Listening Gapfill Challenge: Thinking about decoding issues for our learners.
Shaun Sweeney shares a teacher training activity to help focus on decoding skills for listening.
Be sure to come along to the DT Open access live webinar for more of the same, plus follow-up tasks.
In this post, I’ll share an activity I’ve used in many an English Language teacher training session - the listening gapfill challenge. I’ve used it with pre-service teachers on CELTA or Cert TESOLs, and in-service training or higher quals like Delta and Dip TESOL.
Aim:
To raise awareness of what areas learner-listeners will find challenging when confronted with authentic listening material.
To help with creating material that can be used in class to support learners in their decoding skills.
You can download a pdf with clickable audio links at the bottom of this post if you’re a trainer or DOS and would like to use the activity with your teachers. I’ve also posted some links to similar activities with different source material at the bottom.
If you’re a teacher of English (or indeed any modern foreign language) you’ll probably find it useful to just follow the directions below sequentially.
Watch this video - would it be suitable for any class you’re teaching?
(Consider local context, your students’ interests, level etc.)
If the answer is ‘Yes’ - Great! You’ve got a free lesson up your sleeve that will really help develop their listening skills rather than just practise them.
If the answer is ‘No - they wouldn’t be interested in this topic’ then you’ve still got a free procedure - you just need to find some source audio that meets their needs and interests.
If the answer is ‘No - it’s too difficult for them’ then you still have a solid procedure but you’ll need to find something a little simpler - perhaps even through self recording or recording your peers. Try to keep these as authentic and unscripted as possible.
Don’t be put off using authentic material with lower levels, however - I’ve used this video with B1 classes and wouldn’t be afraid of adapting it to use with an A2 class if I felt the material was sufficiently interesting and motivating for them - I’d just need to take more time with it and offer more support.
For differences between scripted and unscripted speech, see this post.
For more on collaborating with other teachers to create and share resources, see this post.
Having said all that, let’s now imagine you have a good intermediate (B1) class who the video is suitable for.
They’re likely to have some difficulties reaching full comprehension of the text.
This is a good thing - it’s our job to help them understand it and also to help them get better at listening to authentic speech in general. If we can show small improvements on this over the course of a lesson or bigger improvements over a series of lessons, it can have a powerful motivating effect for students who may ‘write themselves off’ as poor listeners.
Now let’s take a look at the transcript for the audio - what would make it difficult for a B1 learner?
The water filters that Just One Africa uses are created after kidney dialysis.
This is hollow fiber membrane technology. It's used by gravity.
So as you can see, the top bucket full of dirty water flows down into the clean water bucket, simply through the filter that's attached. It flows through very, very, very small tubes that collect all of the contamination and the bacteria and the disease and only allow clean safe water to pass through, which is what you see here at the bottom. This water is as safe and as clean as the water that you also get out of your home.
And it's such an incredible privilege to be able to partner with communities to give them access also to the same safe clean water for their families, for their children, for the opportunity for them to be able to have a healthier life and hope for tomorrow knowing that this isn't going anywhere.
This is a sustainable solution for the communities we serve. $65 does a million gallons which is what one filter provides. It saves lives and it absolutely transforms the futures of the people that we serve.
Why is it difficult?
The grammar?
The vocabulary?
The delivery? (How the speaker is speaking)
The answer will depend a lot on your learners - especially their age (i.e. world knowledge) and first language.
The fact that there’s a video image supporting the listening means that students will be able to get an idea of the overall meaning quite quickly.
The grammar is also relatively simple, present simple tense. Some relative clauses but nothing overly complex.
The lexis might pose a challenge - for European L1s, it does contain many Latin cognates that might otherwise be difficult - bacteria, contamination, filter. At the same time, it’s likely that this audio hasn’t appeared out of a vacuum, and will perhaps supplement additional tasks related to the topic.
The final category, delivery, is where the challenge will lie with most learners. This relates to the most basic listening process - decoding, in other words segmenting the speech stream and matching with words in our known lexicon. Our learners’ knowledge of how words might sound when not in isolation is fundamental here, yet often overlooked in published ELT materials.
Standard ELT materials and procedures used and taught on initial training courses will tend to advocate a 2-stage listening approach using questions set in advance. There would be an easy task (gist) followed by more difficult task (detail or specific information, for example).
Instead of taking such an approach, why not try this?
Listen for general understanding (or the gist). The only question needing to be set here is ‘What’s she talking about?’.
Ask learners how difficult they found the listening, what percentage they understood.
Play again if needed, allow learners to compare answers. Apart from the fact that it’s about water filters and produced by a charity, resist the urge to answer every single doubt they may have.
At this stage they have a good overall understanding of what the text is about, but still doubts about the actual words that were used. You can even ask them this - ‘Do you think you understood every word?’. And tell them you’ll help them to do so in the next stage.
Give them a gapped transcript focussing on a short section of the audio. 30 seconds is usually plenty.
Replay the video (or let them do so themselves) and have them complete the gaps.
Have them check in pairs or groups, then help them get all the missing gaps until they have a full transcript.
Replay a final time with the complete transcript.
Have them reflect on what was difficult and whether they feel like they would do better next time they listened to authentic audio. What have they learnt from the lesson today?
OK, simple enough - so how would we make the gapfill?
Which words or phrases would we delete?
Take a look at the handout below and decide which gapfill 1-3 would be suitable for a focus on developing our learners’ decoding skills.
Cliffhanger
…And if you’d like to know the answer, do join us at our upcoming DT Open event!
If you miss it - don’t worry - I’ll post the answers later.
For hints or further inspiration, you can also see similar activities using different source audio here and here.
