Write the Transcript

(TESOL Ideas--Listening)

I can't imagine I'm the first teacher to ever think of this idea.  (It's probably shown up in ESL books before).  But at any rate, I did this in my class, and this worked well for me, so I'm going to share it.

I had a class of adult students who did absolutely terrible on a listening test.
I thought about how to give them feedback and work with them on improving their listening skills.  I decided to have them write the transcript.

I put them in pairs, and gave each pair a mini-whiteboard.  I then played the listening track, and stopped it after every sentence. (In cases where the sentence was long, I broke it down phrase by phrase.)
 The students wrote down what they thought they heard.  I checked their answers, and then if everyone was correct, I wrote it up on the big class whiteboard.

If everyone was not correct, I wrote only the words that were correct, and left them blanks for the missing or incorrect words, and then played that sentence again.  (It helps to have a media player that you can repeatedly pause and jump back on.  I was doing this listening off a computer, and using Windows media.)  I would play the phrase or sentence again and again until someone would get it right.  Then I would put the correct version on the whiteboard.

As we worked, I would identify areas of connected speech where my students were having problems hearing the word boundaries, and briefly practice the connected speech to raise my students' awareness of it.

Eventually, after about 30 minutes, we had the whole transcript written on the whiteboard.  Then I played the whole listening one time again, and the students read the transcript as they listened.

Then I gave them back their listening tests, and now, with the transcript in front of them, they had another chance to answer the questions.  They checked first with a partner, and then during whole class feedback, I asked individual students to give me the answers to the questions, and also identify where in the transcript the answer was located.

Then I erased the transcript, and played the listening track one final time at the end.  The final time the students just listened without being able to read the words.  The students silently raised their hands when they heard the answers to the test questions.