This is going to be a quick post. I've just finished teaching a General English adult lesson online. The lesson's topic was 'I wish' (now) and we used Unit 12A from face2face (Intermediate), 2nd ed. Something interesting came into my mind as I was setting up the lead-in activity. I then decided to change my plan and improvised a bit on the spot, while I was thinking about the flow of activities all the time.
The original plan went like this - the very standard CELTA way:
- a lead-in where I showed my students a visual of 'Aladdin and the Genie'; they had to tell each other 3 individual wishes (in groups)
- pre-teach vocabulary: informal phrases on the topic of wishes and desire
- pre-listening task: my students would guess what the 5 pairs of people were talking about from 5 photos
- listening for 'gist': match 5 conversations to the 5 photos
- scan listening for specific words: gap-fill (marker sentences)
I first came across the following blog post when I was on my CELTA training: Teaching listening - tweaking the CELTA approach. It has made me question my 'convenient' way of running listening activities in the classroom. I've already explored ways to develop my students' listening skills, including focusing on certain speech features which they struggle with, predicting the type of answers prior to a task, starting and stopping (repeating several times), and listening with the script to connect sound to spelling.
Now, I decided against disrupting the flow of 'wishes and desire' by having a pre-teach vocabulary for the sake of it, the lead-in (#1) naturally leads to the pre-listening task (#3). I then ran the 'gist' listening task (#4), in which my students wouldn't be required to understand the 'blocking vocabulary' in order to complete it successfully. After that, I ran an extended stage of pre-teaching vocabulary (#2): peer teaching, clarification, followed by a practice activity (dialogue Q&A: find something in common). Finally, we returned to the scan listening task (#5); at this point, my students should have understood all the pre-taught phrases in the recording.
The time between the two listening tasks was wide apart. Has any other teacher ever adopted this path/framework when they gave a language lesson with listening?