Practising Cambridge English: First Listening Part 4

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Contents

A. TEACHERS’ NOTES ...........................................................................................................2 

A1.  Lesson Plan ...............................................................................................................2 

A2.  Suggested homework/self-study activities .................................................................4 

B. GUIDANCE FOR FOLLOW-UP ACTIVITIES ......................................................................5 

Practising Cambridge English First Listening Part 4

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A. TEACHERS’ NOTES

Description

Time required: 45–60 minutes

Materials required:

Access to the internet in the classroom and speakers

Cut up copies of chosen transcript to distribute among class

Computer and headphones for each student in the follow-up lesson.

Aims: To provide students with the practice of identifying key elements in an audio text and using those key elements to reword and draft Part 4 type questions.

To give students ample opportunity to listen to a wide range of topics from a variety of sources.

A1. Lesson Plan

1. Before the class, choose a podcast from the internet or a recording which will interest your students. The recording should ideally be a monologue or interview, ideally with a mixture of information and opinion. Choose an audio with transcript available. Divide the podcast/recording into sections, each long enough for two comprehension questions. Copy the sections onto separate sheets of paper, numbered. Copy so that there is one section for each pair of students in the class. Have a copy of the entire transcript ready for use on the OHT or IWB.

2. Give students a pre-listening activity, such as giving them some key words from the recording and asking them to predict what the recording will be about in pairs. Then play the recording for learners to check if their predictions were correct.

Timing: 5 minutes

3. Show the first part of the transcript. Ask students to suggest parts of the text which could be the focus of a comprehension question. Questions can focus on; opinion, attitude of the speaker(s), understanding gist or main idea or specific information. Write students’ suggestions up on the board. Together, choose one point to focus on and in pairs, students come up with a comprehension question. Write these up onto the board and work together to create the best question possible, using ideas from different pairs. NB. Although Part 4 is a multiple choice task, it is not necessary to ask them to write multiple choice options at this point.

Timing 15–20 minutes

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4. Give out the remaining sections of the transcript, so each pair has one section (some sections will be repeated). Ask the pairs to read their part of the transcript and to choose two points from their extract that they want to focus on. Then they write two questions for their part. Point out:

the testing focuses on Part 4, and what they should focus on.

the questions should not repeat key words / expressions from the transcript

they should think of ways to reword the text or use synonyms.

Monitor throughout, ensuring that both language and content are correct. Have pairs choose which of the two questions they prefer, and ask them to write it up on the board / computer. Make sure that the questions follow the same order as the transcript.

Timing 10–15 minutes

5. When you have between 6 and 8 questions on the board / computer, play the recording and ask students to make notes to answer each question. Allow students to check their answers in pairs before checking together. If there are any disagreements, play the relevant section of the recording again, and/or focus on the transcript and highlight the part(s) which answer the question.

Timing: 10 minutes

6. (optional) Choose one or two questions. Write the answer to the question beneath it. Next ask the class to come up with two other possible options. Both should be distractors, i.e. they must be plausible in the context and may even use words from the recording, but both should be clearly incorrect when you understand the recording correctly. You can ask pairs / groups to come up with other multiple choice options for the other questions if you wish.

Timing 5–10 minutes

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A2. Suggested homework/self-study activities

1. Learners can write distractor options for the other questions they wrote in class.

2. In the class, ask each student to choose a podcast from the internet. Make sure a topic is suitable and not repeated (where possible). For homework students should work through any pre-listening and listening activities on the website for their chosen topic.

They then look at the transcript and write around 5 or 6 comprehension questions for different parts of the transcript. The questions must be written in the order they appear in the text. Students must either type or write these questions up and bring a copy to the following lesson, or they can post this to the class blog.

3. By typing in interview into sites such as Youtube, students can find an interview that interests them. They can listen and make notes or they make a comprehension activity as described above. These can also be used in follow-up lessons.

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B. GUIDANCE FOR FOLLOW-UP ACTIVITIES

1. For this activity, you will need to select a podcast or similar recording from the internet. There are a number of useful sites, for example:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/ http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio http://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org/en/magazine http://elllo.org http://www.voanews.com/learningenglish/theclassroom/home/

Some of these have pre-listening activities as well as questions for while you listen and transcripts. For this type of activity, the podcast can be up to five or six minutes, as it will be divided into sections. If you don’t have access to podcasts for use in the classroom, use a recording from a course book or supplementary materials book instead.

2. When choosing podcasts:

Make sure the material is appropriate for your students’ age and interests. Make sure the content is suitable for the type of task you want to set. For Listening

Part 4, the content should contain opinion and attitude, as the testing focuses for this part are listening for opinion and attitude expressed in gist, main idea and specific information.

Check the language level the recording is aimed at. Language learning websites will usually grade material, while other sites will not and the level is likely to be higher. In this case, you may need to adapt the task to make the activity easier.

Make sure the delivery speed and accent are suitable for your students. Decide if you need to do any pre-listening activities to help your students’

comprehension.

3. In A1 Lesson Plan Step 6, the students need to write multiple choice options. Writing good multiple choice questions is difficult and exam writers undergo a lot of training. When writing multiple choice options:

all the options must make sense with the question or the sentence stem

all the options should relate to the text in some way

the options should be roughly the same length

only one of the options must be correct – the others must clearly be wrong

the options shouldn’t relate to each other, so that one being wrong means the other must be right (or vice versa)

4. In A2 Suggested homework/self-study activities, students prepare question for homework. These can be used in class. Each student will need access to a computer with internet connection and a set of headphones. Ask students to give the person sitting next to them the handout of pre-prepared questions for the topic. Students then

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individually listen to their assigned topic and answer the questions. At the end students can give each other feedback on the questions and the answers.

This activity can be repeated with students swapping their questions with more than one partner. NB. Make sure multiple copies of the student handouts are available.