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Using short cartoons for listening practice

Image: pixabay.com

Finding authentic listening material at the right level is a challenge for teachers. Text book listening material is studio-recorded, often well-matched to the teaching sequence, but is not, by most definitions, authentic and frequently not that interesting either. The trouble is, video material online is usually too difficult for beginners and intermediate learners.

One solution I have found for frenchteacher.net is to make use of short, relatively easy cartoon clips. My go-to's have been Peppa pig, Trotro and Petit ours brun. They have a number of advantages for classroom use:
  • They are short, usually under five minutes long.
  • They are visually attractive so draw pupils' attention.
  • The language they use is pared down to a good degree since they are written for very young children. In the jargon they are a good source of comprehensible input.
  • The stories have a degree of humour in them.
  • Pupils are sometimes already familiar with the characters so are predisposed to enjoying the content..

But cartoons of this type need to be selected carefully. The comprehension of the average four year-old in France is far better than  that of a 14 year-old language learner in the classroom. Some cartoons therefore work better than others, so I reject ones with too much topic-specific vocabulary, idiomatic language or complexity. For example, I've watched Tchoupi, which is fun, but a bit too fast and complex in my view. I look for ones where the images support the meaning, where the speech is not too rapid, where vocabulary and structure are on the easier side and, importantly, where the story is fun. You sometimes find ones where there is a fortunate match with your topic vocab, e.g. going shopping for food. Occasionally you'll come across ones with target language subtitles which is a bonus.

Even with these criteria in mind, it's important the match the task to the source text. If the cartoon is on the harder side, you need to provide more scaffolding on the worksheet, simplifying the activity by providing a good deal of written support. For example, you might just provide transcriptions of dialogue for pupils to underline where they hear discrepancies, or provide a list of sentences to spot, or you might provide an easy gap-fill with options to choose from. You could provide pairs of similar sentences where students have to choose the one they hear; with high-attaining classes you can make these quite subtle. With easier cartoons you might choose true/false/not mentioned, gap-fill without options, "find the French" or short English sentences to translate by locating them in the dialogue.

In other words you can adapt the task to the text. But there are limits to this, so in general it's wise, I think, to make sure that much of the language is already known to pupils. Researchers argue that for acquisition purposes at least 90% of the vocabulary should already be known to the students, but I would be more a little flexible since some language can be pre-taught before listening and the exercises themselves can provide meanings too, e.g. by using glossaries.

When using cartoons for video listening, as with any video or audio listening tasks, I think it's wise to make sure you build in multiple repetitions to give pupils a chance to listen intensively, not superficially. You can actually achieve a humorous effect by playing a short snippet several times. I really think this alone 'trains the ear'. This is also a case for presenting videos of this type from the front, rather than having students listen at their own pace. You are best placed to focus students on key moments and to ensure they listen really carefully. I mean REALLY carefully!

Once you've worked on a cartoon in class you can then encourage students to listen to more in their own time. Some will.

So all in all, cartoons have a lot going for them. If you have any more to recommend I'd love to know!


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