This is from our PLC member Mark Knowles, Director of the Anderson Language and Technology Center at the University of Colorado in Boulder:
Hi Ben,
I wanted to post something on an experiment that occurred at CU-Boulder this past semester that I would call a CI and Listening Comprehension mash-up. I am very excited by the whole concept of mash-ups using TPRS and CI as a fundamental backdrop, and combining them with other attention-worthy pedagogies such as Critical Language Pedagogy, but I’ll need to elaborate on that at another time.
Basically, this experiment occurred in the context of an adult course taught by Sabrina Janczak, who had met with the class for two semesters for a grand total of 40 hours. Sabrina won them over, even the most reluctant, traditional language learners, with her CI and TPRS skills and infectious personality, and a good time was had by all. But we were both afraid of the language attrition that the students would face because of lack of language input this summer, so I designed a four session extension to the spring course that would bridge CI with metacognitive listening comprehension training. The theory is that if the students have enough confidence with some basic listening comprehension skills, and given the right tools and links to appropriate audio sources, they can work on their listening during the gaping interlude that is May, June, July, and August.
Basically, the mash-up was done this way: based on our two listening passages for the four weeks (8 hours), Sabrina did PQA using structures gleaned from the listening passages. This prepared them well for the more difficult vocabulary of the texts and put them into the mindset of the listening passages to come.
With both of the listening comprehension passages we trained the students on the habits of metacognition. For this, I owe most of what I know to Teaching and Learning Second Language Listening: Metacognition in Action by Larry Vangergrift and Chritine Goh (Routledge 2012). It’s a big book chalk full of great ideas, too numerous to describe here, but what we emphasized with students was prediction skills, monitoring comprehension skills, anxiety control skills, and some self-evaluation skills, The first listening passage was a rather longish but interesting passage from FranceInter’s “La Tête au carré,” a talk show intended to popularize science’s latest research, not unlike NPR’s Science Friday. This particular day was about Jean ADES’ recent publication on how the Seven Deadly Sins relate to contemporary psychiatry, with much of the discussion centering on gluttony, or la gourmandise in French. We did let the students listen to small parts of the original version of that radio broadcast because we wanted to a.) not pull the wool over their eyes about the difficulty of listening to authentic French made for France and the French speaking world and b.) demonstrate that with only 40 hours of French instruction, they could actually pick out some words they understood. We wanted to give them a dose of linguistic realism tempered with the other reality that what Sabrina said she had been teaching them really was French and not Pasto, Twi, or Bulgarian. We then worked with them on an altered version (somewhat simplified, but with a reduction of pronominalized language in favor of explicit language: e.g., instead of “They have become more frequent recently,” we’d say, “Psychiatrists have observed more eating disorders recently.” This way the listening passage that was originally rendered nearly incomprehensible through pronominalization presented an opportunity for greater repetition of terms such as ‘psychiatrist,’ ‘to observe’, and ‘eating disorder’ (the latter term “eating disorder” being the only non-cognate, but nevertheless, this elaboration on pronominalized speech also afforded greater input of phonological differences between English and French). Through our metacognitive training, the students felt very confident they understood the contents of the radio program. We don’t expect them to go out and start listening to FranceInter this summer, but the intention was to give them a clear goal and a clear understanding of becoming more self-regulating and self-directing when they are not in a formal course. We also gave them some good tools to use to get them into “mediated” or “simplified” listening comprehension activities, i.e., RFI’s Langue française website and Yabla.com’s surprisingly useful listening tool.
I’ve set up a website that I will be adding to over time, open to everyone:
http://listenfrenchaltec.wordpress.com.
Please feel free to scope it out and comment on it. I’d like to improve upon this site as quickly as possible, so any help the community can offer would be very appreciated. I want to continue my work on this and iron out all the wrinkles – my goal is to make this a decent contribution to the PLC within the next few years.
Mark Knowles