Tomorrow, 1st June, the last 6-7 weeks of the summer term start. This year, my trust has implemented a new system where the September timetable will become effective as from tomorrow. The rationale is to have 7 weeks to getting used to new classes and syllabi so that in September we avoid cognitive overload in both students and teachers. This means that our Y7 students will become Y8, Y8 will become Y9 and so on.
In languages, this also means that our Y9 students (Y8 until half term) will have an independent listening lesson every two weeks, one out of their four lessons a fortnight. This lesson, introduced in Y9 and continuing up to Y11, has ben instrumental in our school big uptake of languages at GCSE. It consists of a lesson, where students work independently through a set of skilful and scaffolded listening tasks, with their Chromebook and a set of headphones, which we get in Amazon.
Why an independent listening session at KS3?
Second language acquisition takes place through comprehensive input, in fact, research states that in order for students to understand listening tasks, these need to integrate 95% of comprehensive input. Such input, after conscious and skilful flooded modelling, will start turning into output or production, once vocabulary and grammatical processes become fully embedded into the long term memory, with the help of retrieval and deliberate practice.
In this process, to dedicate meaningful time to flood students with 95% comprehensive vocabulary and structures, will be key to help students "learn" and embed such input into their long term memories and to start producing language, in time, via structured and deliberate practice. In this context, listening is for learning not for testing and a tool to focus on phonics, segmentation of words, meaning and grammatical practice of structures.
Similarly, students love these independent listening lessons.
Students like using headphones and work at their own pace, through achievable tasks (95% comprehension input) which motivates them, specially those students with SEN as it scaffolds the learning process in a relaxed and self-directed way.
These lessons are a fantastic example of ADAPTIVE TEACHING at its best, as the tasks created by us become a response to the gaps that we identified in previous lessons and allows us to scaffold the process of listening throughout the session. The sessions tend to work really well during periods 4 and 5, in particular, when students may be more excitable as the nature of the sessions, working in silence, will calm students and help them to focus on their learning.
How to create an independent listening session: What tasks work well?
We are a Google school so we use Slides and Google Classroom as the main tool to deliver these lessons.
We create different listening tasks, one per slide, attached to an audio file, previously recorded by us with Vocaroo or created using AI via the Google AI suite and the text to speech feature.
The tasks are scaffolded and there is always an available link in each slide, to key vocabulary, for example, our Sentence Builders via Sentencebuilders.com. Similarly, platforms such as Sanako (online language lab solution), which we also use, are a fantastic way to create and share the tasks with your classes, allowing you not only to practise listening skills but also oral production.
These are some of the listening tasks we use in the classroom:
1. Filling the gaps, focussing on specific grapheme-phoneme correspondence, or specific grammatical input (auxiliary verbs or verb endings), which students find it difficult to spot. When designing the tasks, there may be several filling the gaps activities, going from only a gap in a sentence to several gaps. These can also be supported by giving the initial letter of the missing word or a list of words by the side. When scaffolding, we provide a different slide for each level.
2. Divide the words. This may seem simple but it can be challenging for many students as they tend to not be able to distinguish the gaps between words in a listening sequence. In this task, students listen to sentences, which are written without gaps as mega long sentences in slides, and students need to separate the gaps between the words. This is excellent to train students to identify "liason" or "sinalefa". The activity can easily lead to a translation task and it can be scaffolded from shorter to longer sentences.
3. Spot the mistake. In this task, students listen to the different sentences and just highlight any words that are different in the written version on the slide. This is great to practise pair of words that are similar, for example "pero" versus "perro" or "toco" "tocó". At a different level, students need to identify the mistake and correct it.
4. Dictation tasks, which can be scaffolded from simpler to longer sentences or by providing initials of words in the dictation task.
5. Putting sentences in order. Students are provided with a list of sentences in slides, and they just need to write the order in which they listen to them. The sentences can be in target language or, in a subsequent slide, in English. They may contain very short sentences or longer input . This task works best when sentences are very similar, so that students need to listen to the detail: "Toco el piano por las tardes porque es divertido" "Tocó el piano por la tarde porque es divertido".
6. Listen and finish the sentence. This is a scaffolded variation of dictation tasks as students need to write what they understand but we provide them with the beginning of the sentence or word. This can be done in target language, as a dictation, or in English, transcribing what has been heard.
7. Matching half sentences.
8. Fill in the gaps with a grammatical focus and then listening to the audio to check choices.
Using Technology and AI to speed up and spice up the process
We use AI tools to help us create the different tasks and the audio material. This can be done via ChatGpt or Gemini, where a list of key words can be introduced and ask the AI tools to create all the above tasks, which you can just then copy and paste into your Slides. Once tasks and scripts have been created, AI Gemini Suite, will allow you to create the audio material using the text to speech function, which includes dialogues too!!
We use Vidnoz and the students love it!!
Vidnoz allows us to create, for free, one minute video avatars talking on a particular topic, which can be easily downloaded as MP4s.
Students watch and listen to the avatar talking and they carry out many of the activities described above but at paragraph level: fill in the gaps, at different levels, spotting the mistakes in the written version of the audio, arranging the order of the written version of the audio according to the video etc.
Vidnoz also works brilliantly to help students to read aloud. Students can listen/watch the avatar while they read the text in their heads, then, they can read the text aloud themselves. This video/audio material also leads nicely to writing tasks by providing a model, which can be exploited in a subsequent "normal" lesson: dissecting the text by translating it, asking key questions on the text and finally asking students to provide their own version of the paragraph.
Suno is a personal favourite. Suno will create very catchy songs based on your own transcript, focussed on the important 95% comprehensive input.
I use the songs in many of my lessons to promote speaking and focus on pronunciation, however, the songs are also recycled as listening tasks during our independent listening sessions. Students listen to the songs and fill in the gaps, again, scaffolded in different levels, spot the mistakes in the lyrics according to the audio version or translate the song.
You can find an example of a Suno song on Barcelona and descriptive vocab to describe a town here
An example of a listening independent lesson with specific activities via slides, can be found here.
