Intensive Listening
f you run out of class time after the second listen comprehension activities, consider assigning the intensive listening portion as homework. For example, in the previous video segment, students were assigned the homework task of transcribing word for word short segments of the text and pay close attention to the words and how they were linked together. While in class we focus on what was said, the intensive listening activity at home aims to focus their attention on how it was said. The goal is to engage them in bottom up listening work.
This particular intensive listening assignment involved listening to three short segments (ranging in length between 45 and 60 seconds) in the text and filling in the blanks on a worksheet. It contained mostly blanks with only a few words to serve as guides to the students as they were filling in the missing words. The text segments in this activity included familiar words but also words that they could guess either from the context or by looking at the root or some grammatical clues within the sentence.
While this particular activity was done at home, intensive listening activities can also be done in the computer lab. The advantage of doing intensive listening activities at home or in the lab is that it allows each student to work at an individual pace and go back and forth as needed to complete the task.
Intensive listening activities involve time and require patience; some students may get frustrated if they don't understand the words. We need to provide encouragement and support and explain to them the importance of intensive listening in building their overall listening skills.
Think of other intensive listening activities that could have followed the video segment on the previous page.