Recently I've been looking for new ideas to try and liven up my listening lessons, and this was recommended to me by a colleague.
The basic idea is that vocabulary words that occur in the listening text are put on little strips of paper, and cut up, and one set is given to each pair of students.
Students listen to the audio, and when they hear the vocabulary word, they grab it. They do this in competition with their partner--whoever grabs the card first gets to keep it, and at the end of the game, the person with the most cards wins. (In other words, the same basic idea as the Japanese game Karuta.)
The game is commonly done as a post-listening activity (i.e. as a 3rd listening, after the students have already processed the listening text once for gist, and then once for detail)
You may already recognize this activity. It's very common in TESOL. In fact, I had actually used it years ago myself, but I had stopped using it over the years. (It's essentially the same idea that I described in a 2013 post: Vocabulary Review After Reading.)
One of the reasons I had stopped using this activity is that I had difficulty managing it. The students often found this activity surprising difficult. They would quite often not hear the key words when listening to the audio, and subsequently not grab them at the appropriate times. Or students would mishear the audio, and grab the wrong word at the wrong time. Because the audio was playing, I found it difficult to give feedback as the game was being conducted. For example, if I would say...
"No, no, you got the wrong word. That word hasn't come up yet."
...then while I was talking, the students wouldn't be able to hear the audio, and consequently miss out on the next word.
When I decided to try this activity out again, I solved the problem by pausing the audio after each word. And this worked well in terms of managing the activity.
The problem, though, is that I think the students quickly realized they didn't need to listen to the whole audio carefully. They simply needed to wait for me to pause the audio, and then just think back to whatever the last word was.
They were, however, engaged with the activity. So it did work well in terms of boosting student engagement.
One teacher told me that the way she runs the activity is that she just plays the whole audio through without pausing it. Students grab whichever words they hear, and if they miss some words, she doesn't worry about it. Then, at the end, she gives them a copy of the transcript. Students have to look through the transcript to find where the words that they missed are located.
I should note that I've been talking about this activity with a few different teachers in my staffroom, and some of them are skeptical about the value of this activity.
One teacher didn't like the activity because it wasn't authentic--i.e. it didn't mimic the kind of listening task people use in everyday life.
Another teacher thought that the the idea of simply listening for individual words didn't help improve students overall listening comprehension. He said that the activity might have some value if the students had to listen to distinguish between similar sounding words (e.g. minimal pairs like "ship" and "sheep"). But if they were just listening for normal vocabulary, then he didn't see the point.
....although, I don't know. I personally think the activity might have some benefit for training students to pick out individual words in the stream of speech. (I mean, the fact that the students have such difficulty with this game demonstrates that there is a gap in their ability, right? Would this game help them close that gap?)
Another teacher thought that any sort of moving activity (such as grabbing) interferes with the activity of listening, and should be avoided. He suggested an activity where the students put the cards in order instead of grabbing them (still some movement going on, but less disruptive.)
So... I don't know. Use your own judgement on this one I guess. What do you think? Is this a useful activity to do after a listening activity?
Addendum:
This activity also pops up in How to Teach Listening by J.J. Wilson, which I'm currently reading.
J.J. Wilson describes it as follows:
Grab the word: Choose about fifteen key words from the listening passage and write them on individual cards. Stick the cards on the wall or board, or if there are a a lot of students, place the cards on the desks after making duplicate copies. The students listen as you read the passage or play the recording, and they grab the words when they hear them. The winner is the person who grabbed the largest number of cards. As an alternative, instead of grabbing the words, the students put the words/phrases in order. A tip: warn them beforehand that the activity is violent! Though not strictly true, this tends to get them in the mood! (p.95)
Here is a sample activity of 10 words that I used with Reflect Listening & Speaking 5 Video: So, What Makes You Laugh? p.76-80. In this case, the 10 words are the words that were selected by the textbook publishers as key words to learn from the unit, so this activity also helped the students focus on key vocabulary.
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