Stan_TP6

 Last week I met with Soufiane and Yi Li to work on their listening skills as requested. For the session I chose a song (Something by the Beatles), and I created a listening lesson to accompany the song. When we finished the lesson, I told each of them to choose one of their favorite American music pieces, listen to it, and try to write down the lyrics as we did in class. I asked each of them to bring in the hand written lyrics, the name of the song, and the name of the band/artist so we could go over the song together Monday at 5pm.

Yesterday (Monday 7/23) I met with Soufiane and Yi for the follow-up listening assignment as we discussed. Yi also invited Joyce, a good English student from Taiwan, to join in on our lesson. Yi, who is admittedly lazy with her language learning, didn't do the homework assignment (this actually proved to be beneficial, because it took us an hour and half to finish the song that Soufiane brought in!). Soufiane however, who is a very eager learner, brought in a song as requested. Just as we had done on the board the week earlier, he wrote the lyrics on a sheet of paper, creating blanks for any words he could not figure out. The song he chose was "I Need a Dollar," by Aloe Blacc, a bluesy-hip-hop song with a lot of poetic elements. It was perfect for our purpose. Instead of using the whiteboard for this lesson, I used the computer and projector. I looked up the lyrics online, copied them and pasted them to a word document, and removed words putting blank spaces in their place. Then I dragged the document over to the projector screen, and played the song on the monitor via youtube. We filled in the blanks while listening to the song, mostly sentence by sentence, replaying sections as needed. When we finished a verse, I would ask them what the meaning of the verse was and we would discuss the artist's intention. This often took some time because of the "poetic elements" of the song, specifically metaphors and phrases like "what you sow is what you reap," and "all that glitters is gold"(the artist actually negated these phrases).

At almost exactly an hour into the session we finished filling in the document. I told them to reserve 5pm-630pm for our tutoring session, so I knew we still had some time left. I figured this would be a good chance to go over the lyrics that Soufiane had prepared in advance so we could learn from all of his "beautiful mistakes." I closed the document that we had already completed, and we again listened to the lyrics as we went through Soufiane's initial appraisal of Aloe Blacc's artwork. This proved to be a great way to solidify what we had learned together. It was definately a challenge, but I could see light-bulbs igniting as we worked through the lyrics a second time; this time with the new challenge of correcting errors. We were just about finished working through the lyrics at 6:30 when Li's ride arrived and Maria politely kicked us out so she could lock up.

I thanked them all for the great lesson and asked Yi to have a song prepared for us on Wednesday at 5pm, so we could practice this listening assignment with the song of her choice. She bashfully agreed as we all walked out together. I think one more go at a lesson like this will be enough before we move onto something else...