Stan_TP4

On Friday (7/21) I met with Soufiane and Yi Li. Both are 4th session CIES students and both expressed a desire to improve their listening and speaking. I figured a great listening exercise would be to listen to a song, and have them try to explain to me what was going on in the song. This was a lot more difficult for them than I anticipated. I assumed they would be able to get through a few songs within an hour, but it took over an hour for us to complete a lesson using one song! The song I chose was a very poetic, slow, love song from the 60's by the forever popular pop band, "The Beatles." The name of the song is "Something." 


First, I played a little less than half of the song for them, and had them write down any lyrics they thought were important to the message. I then asked them to tell me about their understanding of the song. They both had some ideas, and I could see where they gathered those ideas from, but neither had quite grasped the concept. Then we went over the song line by line, writing down the lyrics to the song. I played each line for them as many times as necessary, until they found all the words in that line, at which point we moved forward. For example in the line:

"Something in the way she moves," they may have heard "Something the day she moves." I would write "Something __ the __ she moves," and we would continue listening to it time and time again until they filled in the blanks.


There were a few words that I had to give them because it was clear that they either didn't know them, or weren't familiar with them in such a context. For example in the next line:

"Attracts me like no other lover," they were not familiar enough with the word "attract," and certainly not in this way. However, they understood romantic "attraction" when used in that form.


Once we had a couple lines on the board that formed a complete thought, we would go over the meaning together. I would first ask them what they thought it meant, and I would explain what it meant to me. I explained to them that in poetry and in song that the inherent message, the intended message, and the interpreted message are often very different things. We finished with this song and lesson after just over an hour (70min). We set up a future appointment for tutoring, and I gave them an assignment between now and then. I asked them to each choose one of their favorite American songs, to listen to it, and to write down the lyrics. I told them they could easily cheat on this assignment by looking up the lyrics online, but that would not help their listening skills. We'll see how they did on Monday...