TA #2 -- Listening with Victoria -- Stephanie

Monday/Tuesday/Thursday/Friday meeting

The first class of the week was a follow-up the computer lab class.  After taking attendance and writing the day's Agenda on the board, Victoria passed back the graded exercises from the lab back to the students.  She then asks the class for feedback from last Thursday by asking the students "Which did you find easier, listening in the lab individually or in the classroom as a group?" She prompts the students by asking them to verbally list the pros and cons of each choice and this led to lively, though short, class discussion. 

Next she directed the class to turn to page 22 (#17) in the book.  She starts the lesson by reading the directions out loud, then she pauses to ask the class "Is there only one right answer?"  The class answers no.  Victoria rephrases the question to ask the class "If any answer is correct, how is this possible?  Does anyone know?"  A student answers "Because it's your opinion."  Victoria asks the question a third time to make sure they all understand the directions and she adds that the students should be prepared to tell the class why they chose the answer that they did.  (She told me it's important to rephrase things 3 times to make sure they really understand it, just as you try to not ask yes/no questions because the students will always give you the yes/no answer that they think you are looking for regardless of if they understand or not.)

From there, the students read over the passage they were about to hear and asked questions about any new words.  One word that came up was 'salary' and somehow or another, another student wanted to know the difference between 'celery' and 'salary' since they sounded alike.  Victoria wrote the words on the board and briefly called on students to give the answers.  She then told the students that even though the word sounds alike (to them) "you will know which word is being said by the context of what is said.  For example, if the passage is about a grocery store, it's likely celery, if it's about money or jobs, it's likely salary."  At this, I noticed several students relax and smile in understanding.  I made a mental note to write "knowing which word it is by context" paired with an easily understood example to my Future Teaching Notes.

Now we listened to the passage 3 times with the third listening being a stop/start after each question asked in the passage.  During the pause, she would ask the class the same question, first to see if they understood and then to prompt them to answer it. If a student didn't understand something, she prompted other students to provide the answer or an explanation.  Most of the time, someone in the class was able to do this.  (Another one to add to my Future Teaching Notes.)   Then she would write the question on the board as the students supplied each word. Silent students were called on to give their opinion answer and Victoria would provide feedback and correct any bad grammar by restating the student's questions/answers/comments in the correct way. 

Once all the questions in the passage were answered by the students, she asked for class feedback by saying "Class, what did you learn from this activity?" and the class briefly discussed this. 

Most of Victoria's lessons in the week proceeded in this way, though sometimes during the pre-listening vocab part, she would ask the students to simply underline the words they didn't know before she would ask the class if anyone could define these words. 

The above listening exercises were all in the Listening Book, but Victoria also liked to supply video clips from YouTube for some of her lessons.  She explained these were great because they offered visual clues, especially important when she had students listening to interviews, something they seemed to have a especially hard time with.  I loved how she provided rationale to the students when they groaned at "interview".  She explained that this was a very important skill in real life and something that they would do --indeed already did- everyday and just didn't realize it.  Interactions at grocery stores, asking the FSU bus driver what route he was driving, even asking a teacher questions--these were all forms of interviews. 

A YouTube clip of an interview with Kate Winslet titled "James Cameron's Titanic was tough" gave the students a particularly hard time.  For this exercise, the pre-listening portion was some questions Victoria wrote on the board.  These were designed to get them talking/thinking about the movie and what happened in it.  To make answering the questions as student-centered as possible, she asked each table to discuss all the questions for 5 minutes, then be prepared to give their answers to the class.  After this, she gives a set of instructions to the students and asks them several times --in several different ways-- "What did I just tell you?  What do we do now?" until she was satisfied they all understood. The students watched the clip one time at normal speed, then read the list of questions that they had to answer.  Many students did not know the word "sarcastic", nor did they understand the first two explanations.  Finally Victoria resorted to giving examples of a sarcastic comment and I quicky added my own examples to them. It took another 10 minutes to get them to see where the sarcastic comment was located in the YouTube passage.  Victoria later explained that this sometimes happen and if that many students are that confused about something, you have to pause the class and address it before you can move on.   This is why one day lessons can sometimes become two day lessons, as this one did.

Thursday's class was a Midterm exam.  The teacher explained the first part of quiz very carefully.  The students were to read a set of questions and then listen to a passage twice. She advised them to take notes since the recording would be fast to them (normal native speed to us.) She then walked around monitoring and taking notes. An Interview was the next item on the test. Again, she carefully explained the instructions, then played the video clip.  She tells the class "I know they were speaking really fast, but you can also see what they are doing. Think about what you saw for 5 minutes, then we will watch it one more time.  You don't need to write down each word they said, only write down 5-6 main ideas of what was going on.". Finally, a cloze exercise where they listened to a passage 3 times (twice in an American accent and once in a British accent) and filled in the blanks according to what they heard.  I especially loved her instructions here, that spelling wasn't important BUT if they missed the end sound of a word or got the ending sound wrong (forgetting a plural -s for example) that she would take off half of a point.  Her rationale to them was that the ending sound of the word gave very important clues and even if they mispronounced the middle of a word in a conversation, another listener would likely still understand what they said if the ending sound was correct.

Friday I we viewed my place in the class and Victoria gave me some directions for the coming Wednesday when I would get to try to solo teach my first class.  She went over what she wanted me to cover piece by piece, but gave me the leeway to try and present it my way.  Most importantly, she told me that even if the class just bombed, none of the students would be overly affected by it and I'd still learn valuable stuff, even if it is "what NOT to do next time."  This took a huge amount of stress off of my shoulders.  :) 

We finished our time together by grading the Midterm exams.  She went over the Key that she had made and briefly told me how she graded things and how she records them in Engrade.  Most of it was pretty cut-and-dried except the part where the students were to list the main ideas from the celebrity cooking/interview segment that promoted a  new cookbook.  Victoria had wanted them to mention the last thing in the interview--the name or description of recipe other than the main one that was demonstrated in the 'how-to' part of the cooking show's interview.  I said that I had interpreted this piece as 'add-on' information and suggested that none of the students probably thought it was important.  Victoria said this was a good point and we quickly scanned all the tests, indeed, none had mentioned this.  This caused us to revise our list of main points that the students should have mentioned.  With this revised list, Victoria directed me to keep in mind that the main points might be written down much differently than how she or I listed them.  For example, Gwenth Paltrow was the celebrity featured in the interview, but one student simply said "the famous person that wrote the cookbook" and this was considered correct.  In this way, I learned to look for the correct answers, but to look for them written in a variety of different ways (or spellings.)  This was something I had not considered before my grading experience.  I now realize is probably part-and-parcel with most ESL test grading.  You have to bear in mind that a Listening class is only grading Listening, so spelling a work like it sounds is perfectly valid --this isn't a spelling class after all.