View Content #20776

< Go Back
TitleListening: Neighborhood walking-tour
SourceCASLS Activity of the Week
Body

by Renée Marshall, CASLS Chinese Flagship Coordinator

This listening activity gets students exploring their community and using the target language. The audio-guided walking tour directs students to various locations providing information about each attraction. The students must actively listen to the directions on where to go and take notes on the information provided so that they can share it with their classmates. There are two different audio tours so that not all students are completing the same route. The activity includes pre-listening, while-listening, and post-listening activities. The example provided is in English with the University of Oregon campus as the neighborhood, but this activity can be adapted to any language and to any location. The ideal goal when possible is to connect the target language to the local community somehow by picking locations that have a connection or significance to the target language and/or target culture. If your students are not old enough to walk around on their own this could also be done as a class or group activity with the teacher as the tour guide.

Objectives: Students will be able to follow verbal directions to get from one point to another. Students will be able to pull out pertinent information from an audio guide and then reformulate and share that information with others.

Resources: Exploring your neighborhood handout, Note-taking guide Answer Key, Written transcript of audio tour, and pre-recorded audio for walking tours #1 and #2 (these can be read from the transcripts).

Procedure:

  1. Start this activity by bringing up the topic of the neighborhood/ community/ hometown/ university/ school your students live in / attend. What are the points of attraction/interest? You could also put up a map of the neighborhood to be explored to help with discussion. Also you can bring up the concept of an audio-guided walking tour. Has anyone done a walking-tour before? Where? Why?
  2. Have students pair up. Handout the Exploring your neighborhood handout to all students. Be sure half of the pairs have the Audio tour #1 and half have the audio tour #2.
  3. Briefly go over all the steps of the activity as a class, clarifying any questions/concerns. You may also want to go over the Vocabulary words/phrases at the bottom of the handout with students. Be sure students have a way to access the audio files for the tour (i.e. a link on your class website)
  4. Students meet with their partner and complete the audio walking-tour, completing the Note-taking guide on the back of their handout. Once students have completed the walking-tour, they individually answer questions to #3 on the handout.
  5. Back in class, pairs of students match up with other pairs of students who completed a different audio tour. They discuss where they went and what they learned. Encourage students to make it a discussion—not just reading their answers. What places did they see, and in what order? What did they learn? What did they all ready know? What was most interesting? Circulate and help/answer questions as needed. You can put up the Note-taking guide Answer Key on the board for students to reference. If there seems to be a particular comprehension difficulty you can replay the audio for that problem section and work through the problematic passage with the students.

Note 1: To vary the levels of this activity, you can shorten or lengthen the walking tour and the information provided and/or you can create more challenging or less challenging while-listening and post-listening questions. While-listening questions are used to keep students focused on the listening task and do not generally require extensive writing. The goal of while-listening activities is comprehension, not production. For a useful summary guide of creating pre-listening, while-listening, and post-listening activities visit: http://www.nclrc.org/essentials/listening/developlisten.htm

Note 2: This activity takes some time to create but can be used in many ways. It encourages students to connect with their community; it test students' understanding of verbal directions; it helps students practice their non-reciprocal listening skills by picking out information from the audio tour; it has students reformulate and share the information they learned with others; and it can provide a launching point for other activities, possibly as part of a larger overall project that has students interacting and/or investigating local communities in the target language.

Publishdate2016-02-15 02:15:01