Listening Exercises

This week we run into a lot of listening exercises in the book.  In the past I would of skipped over about half of them, but this semester we really have to teach the book, so I will be grinding through them this week.  Today I did it the way I normally would, but with a few modifications. I made these changes because I have picked up a few things at SMU, but I should mention that I haven't done the Harmer readings yet.  I will read that before I teach using more listening tomorrow.

The usual method to the listening exercises goes like this: We get the listening in the book and I ask the students to read the questions in the book before I play the file.  After the first time through, I tell the students to go through the questions again to answer what they can and to guess what they aren't sure of.  I tell them I will play it one more time and they should this to check the answers they already wrote and to listen for the things they don't know.  I always give specific time lengths for this.  When they have listened and are answering I tell them to ask one another the answers to the questions they don't know.  I do this to keep the faster students engaged and to give extra speaking and listening practice to the other students

This time I added some activation before even looking at the questions.  I asked question about prediction and for the students to make other questions they think might be answered/ other information we may get from the listening. 

Overall, it seems to have worked out better, but I can't really evaluate yet.  The first class had a listening file a manners survey that was done in 2001.  This was actually begun a week ago, they heard the file once  and completed some of the questions in the book.  I asked the students to remind me about what the topic of the listening was and for any details they remembered by using open referential questions.  I took responses from volunteers and by cold calling on others.  Some memories came back.  I went through the usual reminders and plowed through the file (about 5 minutes long). To get answers from this class I found that just reading the answer page and had the students reply in chorus. (The book looked like this: "They conducted the survey in ____________ countries.")  I don't know if this worked better or not.

The later classes listened to an interview with an ultramarathoner.  I tied this to the reading that we did as an earlier part of the lesson.  I did a lot of previewing for the earlier reading, I had the students make questions they would like to have answered about foot races.  After the reading and (the attached vocab lesson) we revisited the questions they made and found answers in the reasons.  I used this as a preview for the interview  and asked what they thought would be discussed and some of the potential answers.

As for the effect, the only thing I can mention is a quick comparison to the book questions.  The book does have a prediction question that should be answered after listening to a short excerpt.  Just using the question and the excerpt didn't help the students at all.  Talking through it, without the excerpt, produced much better results. 

I think the previewing is helpful.  Having the students read the questions before seems to be much more useful, too.  The only real problem is that this takes much longer than just playing the audio and moving on.  It is also difficult to tell how useful this is for the students.  The students who had a lot of trouble I had use the script in the back of the book, another thing that also seemed helpful.

I'll check the book and apply it tomorrow.