Emilie CO #4

Date: October 23rd, 2:00 - 2:50 | Group 1&2 Listening with Olivia James

This class was interesting to observe as it seemed a bit more unstructured/playing by ear (literally!) than the previous grammar or speaking classes. The students also appeared a bit more varied in their skill levels--some clearly were only catching a few words while others felt they understood about 80%. It makes sense to me that at these earlier levels there would be greater "standard deviations" so to speak among students. The lesson revolved around a "podcast" (created with Google Notebook/AI) based off an article the students had presumably read earlier that week. The goal was to listen to the podcast once, discuss, and then re-listen to it with pauses, with one half of students transcribing words (to practice English words) and the other half paraphrasing words (to show understanding). In the end, however, the 2nd re-listen did not get very far in the time allotted because really only one student was doing the transcribing. Although the other students struggled more, I think listening to a podcast was still a critical skill for them to practice and with time all will improve.
Key takeaways: I did wonder if perhaps the passage was a bit too hard/fast for most of the students. Of course, I am only a novice, so I could be totally wrong on this; it is always good to challenge students at just the right level. Moreover, even though AI is a great tool and I really liked the idea of feeding AI an article and then getting a podcast for students to listen to, the one downside is that the AI dialogue/voices sometimes sounded a bit unnatural to me. It felt a bit scripted/generic and not how a real podcast would really proceed, and the "speaker's" word intonation/emphasis was strange sometimes. As a listener the right emphasis on the right words can really make all the difference in understanding complex passages sometimes (see: Shakespeare performances), so I wonder if it was maybe tripping students up a bit. However, in general I really liked the idea and the enthusiasm of the teacher. I also noted that one must not be phased by students being discouraged, argumentative, or tired--just roll with it!!