27: Scaffolding Listening Skills
Let’s chat all about differentiating and scaffolding listening skills! Here’s how you can make a listening activity easier or more challenging depending on the student.
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transcript episode 27: Scaffolding Listening Skills
Hello and welcome to the TOD POD, a podcast to support Itinerant Teachers of the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, SLPs, and other Deaf Education Professionals. I'm Deanna Barlow from Listening Fun and today we're talking about scaffolding listening skills. What I mean by that is ways to make auditory tasks easier or harder depending on the skills you're working on. The different factors that you can adjust are the number of critical elements, set size, sentence length and complexity, time, background noise, and distraction. So you can have a direction with 2 critical elements such as 'give me the yellow ball', which is very easy. Or you can have something like 'I would really like you to pass me the yellow ball when you get a chance please' which is a lot more taxing on your auditory memory for obvious reasons, even if it's still only two critical elements. So we're going to go through factor by factor and discuss how you can use it to scaffold a child's listening skills
Alright the first one is critical elements. So critical elements are the information necessary to complete a direction. So for example, “give me the yellow ball” can be 1 or 2 critical elements depending on what the options are, if there's only balls only the color really matters. But if there's a bunch of objects some of which are yellow then you really need to hear both words to follow the direction completely. So the first way to make a direction more complicated is to add more critical elements.
Lists of objects are harder than other grammatical structures. So if we're playing with toys and I say, "the dog is running to the blue house." You might have to remember 3 elements: dog, running, blue or blue house, assuming there's only houses. But this is easier than me saying, "give me the dog, the cat, and the duck." The sentence and the syntax helps your auditory memory by providing a clue and giving some context, so it's not just a list of 3 random items. The 3 elements are related to each other in a grammatical way that is predictable. So if you're working with a child on 2 or 3 or 4 critical elements and they're struggling, a way to make it easier is to practice more with like mixes of nouns and verbs and adjectives or prepositions, instead of just a list of nouns over and over again, or even a list of attributes, that's also just as hard. This works really well in play like, the cow jumps over the farm, the pig jumps over the horse, the horse goes under the chicken. You can see how you can practice a lot of different following directions with multiple critical elements without resorting to lists. Once you build their auditory memory through these activities and others, you can try lists again and see how they do.
Sequencing also falls under critical elements because the sequencing word itself is a critical element, right? So “give me the dog then the cat” has 3 critical elements because you have to understand the then part to follow that direction completely. Introducing sequencing is another way to make directions more challenging without making the lists longer.
Alright, let's move on to set size. There's closed sets, which can be small or large, and open sets, which which have unlimited possibilities. So obviously small sets are the easiest because seeing all of the options like jogs your memory and gives you less chances to be wrong. It can also be mixed. So for the last example like the animals are part of a closed set. There's only so many animal toys to pick from, but the verbs could be at open set I could give any verb in the direction. So if I wanted to make the activity easier, I could just pick 2 or 3 verbs so they have an idea of what it could be and they only have to listen for those possibilities. However I would challenge you to incorporate open set directions as much as possible as early as you can because it really helps develop that active listening skill. Small sets are a good way to scaffold a harder skill like more critical elements but an open set is more likely to carry over into stronger listening skills in the classroom. If a student is doing really well with listening activities with 3 critical elements for example, I might try some 3 critical element or actions with an open set or at least a very large set. Drawing activities work really well for this, movement activities, like “clap after you touch your nose” something like that, because they have no idea what's about to come out of your mouth, and they have to be prepared for anything.
Alright next let's talk sentence length and complexity. So sentence length, complexity, and structure can impact how challenging a direction is or a message is. Putting the information at the end of the sentence is acoustically the easiest. So, 'please give me the ball' compared to 'can you get the ball for me please?' So it makes sense that more complex sentences with more like quote unquote fluff will be more challenging because the listener has to weed out that extra information. One thing I do to make directions or auditory practice more challenging is to include unfamiliar names of people, places, brands, anything that they have to listen to the actual word to understand instead of relying on the context. That makes it a lot harder. So for example, if I'm looking at a map and I say, 'circle Antarctica and then put a star on Canada' that's going to be a lot more challenging because you really have to hear the exact words I'm saying and your brain can't fill it in based on context if you didn't hear it perfectly. I like doing a lot of listening practice with maps and geography activities for this reason because it's great listening practice for the actual sounds in words in connected speech. But it also builds background knowledge which is just like a bonus. When I'm doing like listening for details in sentences or paragraphs, I often ask them to remember the people's names when I want to challenge the student.
Alright next is time. The longer the amount of time between the verbal direction and them following the direction, the harder it is. So you can artificially create a time delay by counting to like 5 or 10 in your head and then letting them complete the direction. But I actually prefer when the time is built into the activity. So maybe the toy, the puzzle, the activity, whatever it is is across the room and you give them the direction and they have to walk over to complete it. And while they're walking over they have to hold that direction in their auditory memory. If you have like puzzle pieces or paper pieces or anything that you can like turn upside down so that they can't see it. They have to hold that information in their auditory memory while they're flipping them over to find the 1 they need to finish the direction. So like I have like farm animal magnets for example. If you flip all the magnets upside down and they can't see the picture and I say, 'put the cow on top of the whiteboard and the pig at the bottom of the whiteboard' and they have to go through and flip over every individual magnet. It takes a lot of auditory memory skill to hold that four critical element direction in their head and and finish it. So even once they find the piece, "what was I supposed to do with it?" So it's really good at making those directions more challenging but in a way that still like makes sense and is functional.
