This post will be a reflection on an experience I had in the classroom this week with my year 7 French group. In it I will attempt to ‘think aloud’ what happened and what I could learn from it in future teaching of listening. It is a mixed ability group of 30 students who began French in September - about six months ago. They have five lessons a fortnight.
The back story
We have just begun a run of lessons on comparatives: in practical terms, this means using the phrases ‘plus xxx que’ (more [adj] than), ‘moins xxx que’ and ‘aussi xxx que’. I had introduced the ideas and we had worked quite a lot on the vocabulary in the previous lesson, and all of them had completed a vocabulary-learning homework including these key words within the structure (eg plus grand que / moins intéressant que / aussi beau que).
I wanted to move on to doing a series of listening exercises so that the class could have a lot more comprehensible input before they began to output their own sentences comparing people and animals. We were working out of Gianfranco Conti’s Trilogy book and we were on the third listening exercise. I had begun with one with a multiple choice where they had to identify the correct adjective they had heard, with an option of three. Then we had done a gap-fill listening exercise where the gaps were consistently the ‘plus’, ‘moins’ or ‘aussi’. I felt that both of these had gone well and my impression was that they were beginning to get it.
What surprised me was what happened next.
Open-ended listening
It was the next day, and we moved onto a much more open-ended exercise.
Before we started we revised the structure of the comparative and we all recited - quite a few times ‘plus BEEP que’ ‘moins BEEP que’ and ‘aussi BEEP que’. I spot checked understanding with a range of students and was confident they knew what was going on.
Then the students heard ten sentences, all of which followed the same pattern: my [family member] is [more / less / as] adjective [than] me. The students had to translate the adjective and the comparative.
I thought I would increase the challenge a bit by playing the whole track all the way through, without pauses. Lots of nice sentences, all following exactly the same structure, that we had talked about quite a lot in the previous two lessons. I played it twice. They’ll be great at this, I thought.
Audio finishes. ‘OK chaps,’ I say, ‘show me on your hands how many you got out of 10.’
Ah.
How did they get on?
Mode score was probably three. One of two of my strongest students pushed into needing both hands. Many only got one out of 10.
What to do? In another life I might not even have asked this, but simply gone over the answers. Then there was a life where I would have asked for scores, THEN given them the answers. The next step in my teaching listening journey might have been to play it again, with the answers, and ask the students simply to really NOTICE the meaning, and assume (hope?) they had done. Yet this time I decided to go right down the rabbit hole. I was fascinated about what had made this task difficult, particularly where I felt I (and Gianfranco) had scaffolded it so well in the run-up.
Too fast. Too garbled. Lost concentration - all those common things.
So I reverted to: I’m going to play it and someone is going to say back to me exactly what they’ve heard, even if it is bluh bluh bluh.
The first sentence I played was ‘mon père est plus grand que moi’. Bear in mind we had used ‘grand’ as the example adjective over and over.
I pick a student (I’ll call him Bob, which is not his name.) Bob, say back to me exactly what you heard there. After a few extra listens, Bob came out with ‘mon père est plus que mon grand-père.’ (my father is more than my grandfather)
My analysis
Let me tell you what I think was going on here. (I did ask Bob whether he thought that, and he agreed, but he might have just been playing along with me.) It reflects quite a lot of the findings I made in my analysis of listening errors in my PhD research, and this little classroom episode therefore suggests to me that the experiences I wrote about there are more universal.
The key point is that Bob seized on ‘grand-père’ and even though we had practiced and practiced the ‘plus grand que’ structure, he couldn’t get back to it because ‘grand-père’ had totally dominated his understanding. Once a listener has got hold of something from which they try to build meaning, they will try hard as they can to use that. Trying to get them to change their perspective is very, very hard. I’m not the only researcher to demonstrate this, either (there’s a great paper by John Field which does this in a really creative way - reference at the bottom).
There are other elements of Bob’s sentence which I also saw in my PhD:
Doubling up - where a listener notices a word and translates it twice. Here, the word is ‘père’, which in Bob’s mind was both ‘father’ and later reappeared as ‘grandfather’. This isn’t uncommon and illustrates the mental muddles that a listener can get into even with a short sentence’.
