Listening Skills...whose?

Today ‘s goal was teaching talking about future goals using the new phrase “What do you want to be?” We were reviewing job title vocabulary and learning additional new jobs, as well as practicing listening skills via a listening activity. This proved more challenging for my students than I expected.

For one thing, my pacing for a lesson still leaves a lot to be desired. I tend to rush certain things, packing in too much teacher talk at once, as I did here, especially when giving instructions for the second stage of the listening…or simply pausing and moving too slowly when giving instructions. My MIC techniques are slowly improving (I’ve still modulated my pronunciation and speed perhaps too much, as can be seen here). That being said, I’ve noticed that using more gestures and pausing more often after a word (as I did in the first minute of the video) to allow my students to guess what’s coming gives them confidence and let’s them help construct, if not meaning, the instructions themselves. They seem to have more confidence.

Speaking of confidence, though, I noticed my students’ confidence flagged later on after they didn’t understand part of what I had assumed had been part of their pre-knowledge. In setting up the second part of the listening activity, I had neglected to check their comprehension of “clue” , one of the words they NEEDED to know before using the handout. And, since I loaded my instructions with too much teacher talk and not enough checking of their comprehension (I was hurrying because I hadn’t told them to prepare a pencil), I didn’t understand the extent of their confusion.

One struggle I’m having is with pre-teaching or not pre-teaching words in a listening exercise. In reading, obviously students can derive meaning from context to some extent. But in listening, negotiating meaning is more difficult. Even if students can work together in groupwork or pairwork to scaffold others’ lack of understanding, they often get hung up on one misunderstood or unknown word while listening and that affects the whole of their listening comprehension. With this class ofyoung learners, I feel like I should have pre-taught EVERY WORD they could possibly have missed. What’s ideal?