Putting a bunch of objects in a bag can also work the same way they have to look through the bag to find the objects that are part of the direction and then remember what you're supposed to do with them. So if you have a student succeeding with three critical elements but struggling with 4, you can help them build their auditory memory by giving them directions with 3 critical elements and a time delay. It's a way to practice and improve without moving up to the next number. And you can imagine that if you do a lot of practice of 3 critical elements with a time delay your auditory memory is going to get stronger because you have to be really solid to be able to remember 3 elements with a time delay and eventually that practice will carry over into being able to do 4.
Alright next is background noise. This makes it harder because the student has to use more cognitive energy on hearing the word and might not have as much cognitive energy left over for actually remembering or comprehending the direction. And there's different levels of background noise. It can be quiet or loud. It can be music without lyrics, music with lyrics, or a conversation background noise like a coffee shop sound. I just get these on Youtube. There's a app I used to have called Noisily, I haven't used it in a while. I usually just get little background noise things off Youtube. But obviously that's harder than music without lyrics right? So I had a student who was doing amazing with auditory memory like 7 plus critical elements like wow blowing my mind. So we practice in background noise more and we started with instrumental Taylor Swift music quietly in the background. It was lovely me and the student both very much enjoyed it [LAUGH] Um, and that was pretty doable for them. Um, yeah, it was more challenging than quiet but it allowed them to build up their confidence listening in background noise instead of going straight to loud coffee shop sounds and like I know that this student had trouble listening in background noise and they knew they had trouble listening in background noise. So not only does it scaffold the skill but it also builds their confidence with a more challenging skill especially for older students. So start with like the easy background noise, the instrumental quiet music and work your way up to like the loud coffee shop sounds once they are really successful. And if I do that I might also bring down the number of critical elements so that they can feel successful work their way back up. It's like you can pull any of these levers at any time to make it easier or harder.
And the last one is distraction. So last week we had Lynn Wood talk about this a little bit in that guest interview and it's such a great way to increase the challenge. Basically you have to have a student work on something while they listen so they have to like think and listen at the same time. It's great practice and for real life because like that's how real life works people talk to you while you're busy and sometimes you need to be able to do both and that can be really challenging for students who are using listening through hearing aids or cochlear implants. So it's really applicable to like note taking as well. And even though we hopefully have accommodations in place for note taking, it's still like a useful skill to be a little to like jot down notes while someone's talking to you like. If you are to the doctor's office and you want to jot down notes or you go to home depot when someone's explaining something to you and you want to jot down notes... not at all a real example from my life. [LAUGH] Um, but it's it's a helpful skill to have. So a few things that I like to do for that are a really challenging puzzle like a jigsaw puzzle something where they really have to like think while they're doing it. A difficult game. There's like some like brainy games depending on how old the students are um, anything that's like kind of distracting. I've also used an iPad this is like probably not the best example, but it does work. Um, it's that game with a ball and it like bounces and it hits the bricks and it makes them disappear. Do what I'm talking about? Um they have to really focus on that ball to like not drop it and we'll do listening practice while they're playing that game and let me tell you that is a distraction. And then another thing you could do is I've used like an I spy book you know like the ones with the really hard eye spy pictures where they're like sometimes the pictures are small and sometimes like, there was one it was like looking for a duck and like the lake was in the shape of a duck like it's not even just like like it's hard. They really have to like look for it. So I felt that was really good like really got their attention so they were really thinking like they were thinking about the duck. Everywhere they were looking and I was talking about something else and they had to hold both in their auditory memory and that is very challenging. Really just keeping their brains actively engaged while they're listening at the same time is very challenging listening practice and an awesome way to scaffold it up to make it harder. Um I guess I shouldn't say scaffold to differentiate it up, and challenge those students with a strong auditory memory. So just like with my other examples before like let's say you have a student who's doing really well with 5 critical elements but is having a hard time with 6. Maybe do 5 with a distraction or 5 with a time delay or 5 with more challenging vocabulary and you'll be able to build up their auditory memory where then they might be able to do six with some practice.
So that's everything you can adjust to differentiate listening skills. Just a quick review for you. It's the number of critical elements, the set size, the sentence length and complexity, time, background noise, and distraction. If you're looking for something to use while practicing these skills you can check out my Auditory Processing Made Simple binders. You can use that as like a base and then adjust the level using all the things that we've talked about today but I'll often use that as like my base of what I'm saying and then I can adjust it depending on what the student needs. So you can check that out in the show notes if you want along with the transcript for today's episode. Thank you so much for being here and I'll see you next week bye.