My Taiwanese student, Joyce, asked me to assist her with a
video listening lesson that one of her teachers had downloaded for her. We spent the next two hours dissecting
the 50-minute lecture. The lecture
dealt with the theories of the causation of the Civil War in the United
States. Wow, what a journey that
turned out to be! Luckily, I am a
history buff; otherwise, it would have been a very difficult lecture for
her. We went from the colonial
settling of the South, to secession, onto the Missouri Compromise, some of the
issues with reconstruction, and finally, the 20th century progressive
re-writing of history. I paused
the tape every 2-3 minutes to explain geography, vocabulary, the Constitution,
government issues, Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, Ft. Sumter, etc. After concluding the lecture with a
page of notes, I looked at her and asked why her teacher had selected such a
complicated lecture for her. She
said that the TOEFL asks questions about American history. All in all, she seemed to grasp the
history and the concepts that we had mapped out. By the end of the time, she was smiling. She felt confident that when she
listened to the lecture again, she had a base of knowledge to follow the
lecture as a listening exercise, instead of trying to understand the concepts,
names and vocabulary.
No comments:
Post a Comment