Listening Training

Sorry I haven't updated in a while, but it is hard to keep up with the family, class, and the blog. I will try to do better going forward.

We are two weeks into Unit 1. The students are finally understanding the process of the class, (although I did have a student ask me yesterday if class was going to be like this every day). Now, students are learning not about the flip, but about working to my expectations. Since I allow students to work at their own pace through the material, they can do activities when it works for them, and as many times as necessary.

Nowhere is this as apparent as the listening activities. Listening is an area where students struggle. It is something I struggle with as a teacher. How do I help the students progress and improve their listening without them getting discouraged?  I have spent much of the last two days explaining to students that they have to "train" to listen. Just like a kid isn't going to become a star football player without practice, they aren't going to become good listeners without practice.

Today students are working on a listening where two girls are describing their daily routines to each other. It is a slightly longer listening, about 2 minutes, and a little faster than what we have done before. So many of the students listened two or three times, threw their hands up, and just wrote whatever on the comprehension worksheet. As I was checking work, many of them were shocked that I wouldn't give them credit unless they went back and tried again.

It just reminds me of why I love the flip. In previous years, we would listen two, maybe three times, and their either got it or they didn't. I never really got a good handle on who understood what, and some were lost forever. Now, they are able to take a listening, listen to it in little chunks, discuss it with their classmates, and then move on. Obviously listening to conversations fifteen words at a time isn't ideal, but baby steps must come before they can run!

Teaching Listening Follow Up

So in my earlier post Is it possible to teach listening? I talked about some problems I was having with my students listening, and more importantly my teaching of listening.

So, I went back to the two listenings and gave the students the scripts from the listenings to follow along with while we listened. As we did each one, when we got to the questions, I encouraged the students to feel free to change their answer if they felt it was now incorrect. The first listening was very short, about a minute and a half. There were really no unknown words in the listening. In the listening the narrator talked about how fast paced life was now and how she just longed for the slow life. This was the listening that had one of the answers as "we should return to prehistoric times." After a gave the students the answers, we went over them, and I was amazed that there were still about 40% that still had that answer chosen. (Now that is in my regular 3 classes. In my PreAP, they all had it correct.) When I talked to them about it, I even had some students try to argue with me and pointed in the script to where is said that. They totally missed the "no" in the sentence. Out of the three questions in this listening, most had 2 out of 3 correct.

In the second listening, which is about 2 and a half minutes, a guy is looking for something talking to a friend and she is commenting on how dark and disorganized his place was. They talk about the problem, he explains the problem, and then the friend offers to come over and help him organize. Now in this listening , there is a small amount of new vocabulary. Between that and the longer length, I did not expect the students to do quite as well. However, after following the same process as above, I was very surprised that the majority only got 2 of five questions correct.

I am hoping that you Spanish (or any other foreign language teachers out there) might be able to help. I am not sure what else to try. Clearly, it is too late for me to make changes this year, but I want to improve for next year. How can I better present the listenings? How can I best utilize my time in the flipped class to help the students improve this vital skill?