Timeline and 4-Digits Rules: The Following Tips are Recommended

Post-Listening Activity, My Student is Explaining His Timeline

Teaching listening on thematic topic is really interesting. It guides students to comprehend the way of discourse is expressed in contextual arrangement. Various topics exist in society along with their suitable genres. Together with the use of specific genre, it involves particular language feature.

The first topic in my intermediate listening class in this semester is by listening history. People like to have attention on history in order to know the events happening in the past. How do they know this goal? By focus on the sequential events. The events happening on particular period are predictable. This way is by listening date, age, and year. While listening them, we know the continuance of events which are being talked.

The important  thing in my lecture when we discuss this topic is by listening numbers. Napoleon did many things in his entire life. What kinds of number will exist? I ask students to master numbers up to four digits (i.e the maximum digits reflecting year up to currently time, like in 2016). Ensure that they know the differences of listening year and thousand. For example, How is 1998 pronounced? Nineteen ninety eight or one thousand nine hundred ninety eight? Make sure that they are able to listen perfectly either year or currency. Which is much possible of both?

Timeline and Sequential Markers

The other point is to make timeline. Drawing timeline is useful so that we know someone’s journey, nation’s development, revolution, and so on. Anticipate that timeline is not only expressed in years. It is possible in representation as reflected in age and extent. For age, we should be responsive while listening “In 25 years old...”  or “his 18,...” . Extent reflects the period passing from the exact year like “4 years later,...”.

Timeline is the essential thing in listening history which involves sequential events. That is why, comprehending sequencing markers is important too such as first, next, after that, finally, and so on. This is what I said that particular language features stand on the right genres. So, let’s see what will happen with the other themes on the next posts!