Summary of “Through Listening Strategies for Literature”

In this article, the author emphasizes that listening is more than sitting quietly and it isn’t a passive activity. Because students spend most of their time listening in school, so the author introduces four most successful strategies for listening. And take the speech from Harvey Daniels at the recent ALAN Workshop at the 2001 Fall Conference of the National Council of Teachers of English for example, the author concludes that listening to stories stimulates our senses and challenges our minds, so the four strategies are related to literature. The first one is teacher read-alouds, which means teacher choose chapters or shorter selections from all the books that will elicit interest in the students to read aloud or spend a few minutes daily or read a whole book with the class. The second one is listening guidance, which means the students have to complete a listening guide as they listen to teachers’ reading the book. The method was developed by Dr. Elane C. Stephens to use with middle grades students. The third one is readers’ theater, which means students select or are assigned a part from a script based on a book or story, they read their parts and convey meaning primarily through voice inflection. The last one is listening logs used with audio books, which means providing students with the opportunities to hear books or selections from book being read by professional actors. These four strategies are involved with literature, and they are all helpful for students’ effective listening.