Sam - Classroom Observation #3

On November 16th, I sat in on Andrea's listening class, level EL-HE. Because it was an Islamic holiday, all but one of her students were absent. The first exercise was to watch a clip from "The Terminal," a movie starring Tom Hanks. I would have probably given a synopsis of the movie first, but instead they just launched right into it, playing the clip all the way through once, to give the student a general impression. The second time, Andrea stopped at each sentence, and the student had to complete a cloze worksheet.

The second exercise was to listen to a song called "Everybody" and complete another cloze worksheet. When they'd gotten through that, Andrea asked the student what she thought the song was about, and a few other questions relating to the theme of the song ("everybody needs to be loved"). Then they went over some vocab from the song, like "fit like a glove" and "to fold." Andrea told me it's hard to find clear enough songs to do these kinds of exercises, and that simple acoustic guitar songs are better, since there's less going on musically to distract the listener. She recommended using Norah Jones and The Beatles for listening lessons of this kind.

I would be curious to see how the pace would change if the classroom was full of students. We were fortunate because we could take the time and give the student personalized attention, but I imagine that will not usually be the case. There will probably normally be some people left behind, or have to be worksheets of different levels for the cloze exercise.