As my students do not have many in-class Hörverstehen activities, and I have just been researching how key listening skills are acquiring a second language, I would love to include a listening activity for this day. One website I have found with slowly, yet understandably/not mind-numbingly boring, spoken German with the text as well (major pro): Slowgerman.com. Deutsche Welle also has slowly spoken news with text, which, although also awesome, is often beyond the level of even most of my Honors students...Anyone have any other ideas/ways to listen to language they may have encountered in their own studies? I love Skype, but the computer lab and that sort of access in Northville is difficult to come by. Die Sendung mit der Maus is a fun YouTube resource as well, but the topics are not always applicable to what we are studying...
Anyhow, my plan thus far is to incorporate the Promethean Board for the Daily Notes, examples to be done as a whole class/going over the homework, a brainstorm as to what the Hörverstehen will be about based on the title and the current unit (maybe utilizing Padlet here? I don't want to overload the students with too much tech...), followed by several listens to the text with different focuses. Included also in the lesson will be the students' Tagebuch (journal) entry, which they write daily and then finish at home/type into GoogleDocs for fast and easy feedback, as well as the ability to reflect upon how they are growing as writers of German. We have 90-minute blocks...lots of time for activities!
If anyone has any other ideas for the listening activity/useful links were Podcasts, Radio, or short clips can be found (in German, with German subtitles if it is a video), please share! We are currently wading through home/household vocabulary, as well as the dative in some classes and the Preterite/Simple Past in others. Hope everyone enjoyed the recent snow days! Crazy Michigan weather.
Kelsey,
ReplyDeleteThe Promethean board sounds very cool. Hopefully you can figure out how to use the pen! You asked what were some other options for listening activities and I wondered how you would feel about recording yourself or maybe even your students. Potentially you could record a conversation with your mentor teacher and have your students listen to that. Another idea is to pair your students, then put each pair in charge of creating a listening activity. The best pair gets a perfect score while their classmates have to complete the activity. Obviously this is just a thought, but it may work well for your class.
Katie
Kelsey,
ReplyDeleteWow. You've got a lot going on here. I think the key is to choose one of these tools, master it, then slowly "fold" in the others.
As for the listening activities, this seems obvious, but you could have them use the voice recorder on their phones. Also, if you check out Goobric, you'll notice that there is now the ability to audio comment.
Sounds like you have plenty of ideas though. Keep pushing those boundaries.
Kelsey,
ReplyDeleteSomething that really worked for me in learning German (and French and Italian) was my infatuation with opera. In the days when even VHS tapes of opera performances were rare I listened my way through Professor Ron Riddle's collection of complete opera recordings from Monteverdi to Berg playing the LPs and following the librettos with original language and English translation side by side. Something about the poetry's connection to music and hearing the singers' voices made things stick. Interestingly, my purpose was not to learn language, but to follow along, getting through the albums playing them through only once (I had a lot of operas to listen to for my tutorial on the history of opera with Professor Riddle) following both the plot and the music. I got lost a lot. This made me do a lot of scanning back and forth from original language to English and back. Did I hear a word I knew? Could I find the spot in the libretto and confirm I was in the right place by listening to what followed to see if it matched up and I could confirm I had found my place? I never thought about it until now, but I was doing a ton of really great exercises for language learning: listening to the sung text to find my way to a specific spot in the libretto (which was always moving forward), scanning parallel columns (German-English, French-English, or Italian-English). Following two columns simultaneously was tricky even when I hadn't lost my place. In other words, it activated many different parts of my brain at the same time. Sometimes I wonder if this sort of super-stimulated multitasking in language learning lights up different parts of the brain simultaneously in ways that multiply effective learning. Or maybe I just listened to a lot of operas.
I don't know what you could do with this. I doubt many students would respond favorably to opera (although it is a big deal in Germany). But between words and/or video on a big screen, audio playing, and text on paper or a small screen all brought together through some sort of task or game you could create an exercise using multiple stimuli and language skills. Finally, I think texts that are more elevated than simple everyday conversational language—verse, drama, proverbs, exemplary prose—lends itself to study and repetition. If students are going to remember a phrase or passage, wouldn't a line of Goethe or Heine be better than a textbook dialogue about how to get to the laundromat?