Week 5: Listening - The animals

Fifth week of Teaching Practicum I and this was the second chance of David and Jocelyn to perform a class for children focused on the listening skill.

Teaching a listening class is very challenging in the way that once something has been said , later on it disappears; especially for beginners it is quite complex to remember what has been said or in the order the events were mentioned. Contrary to a reading class because if you are reading you can re-read something or go back to a specific part of the script. With this, I am not saying that one skill is easier than the other because each skill has a level of difficulty and listening and reading are not the exception.

So now let’s move on to good aspects and little details to improve from the listening class.

Positive things

• I remember that in their first class the children were sat down in the while 60 minutes of the class. They didn’t perform any activity that required movement from children. However, in this opportunity, I could see some activities in which children move their bodies, they stood up from their desks. I did loved this because it seems that you took into consideration that observation from us. It was something that you improved.
• As I wrote above, the warm-up activity was nice because I could see that most of the children enjoyed it. It was a clever idea to review the grammar class. I guess this game was a little bit challenging for children because they have to remember the structures that they learnt in the previous class.
•  I think that the monitoring from both of you was good because you were checking desk by desk how children were completing the activities. Besides, it was good that David let children ask him if they had any doubt. It was perfect.
• Jocelyn, I loved the way you taught the during 1. It was awesome that first you described the pictures that you used. I think that by showing the pictures to the students, they could easily guess what the story was about. I liked when you insisted and tried to explain to one child why the picture he considered was ok was not. I did liked that part.
•  It was god the way D vid tried to explain the difference between the questions ”what is it?”, “what are they?” it was good to see that he used as many examples as he could give to leave the topic understandable.
• I think the audio was appropriate for children. It wasn’t too fast but it wasn’t too slow.

         Things to improve

• ·         Don’t focus on just one side of the class. You were looking jus to one part of the class, and that’s why I guess you didn’t notice that the ones that were in the middle were talking and playing.
•        I do not know why but I remember that in your first class your tone of voice was perfect, and what I could see was that in this time you were talking low; that’s why children couldn’t understand sometimes the instructions.
• ·         Be careful on those kids that talk too much. I noticed that now what they do is that with a little thing that you give to them they take advantage of it and play, and this class was not the exception.
• ·         I would advise you to use bigger pictures because some of them were too small, and I think that the size of the pictures matters in this type of classes. For example, there was a time when David asked them what they could see in the pictures, but those images were too small, and that was like a “barrier” for children to answer properly.
• ·         Make emphasis on the instructions because a girl didn’t understand, so what she did was to ask to a classmate that was near to her.
• ·         For the next class, try to avoid cheating in the during stage. There were two children that just copied the answers, and they didn’t complete the exercise by their own which I think is the main goal of the activity.
• 

I would have done different

• ·         I would have done a different activity for the post-listening stage. I will share with you two examples that can be apply in a PDP lesson in the post stage. The first one is draw their favorite part of the audio, in this case. Maybe one thing that students would have done is to draw one animal they remember with the features the audio mentioned. Another activity could be make a survey among students about their favorite animals, and then draw the animal that children preferred the most.