APPENDIX 2 | A POEM FOR TWO VOICES No Books and 150 Students? Kim Hughes Wilhelm Instructions: To perform this poem as two voices, one student reads the lines in column 1 and a second student reads the lines in column 2. Note that both students will read the words in italics together. Question 5: What factors should be considered when deciding when to get married? Question 8: Should a son or daughter always marry the person his/her parents choose? Question 9: Should a son or daughter marry a person even if his/her parents disapprove? Question 12: In these modern times, what are the major difficulties that married couples face? Question 13: What are the most positive aspects of marriage? Cooperative Listening as a Means to Promote Strategic Listening Comprehension C ooperative learning has been part of the language learning domain for at least two decades. The approach principally aims to enhance the quality of learning by having learners cooperate in small groups or pairs (Fitzgibbon 2001). It is a mode of learning that promotes mutual helpfulness and active participation from all students in solving a problem (Jacobs and Hall 1994; Christison 1994) and is in harmony with strategic learning, whereby learners use their cognitive resources to master a particular language skill as efficiently and effectively as possible. Unfortunately, as Oxford (2002) notes, efforts in strategy training have focused on cognitive and metacognitive strategies to the exclusion of social and affective strategies, such as cooperative learning. This is unfortunate because the strategies employed in cooperative learning can be powerful tools for students as they attempt to master the demanding language skill of listening comprehension. Teaching listening comprehension is undoubtedly a challenging task for teachers. The fleeting nature of sound makes it hard for listeners to focus attention on a particular word or phrase for detailed analysis. So, it is understandable that many teachers slip into testing the learners' listening comprehension rather than teaching them how to listen effectively. Field (2002) points out that teachers tend to concentrate on the product of listening when they should be interested in the process. Since the 1960s, he notes, teachers have tended to begin their listening comprehension lessons by preparing learners for the vocabulary they will hear in the recorded material. After listening to the material, the students then are required to answer some comprehension questions, followed by pronunciation practice. Recent publications in the area of listening comprehension have featured new ways of teaching this skill. As Nunan (2002a) notes, these new techniques focus more on training learners to utilize effective strategies for listening to spoken messages. These strategies are best learned in an environment |