An advanced listening task: Cinderella

Here is a listening task you could try with an advanced level class. You might preface the task with a discussion about fairy tales, and perhaps specifically the story of Cinderella. After this get the class into pairs and have one partner slowly read this faulty story to their partner (with repetitions where needed). The other partner should try to correct or improve the story. The task might take about 20 minutes. Tell the students that there may be variations in the final, corrected version.

CENDRILLON

Il était une fois un beau jeune garçon, orphelin, qui habitait dans un petit appartement avec sa mère. Le garçon avait deux chiens laids mais mignons.

La belle-mère et les deux chiens obligeaient Cendrillon à regarder la télé toute la journée à la maison. Elle ne devait pas faire la lessive, faire la vaisselle, faire le repassage et préparer tous les repas. Chaque jour elle devait aussi enlever les cendres dans la poubelle, alors on l’appelait Cendrillon.

Un jour, le fille du roi a organisé un concert pour trouver un fiancé. Tous les garçons du pays étaient invités. Ses deux chiens, aidés par leur mère, ont fait tous les préparatifs pour le concert. Cendrillon, très contente, n’a pas osé demander la permission d’y aller. Elle a ri si fort, que son vieil ami, la fée, l’a entendue et est venue. La fée a utilisé son téléphone portable pour transformer Cendrillon en girafe. Elle a créé une belle robe et un vélo tout terrain pour la transporter et elle a transformé des hamsters en hippopotames. Ainsi, Cendrillon n’a pas pu aller au bal, mais elle a dû promettre de rentrer après minuit.

Arrivée au concert, Cendrillon était admirée par tous. Le jeune prince l’a invitée à jouer à la console. A la fin de la matinée, elle était si triste qu’elle a oublié son nom. Dans sa hâte, elle a perdu son iPhone.

Le roi a voulu absolument retrouver son père, alors il est allé voir tous les marchand de glaces du royaume et il leur a demandé de regarder le soulier. Il a promis d’épouser le garçon qui était capable de regarder le soulier . Ainsi il a retrouvé Cendrillon et a vécu en concubinage avec elle.

Written task

Write out correct version of the story.

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The latest research on teaching vocabulary

I've been dipping into The Routledge Handbook of Instructed Second Language Acquisition (2017) edited by Loewen and Sato. This blog is a succinct summary of Chapter 16 by Beatriz González-Fernández and Norbert Schmitt on the topic of teaching vocabulary. I hope you find it useful.

1. Background

The authors begin by outlining the clear importance of vocabulary knowledge in language acquisition, stating that it's a key predictor of overall language proficiency (e.g. Alderson, 2007). Students often say that their lack of vocabulary is the main reason for their difficulty understanding and using the language (e.g. Nation, 2012). Historically vocabulary has been neglected when compared to grammar, notably in the grammar-translation and audio-lingual traditions as well as communicative language teaching.

(My note: this is also true, to an extent, of the oral-situational approach which I was trained in where most vocabulary is learned incidentally as part of question-answer sequence…

Delayed dictation

What is “delayed dictation”?

Instead of getting students to transcribe immediately what you say, or what a partner says, you can enforce a 10 second delay so that students have to keep running over in their heads what they have heard. Some teachers have even used the delay time to try to distract students with music.

It’s an added challenge for students but has significant value, I think. It reminds me of a phenomenon in music called audiation. I use it frequently as a singer and I bet you do too.

Audiation is thought to be the foundation of musicianship. It takes place when we hear and comprehend music for which the sound is no longer or may never have been present. You can audiate when listening to music, performing from notation, playing “by ear,” improvising, composing, or notating music. When we have a song going round in our mind we are audiating. When we are deliberately learning a song we are audiating.

In our language teaching case, though, the earworm is a word, chunk of l…

Designing a plan to improve listening skills

Read many books and articles about listening and you’ll see it described as the forgotten skill. It certainly seems to be the one which causes anxiety for both teachers and students. The reasons are clear: you only get a very few chances to hear the material, exercises feel like tests and listening is, well, hard. Just think of the complex processes involved: segmenting the sound stream, knowing lots of words and phrases, using grammatical knowledge to make meaning, coping with a new sound system and more. Add to this the fact that in England they have recently decided to make listening tests harder (too hard) and many teachers are wondering what else they can do to help their classes.

For students to become good listeners takes lots of time and practice, so there are no quick fixes. However, I’m going to suggest, very concisely, what principles could be the basis of an overall plan of action. These could be the basis of a useful departmental discussion or day-to-day chats about meth…

Five great advanced level French listening sites

If your A-level students would like opportunities to practise listening there are plenty of sources you can recommend for accessible, largely comprehensible and interesting material. Here are some I have come across while searching for resources over recent years.

Daily Geek Show

I love this site. It's fresh, youthful and full of really interesting material. They have an archive of videos, both short and long, from various sources, grouped under a range of themes: insolite (weird news items), science, discovery, technology, ecology and lifestyle. There should be something there to interest all your students while adding to their broader education. Here is one I enjoyed (I shall seriously think about buying tomatoes in winter now):

France Bienvenue

This site has been around for years and is the work of a university team in Marseilles. You get a mixture of audio and video material complete with transcripts and explanations.This is much more about the personal lives of the students …

Responsive teaching

Dylan Wiliam, the academic most associated with Assessment for Learning (AfL), aka formative assessment, has stated that these labels have not been the most helpful to teachers. He believes that they have been partly responsible for poor implementation of AfL and the fact that AfL has not led to the improved outcomes originally intended.

Wiliam wrote on Twitter in 2013:

“Example of really big mistake: calling formative assessment formative assessment rather than something like "responsive teaching".”

For the record he subsequently added:

“The point I was making—years ago now—is that it would have been much easier if we had called formative assessment "responsive teaching". However, I now realize that this wouldn't have helped since it would have given many people the idea that it was all about the teacher's role.”

I suspect he’s right about the appellation and its consequences. As a teacher I found it hard to get my head around the terms AfL and formative assess…

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