Listen to and develop interpretations of oral and multimedia texts created by international speakers and authors from various cultural communities.

Select deliberately and use effectively a variety of before, during, and after strategies to construct and confirm meaning when listening to texts.

Use language cues and conventions of a variety of informational and literary texts to construct and confirm meaning when listening.

Adopt and demonstrate critical listening behaviours to analyze the overall effectiveness of oral presentations:

• Focus attention on the speaker's message
• Filter distractions and recognize factors that interfere with effective listening, including personal biases
• Identify the thesis of a speech and determine the essential elements that support it
• Analyze explicit and implicit messages/concepts, viewpoints, values, theme, and tone
• Recognize overall plan or organization including transitional expressions
• Distinguish between emotional appeal and reasoned argument
• Evaluate and verify facts and arguments, and identify fallacies in oral arguments
• Identify key allusions and symbols
• Use effective note making strategies and a variety of written or graphic forms to organize and share ideas acquired from what was listened to
• Identify and analyze the effect of artistic elements (e.g., imagery, language, character development) within texts.

Identify the purpose of a variety of listening tasks and set goals for specific tasks (e.g., comprehension, collaboration, facilitation, persuasion, mediation, empathy, evaluation).

Use evidence from the texts to support interpretations.

Identify and analyze the perspectives and/or biases evident in oral texts.

Listen to, discuss, interpret, and evaluate spoken texts in terms of their structure and their social, cultural, political, and historical contexts.

Analyze historically significant speeches (e.g., Gettysburg Address, Mandela's Hope and Glory, Churchill's speeches) to find rhetorical devices and features that make them memorable.

Describe and analyze potential sources of bias in oral presentations including those that attempt to persuade.