Vowels are less noticeable than consonants - Bob acknowledged that he was confusing ‘moi’ and ‘mon’ - he was focussing in on the ‘m’ sound at the start, and manipulating the rest so that it fitted in the sentence.
Grammar is beside the point - Bob agreed that ‘my father is more than my grandfather’ didn’t really make sense, and he knew that, but that he couldn’t get past that in his head.
Our next sentence was ‘ma mère est aussi belle que moi’. I asked another student (let’s call him Barry) about that one. Again I played it and asked him to say back what he had heard. He came up with ‘aussi bear que moi’.
He agreed that ‘bear’ was an English word (my research indicated many many times where a beginner listener would attempt to substitute an English word where they couldn’t translate or detect a good French translation. I was interested here that Barry initially didn’t notice the ‘l’ sound at the end of the word ‘belle’. This isn’t something that came up in my PhD but I have noticed how ‘l’s can be harder to detect in German listening and is something to look out for, particularly if there are minimal pairs (two words which are very similar but with different meanings, eg in French dix and deux), one with an ‘l’ and one without.
However, I was heartened that here, Barry had been able to interpret all the words and could simply identify that he couldn’t recognise ‘bear’ / ‘belle’.
A similar thing happened with my last example: ‘mon frère aîné est plus musclé que moi’. Most students struggled with this one although again, the issue was simply the identification of the adjective. What’s interesting, though, is that they froze and seemed to lack the self-efficacy to try and puzzle out the cognate. I suspect that even in this short sentence, cognitive overload wasn’t too far away. What did we do then? I asked them - say the word back to me again. ‘I can’t.’ I wasn’t going to give up. ‘Well what does it begin with?’. We listened again. ‘M’. ‘Great, what next. Can you say the word?’ we listened again. And at that point (probably on the fourth listen), the lightbulbs went off over their heads and Sarah said ‘musclé!’ Then she said ‘Oh! Muscle-y!’ Actually the French pronunciation that reflected the spelling of the word undoubtedly helped her there.
Was it worth it?
This back-and-forth unpicking took the best part of an hour’s lesson. Was it the best use of lesson time? Yes and no. Here’s why I think both…
No because…
well - we could have had loads and loads more input and perhaps they would have picked up more through osmosis?! Or I could have gone back to more input through reading? Perhaps tried to get some input-output going through a lot more speaking and then got back to the listening?
Ultimately I’m a teacher, not a researcher; did I just go into researcher mode?
Yes because…
… it showed to me that within that context - understanding full sentences - we were nowhere near 95% comprehensible input.
… I hope it built self-efficacy in listening because it demonstrated to the class that others found it difficult too. If I had just said ‘oh dear, we all got 3/10’, I don’t know if that would have been constructive. If students are to get beyond the ‘listening is hard’, one of the things we need to do is to show that they are all in the same boat, and the challenges they face are normal.
… it showed me that we have to be REALLY careful with words that might pop up multiply in a sentence - like ‘grand’ for both ‘tall’ and for ‘grand’ in grand-père. Because I think Bob might have been OK if the sentence hadn’t involved ‘grand’
… students really do overlook vowels, muddle up the order in which they hear things and ignore the fact that their translation doesn’t make sense. Again, I think we do them a service by acknowledging that these issues are perfectly normal in beginner listening, and by highlighting them, and raising awareness of them, perhaps a metacognition will kick in to begin to double-check or override the initial struggles.
What next, then?
Honestly, I’m not really sure. I can’t keep spending the best part of a lesson on a single listening exercise, even if I’m me! But I think what I’ll be doing is checking in on Bob, Barry and Sarah in particular to work out the extent to which their listening difficulties might be impacting on their production of French, or their motivation. I hope that, by acknowledging that their challenges were normal, they won’t lose motivation or self-efficacy and I think with listening, in year 7 French, that’s one of the biggest challenges. We shall see.
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