Listening, Understanding, Remembering, Verbalizing

Listening to a story, understanding its meaning, remembering the details, and then being able to verbalise answers to questions are essential steps in developing higher level language skills and in progressing in academic learning. The four skills need to be combined in activities, recognising that each skill is dependent on the others if children are to master higher-level language.

The goals of this resource are:

• be able to listen attentively to a story.
• understand the story.
• remember the details.
• be able to answer questions about the story.
• retell the story.

The short stories are to be read aloud to the students as they look at the pictures, utilising both the visual and auditory channels of learning. To determine how well the details have been retained; questions, sentence completions and answer choices are provided for each story. These should reinforce remembering the details and assist the students in the final step of retelling each story.

At the end of every four stories, a summary is presented to show how well the students have retained the details of all four stories. Again, both visual and auditory clues are presented to assist the students in remembering the details in all

four stories.