After Second Listen
Watch the following video in which the students discuss the text after the second listen.
This video clip shows the importance of doing multiple listens during a listening activity. It demonstrates to us how students work to verify and modify their initial assumptions and progress from global comprehension to a more detailed comprehension of certain segments within the text.
Of particular interest to us in this clip is to observe how students refine and expand their comprehension after the second listen. Let's consider the following:
- After the first listen (not shown in the video clips), a student said that she thought the Pope wanted the young Copts in the U.S. to assert their American identity. Despite that this piece of information was not correct, the teacher wrote it on the board with a question mark for the students to consider during their second listen. At the beginning of the present video clip, we another student corrects this information by saying, "...The Pope said that the Americans forget their origins in the East." Then, notice how the student who had originally given the incorrect information added: "In his view, it is unfortunate that they forget their origin." The student now is not only able to get the idea right but also to get the exact wording used by the Pope.
- Also after the first listen, a student said that she heard the word taSayyub or "lack of restraints," a word the students had never seen or heard before. The word did occur in the text, but the student missed one of the sounds in the word. Instead of correcting the student, the teacher told her that getting the word showed great concentration on her part. He wrote the word as pronounced by the student and placed a question mark after it.
- After the second listen—as seen in the clip—the teacher asked the student whether she wanted to verify her answer, and she produced the word correctly. The class didn't know what the word meant, so he left it up there with a question mark for subsequent listens.
- After the second listen, one of the students said, "[The Pope] is encouraging people, the new generations born in America, to return to their countries." Note here that the student was not only able to get this new chunk of meaning, but was able also to guess the word generations which was a new word.
- In pre-listening, the teacher asked the students whether the Pope visited the U.S. often and the students did not know. At the end of this video segment we see a student telling the teacher, "he said at the end that he travels a lot, perhaps in order to help the followers."
So what we see here is how comprehension expands after the second listen. Notice, after the students finished their second listen, the teacher allowed them time to add to, modify, or verify the information they presented after the first listen. Then students worked in pairs to discuss the questions on a worksheet. The goal of these questions was to encourage the students to "dig deeper" in the text in preparation for a possible third listen in class or at home.
When doing listening activities we need to remember to allow the students to do multiple listens. We need also to have confidence in the students' ability to collectively "create meaning" using the various pieces of information contributed by each one of them.