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TitlePredicting What You Will Hear
SourceCASLS
Body

This activity is a pre-listening activity. It is for all levels of language learners and is a useful strategy for preparing to engage in interpretive listening.

Learning outcomes
Learners will be able to:

  • Use visual clues to predict the content of a video before listening
  • Evaluate the utility of predicting what they will hear as a pre-listening strategy

Mode(s): Interpretive

Materials: Predict what you will hear video, a video that aligns with your curricular goals and needs

Procedure:

  1. Introduce learners to the listening strategy of predicting what they will hear using this video.
  2. Explain to learners that they will practice the strategy by watching a video that aligns with your curricular goals. For example, if you are studying travel, you may choose to share an advertisement from a travel agency.
  3. Provide learners with the title of the video or, if there is no title, a one-sentence summary of the video. 
  4. As a group, brainstorm words, phrases, and structures that learners expect to hear in the video. If the learners come up with ideas they do know in the target language yet, use this step as an opportunity to model appropriate dictionary use. Depending on the proficiency level of learners, this modeling may entail exploring parts of speech and/or examining the various definitions of a word.
  5. Show the video without sound. Ask learners to note any additional ideas that they want to add to the brainstorm as they watch.
  6. Revisit the brainstorm together and add any additional ideas documented by learners as part of Step 4.
  7. Show the learners the video again, but with the sound included. As they listen, ask them to keep a tally of how many predictions were correct.
  8. On an exit ticket, ask learners to evaluate how well the strategy seemed to work for them compared to times they have watched videos without making predictions. Ask them to state whether they will use the strategy when they are enjoying target language media in other areas of their lives.
Publishdate2021-04-05 09:15:02