In episode 52, Dr. Beniko Mason joins the podcast to talk to Stacey about Story Listening and the most efficient way for learners to acquire language. In her four decades of teaching and researching, Dr. Mason has produced both impressive research as well as impressive results for her students. Be sure to check out the show notes to find links to her publications and current projects.
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Show Notes
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Resources from the show…
…You can learn more about Beniko Mason and her work at her website.
… Storiesfirst.org is a resource for those interested in using Story Listening. Stories First Foundation was founded by two teachers, Claire Walter, a French and ESL teacher in Tennessee, and Kathrin Schectman, a German teacher in Erlangen, Germany.
…There is also a Facebook group Story Listening for Language Acquisition
…Beniko has published extensively. You can find a list of her publications here on her website, and Dr. Stephen Krashen also has several of their co-authored papers available on his website for download.
…Dr. Krashen and Dr. Mason have Story Listening workshops coming up this summer. You can find more information here: https://storiesfirst.org/learn/
Getting Started with Story Listening
Learn the how and why of Story Listening in this one-day workshop with Beniko Mason and Stephen Krashen
Place: Los Angeles, CA
Date: June 18, 2018
Time: 9:15 AM – 4:00 PM
Place: Portland, OR
Date: June 20, 2018
Time: 10:30 AM – 5:30 PM
Place: Syracuse, NY
Date: August 9, 2018
Time: 9:15 – 4:00
Thanks for this. I thoroughly enjoyed it, probably as it brought together the two things that I am most interested in in Teaching English as a Foreign Language: extensive reading out of class with a class library of guided readers and getting students to record themselves retelling stories to each other in pairs where the listeners really have to listen as they haven’t listened to the stories themselves.
I’m a language learner, too, of Catalan, and have learnt most of what I know from living in the country and watching TV and reading newspapers, but recently I have begun reading graded readers in Catalan and I am trying to make a catalogue of them following the style of the Extensive Reading Foundation’s speadsheets of graded readers in English. ( https://sites.google.com/site/erfgrlist/ ) It isn’t easy as the publishing of graded readers is much more recent and less sophisticated and I have geat difficulty assigning grades to the readers as there is very little information available about number of headwords, CEFR levels, etc.I also don’t know where I can find tools to check the headwords for Catalan texts. In English there are lots.
When Dr, Mason spoke about getting refugees in Turkey to learn Turkish in the way she outlines, I immediately wondered if what is true of graded reading material in Cataln is also true in Turkish.
Incidently, I saw a recent post on Facebook to https://www.facebook.com/groups/exreading saying “Hello all! I’m working on a proposal for an online program for refugee claimants in Canada who can’t easily access ESL classes, that will be based around using graded readers in ebook format (audio enabled), accessed through public libraries. Has anyone any experience (good or bad) with self-guided ER and blended Reading While Listening (RWL) in digital format with adult learners?” This sounds like exactly hat Dr. Mason is talking about.
Anyway, thank you again for the interesting podcast. I’ll follow up the show notes
Wow, thanks for sharing! Dr. Mason has a really passionate group of people working on her Story Listening project (link in the show notes). I hope you’ll find resources there, or if anyone has leads for you, that they’ll post in reply!