Post-listening Activities
Now we are going to look at some examples of post-listening activities that you may be able to adapt to your own classes. Then we will ask you to design your own post-listening activity that you can use in your classroom.
Activity Briefing – Listening - Post-listening Reading Passage
Click here for the Idomatic Expressions graphic organizer.
Instructions: In this activity you will see an example of an Ideomatic Expressions graphic organizer and how it can be used to aid listening. See how it is organized by idiomatic expressions, topic specific terms and common terms. An organizer like this can be used for pre-listening for the activation of schemata, and also as part of during-listening and post-listening. Teachers may wish to design their own organizers so that specific features are paid attention to. Click here for the the complete script of the news passage "Heir in the Air."
Activity Debriefing – Post-listening Reading Passage
In this post-listening sample, we were given an opportunity to extend knowledge gained from the passage to another context. We were also given the opportunity to transfer what we learned in listening to a reading activity. This could provide us with language to expand on the same topic.
Now that you have been through the Heir in the Air sample listening activity, lets look at the components that made up the listening task. If you recall, when you looked at the vocabulary list, you were asked to identify words that you believed would be included in the video. You watched the video without sound and looked at the list of terms to determine which you thought would be used in the news item. You expectations were set up by the relationship between the words on the page and the images on the video. When you were asked to play the video with sound, you were able to focus on a particular thing, in this case the vocabulary items you had selected. Did you find that you were able to use your prior knowledge of the subject matter or the individuals mentioned in the passage to help your understanding?
Using what we already know about a topic can help learners understand because it gives us associations in frames or schemas.We had many examples of activities for the listening phase. Some of them focused us globally on the content like the 3-2-1-Go, while others gave us specific areas of focus like the gists. Others gave us an opportunity to demonstrate comprehension like the caption activity. The listening component provided us with ways to strategize our listening and to organize the information we heard.
Activity Briefing – Designing Post-listening Tasks
Your task at this time will be to design a post listening activity for the passage on traffic in China. You may view the video again if you need to. Otherwise, begin designing your listening activity.
Confidence Check
Take another look at the listening activity you designed and consider the following:
- Does it provide the learners with strategies for listening?
- Does it determine how input will be presented?
- Does it match the student’s proficiency?
- Did you provide the learners a purpose for listening to the passage?
- Do they understand why they need the information?
- Do you provide the learners with a series of steps or scaffold to guide them to the completion of the task?
- How did you organize the information?
- Did you incorporate both bottom-up and top-down processing?