Listening has been the biggest struggle for my students for years. I have tried all sorts of tools and topics to engage their ears, but nothing has made them feel as confident as the highlighting activity based on a student suggestion this semester.

Really it started with another round of reflection burnout. Correcting answers on AAPPL style listening assessments proved pretty darned time consuming, and honestly, I DREADED grading them. When I asked my first period what I could do instead to get them to learn from their first attempts, one of my musical types suggested using a transcript to compare what they heard.

Knee-jerk response: OMG, now I have to transcribe like 15 minutes of video each time we have a listening assessment.

Follow-up response: eh, that’s only like two assessments, and it would be worth it to make reflection seem easy enough that they’ll actually do it.

In case you’re wondering, the second response was the correct one.

I got almost all of the reflections back, most of them on paper, within the 30 minutes I gave them in class! AND it gave me a really quick, really clear reference as to what was keeping them from comprehending. So I started using the process for listening review beforehand too! (PROTIP: these make FABULOUS sub plans. Alas, I cannot publish them because they’re transcriptions of other people’s words.)

Post-Assessment Reflection Setup

For the reflection task, I simply typed transcriptions for all of the videos, added a screenshot of the slide they’re from, and added a little box for typing/writing about what-I-missed-and-why in between the Novice Mid, Novice High, and Intermediate sections and gave them highlighting instructions at the top:

• Highlight everything you hear AND understand in GREEN.
• Highlight every you hear and DON’T understand in RED.
• DO NOT HIGHLIGHT IF YOU DON’T HEAR.

I’ve since decided I should add a third color:

• Highlight everything you hear ONLY WHEN SLOWED DOWN in YELLOW.

You see, my single biggest qualm with the STAMP test is the “authentic audio,” so getting back to a district where I can make my OWN listening assessments, I relish the ability to

1. Choose videos with language adjusted for novice ears and
2. Allow students to slow down and replay the audio as much as their little hearts desire.

As I learned at my first iFLT, making students feel confident–positive–about the language AND their own abilities is priority #1. Kind of almost the only priority, really (though I am interested in monitoring their progress, too, so there’s that). So focusing on an “assessment of performance towards proficiency” (you know, like the AAPPL) feels like the right move for Level 1. And modeling and rewarding using the tools at their disposal to facilitate tasks that could otherwise seem impossible, I mean…what else am I even THERE for?

Pre-Assessment Review Setup

So I can’t GIVE you my review tasks without academic dishonesty, but I CAN show you how astonishingly easy it is to do–even with the flu/head cold from hell (quality closed captions can come in clutch for stuffed ears).

Here’s the deal. You can copy my Google Slides template here, and then just CTRL D to your heart’s content. Because all it is is a slide with

1. The same instructions for the reflection
2. An embedded video and
3. Chunked transcripts

PS It’s a kind thing to do to cue up the video to where they are listening using the video playback format options. Also: duplicate the video slide before you add the transcript chunks for super speedy creation.

Plus I have added an additional slide to keep things sliding toward intermediate, wherein students periodically summarize in English.

Bam. That’s it. It’s great for sick days, great when you need 20 minutes of peace at the end of class, great when they’re about to mutiny if they see another EDPuzzle and all of the rest of your class songs are blocked on LyricsTraining.

And both the reflection and the review? SUPER easy to grade at a glance. Scan for the red, skim the summaries, jot yourself a few notes for what to go over again or let slide. Unethical ProTip? Add some wording that was definitely NOT in the video to see who’s just reading and who’s actually listening (I swear I only thought of this because I accidentally transcribed more than the clip I’d made in my flu/cold haze). You COULD have some fun with it though, really.