they need help developing their listening skills, 4 said they are still working on improving their skills, and the rest said that they are good listeners 14- this is for year 4. And year 6 – we had 6 students that said are still working on their skills and others said are good listeners and excellent.

About the assessment of the content year 4 had 71% on Rounders 1 and 48% on Rounders 2, and Year 6 had 92% on Rounders 1 and 80% on Rounders 2.

We shared results with them, and discuss with them how listening skills would help them to get better results, especially in year 4. We felt they could do more, but during the assessment, they played more than listening and that may affected their performance.

After we shared the results they realized that listening skills make a huge difference in their school results, we had some good lessons were they were trying their best to listen to others and understand before they talk.  And we asked them to come up with week goals about how they can be good listeners in class.

Cycle 3

We were not happy with the results because we knew that students could lose attention again easily so we thought about a way to discover deeply what was the problem with the classes, until one of the teachers shared a self-assessment of Approaches to learning, with the junior school mentor. We adapted the assessment to use for our students. And to read the results we used a statistic program SPSS version 17

So I divided communication skills into 3 parts Listening, speaking and interpreting,  According to table 1, the average show that my Year 4 students, in general, they speak more than listening according to their self-assessment and year 6, they speak more than they listen also. Actually, this is what I observe in class.

Table 1

Cycle 4 – Using Learning Environment Template (Behavior)

After Cycle 3, Luke Modder shared with me a Lesson plan template. And one of the points at the beginning of the unit was the fact that the teacher reminds students that they are being marked out of 5 every day on participation: PE kit, late, inclusive, participating in the activity, being kind, safety, material care, etc.

We decided to try and it was successful, It gave us teachers the opportunity to see how they develop from one lesson to another, I had a chance to see them self-making show that they all get fives during the lessons. So they even control and make sure their colleagues behave appropriately.

This method changes the classes positively, in many aspects. And we are aware that we need to keep things always more interesting like rewarding those who have more points than others or setting a goal for the whole class.

Final considerations

After applying this cycle instead of solving the issue of listening in class we discover that there is no magic strategy that we will apply and solve the problem, we will need to continue researching and implementing new strategies because a lot of aspects interfere when we talk about listening skills, Behavior, the content we are delivering, the teaching strategies.

But in this action research, knowing this information will take us to another cycle, and help us to understand how to balance speaking and talking in the classroom. Which strategies do I need to apply to be able to balance listening and talking skills in my class?

9. Bibliography

Manallack, S. (2003). Improving your listening skills. Bmj, 327(7408), 29s–a–29. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.327.7408.s29-a

McCargo, M. G. (2017). The Effects of Plickers As Response Cards On Academic Engagement Behavior In High School Students. Master’s Thesis, 1–85. Retrieved from http://aquila.usm.edu/masters_theseshttp://aquila.usm.edu/masters_theses/300

Nurpahmi, S. (2018). Improving Listening Skill By Activating Students’ Prior Knowledge. ETERNAL (English, Teaching, Learning and Research Journal), 1(1), 28–38. https://doi.org/10.24252/eternal.v11.2015.a3

Purdy, M. (2017). What is Listening?, 357–384.

Sharma, N. (2011). Strategies for Developing Listening Skills. ELT Voices India, (December), 12–18. Retrieved from http://eltvoices.in/Volume1/Issue6/EVI16.2.pdf

William Doverspike. (1981). HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR LISTENING SKILLS: A KEY TO GOOD COMMUNICATION, 3.

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