Wednesday (7/25) a group of students joined me for another listening lesson. These listening lessons that started with Soufiane and Yi Li (who both expressed a desire to practice their listening) have grown quite a bit. On this occasion Soufiane, Yi, Joyce, and our newest memebers Yi Jun (for Taiwan) and David (from Colombia) joined in. Soufiane is somewhat of a marketing agent for me, because he is always talking me up!
Yi Li, who is admittedly pretty lazy with her language learning had actually done her homework! This provided the song for our listening lesson : ) She came with hand written lyrics to the song "Let me show you," by Natasha Thomas. We found the slow version of the song on you tube to stream for listening. I looked up the lyrics, copy and pasted them to a word doc, and used the "replace" feature to swap words with blanks (____). After removing about a third of the lyrics, I projected the "fill-in-the-blank" format so everyone could follow along with the lyrics. We played the song all the way through first so everybody could get the "gist" of it (yes Charlie, the gist), and then I played the song line by line as we filled in the blanks. Since there were so many students, we rotated lines so that everybody would get a chance to work(otherwise a highly enthusiastic Frenchman would happily yell out the lyrics!). This seemed to work out really well, especially since one by one, those who were challenged required me to play the lines again and again, which force everyone to listen repetitiously.
When we finished filling out the lyrics sheet, we moved onto what seems to be the more difficult portion of the lesson, correction. I took Yi's hand written lyrics, and wrote each verse on the board just as she had written them on her homework assignment. Then we went listened to her lyrics again, and corrected any "beautiful mistakes" that she had made. I think this is more difficult because the absence of lyrics surrounded by the correct lyrics (as in the fill-in-the-blank), is easier on the eye and ear than incorrect lyrics that sound close to what the artist is really saying. This is great because you can actually observe the students improvement. Many times Yi would correct her lyrics as soon as she heard the line play, but other times she would state "it still sounds like that to me." I don't blame her for feeling that way, because even when her appraisal was incorrect, the sound resembled the artist's mumbles.
We reached a good stopping point and I closed the lesson with some kind of philosophical wisdom as I tend to (though I can't quite remember what I said right now). I asked everybody if they would like to do this same exercise again, or if they would like me to prepare something different for next time. They said that they would like to do it again, and I agreed that we could do one more song. I asked David to bring the song for the next session, and I have a feeling that because of his nature, he will bring something very challenging. I look forward to it : )
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