L2 Listening

I agree with the statements made in this article about the struggle to understand if students are improving their listening skills in an L2 classroom. One of the biggest challenges fro me on my practicum was putting in listening activities that were not part of the standard resource set. 


 The students found these tired and too old fashioned to take seriously. I really like the idea of the students describing what they hear to make sure that listening has occurred. I also like the idea of asking students what strategies they are currently using to understand. This makes students think about this more as well as giving the teacher a set of strategies to work off of. 


 I used some listening exercises in my class that used the idea of keeping track of key words and assembling some meaning from those as a main strategy. I also used more authentic texts and tried to find strategies for them to break them down. 


 I think that finding those strategies and working with more difficult audio texts is more beneficial than working off of the slowed down versions from the resource packages.