Getting into the mindset of a student listener

It’s half term, and that’s a time when a lot of us might relax a bit, and with that comes a wonderful opportunity to think more widely and loosely about pedagogy, as we enjoy a week’s pottering, spending time with family, having lie-ins, or whatever else we are doing. For me it’s definitely a time when I have the headspace to mull over what’s happening in my teaching and my students’ learning.

I’ve written before about how difficult it is, once you understand a language, to remember what it was like when you only had partial understanding of that language. I would say it’s even harder than, say, remembering what it was like when you couldn’t walk, or talk - I suppose because we all have experiences in our adult life of moments when those become impossible.

A challenge!

So we play a passage to our students and we make perfect sense of it. But our students’ perception is something very different, and my work is constantly trying to get under the skin of that student perception. So over half term I have a few little challenges for you, to begin to experience what the students might experience. Then your job is to think about how that made you feel, what you did to compensate for your incomplete understanding, and what you might have learned from it.

Here’s the first clip. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYcnb5jppWo

Now here are three comprehension questions for you.

1. The mention of which place makes the younger woman laugh?

2. What wonder of the world are they talking about?

3. Which other country is relevant to the discussion?

Now then - did you get 3/3? Wow - that’s 100%!

Does that mean you understood 100% of what was said? I’ve written quite extensively about the ‘Comprehension Approach’ here, and this little quiz just sums it up: it’s fostering the idea that answers are right or wrong and quite honestly, it tells the teacher almost nothing about your skills in listening to Quechua. 

Now a few more videos

Now I want to get you more into the mindset of the learner-listener by giving you a few recordings (all YouTube!) of languages that are close to ones that you might know, but not entirely. The point about this is because my research suggests that listeners’ understanding comes in and out of focus - they get a few bits, then it goes a bit blurry again, then they get a few more bits. It’s quite an odd experience - and unless we as teachers are frequently exposed to a language we’re not too proficient in, it’s not an experience that we are familiar with. Yet it is what our learners are experiencing every single time you are giving them a listening passage.

These passages are English-adjacent and aim to give you that experience.

Firstly, listen to Christine - start at 1 minute and go on until about 2:24. What are the chances of her going home? What does she say about writing poetry?

This clip went viral a few years ago. I still find the experience of listening to Mikey O’Shea fascinating and I definitely get that experience of my understanding going in and out of focus. 

A few more links, and what to do while you’re listening

If you’re enjoying the experience, depending on the languages you teach, you might also want to try any of these links. When listening, think about what your comprehension difficulties are: ‘I don’t know the words’? ‘I know all the words but I can’t work out the meaning because I can’t access the grammar’ ‘I can’t hear the gaps between the words’? Etc. Experiment with listening with subtitles and not. With watching the film and just listening. What happens if you listen with subtitles then listen again without? What happens if you come back tomorrow and listen again without subtitles? Do you remember the whole meaning of the passage, or do you dwell on particular words (I like Christine’s ‘barly slicht’).

For French / Spanish speakers

Nissart - an Occitan dialect spoken in Nice

Occitan

Esperanto

Gallo

For German speakers

Pomeranian

Swiss German

For English speakers

Cumbrian

Jamaican Creole

Now I hope you’ve had a lovely little half-term internet rabbit hole into the wonder that is the WikiTongues YouTube channel, and now you’re back.

Where does this leave us? What might you have taken from this to use in the classroom? I would suggest the following:

Self-efficacy

Self-efficacy is the sense that we can do it. Audio input is fleeting, and the listener in the classroom can’t control it. And as we’ve now seen, understanding is most likely partial at best. And when our self-efficacy is low (eek! We’re going to do that thing that I find really hard), we end up feeling anxious (eek, she’s going to make me do something and I’m not going to be very good at it), and that gets us into a vicious circle because if we’re anxious, or memory gets compromised, too. My own sense is that to name these feelings when students are about to listen will burst the bubble of anxiety: again, because listening happens in the mind, the students might have no concept that the others are also finding it tough. Hopefully that’ll reduce the anxiety and hence boost working memory (or at least revert it to a manageable baseline!)

Getting beyond the Comprehension Approach

Think back to the Quechua ladies in the first little practice you did. Now think - what would your students think if they also got 3/3? I would suggest a certain level of bewilderment or cognitive dissonance - firstly ‘I got everything right, yay’ but also ‘how did I get everything right when I understood almost nothing?’ Think about how you can work with the text and the passage at all sorts of different levels, beyond just comprehension questions. Give students the transcript and listen and read at the same time. Unpick the meaning. Do some gapfill listening (just not as a lead-up to dictation!). Read aloud. In short, spend A LOT more time on the passage than you would normally with nothing but a comprehension question.

Use some of the English-adjacent videos 

And facilitate a discussion on their experience of listening and understanding. This should give you a good idea of what strategies your students might be using to compensate for incomplete understanding. Ask what are more and less successful strategies. Ask them how this experience (which you might be able to share) compares with their experience of listening to their foreign language.

What now?

Enjoy half term. And if you feel like it, let me know in the comments or in various other places what your experience was like and how you will bring that back into the classroom when you’re refreshed and renewed a week on Monday.