::A Geek in Korea::

My lowest level class for this month is made up of a mix of students I’ve taught before. I’ve been teaching some of them as long as I’ve been at the school, and some of them I’ve only started teaching in the past month. The interplays and dynamics between students as they join new classes is always a problem. Let two talkative students sit together and you have problems. If two class clowns end up in the same class it turns into a competition. Add in new materials and new settings and you can have a surprising result for students you think you know very well.

Today was my first day in this class with a pure "speaking" style book. The book series we chose was a listening heavy book because the students have done phonics and reading and needed a change. It’s fairly clear that the students have never done a listening intensive book either. Teaching listening involves dialogs, dictation, and repetition. Lots of repetition.

I teach the class following this self created procedure:
Listen to the dialog four times with the book closed.
Repeat the dialog several times together, book closed.
Students Open the book.
Students do the dictation by filling in blanks by listening to the dialog and writing.
Students close the books. Students get out notebooks.
Students listen to the dictation again, and write the entire dialog from memory without spelling help.
Students listen to another activity and write the answers in their notebook. One chance to listen and write.S
Students open the books up, check answers.
We do a listening "test" where students answer comprehension questions about dialogs.

Wash. Rinse. Repeat. I’ve got the book series to an science after more than fifty lessons in the past month. I can do lessons in the time given perfectly with lots of time for helping and making sure students understand the material well. Today was the first time these students witnessed my procedure in action. Since they’ve never done a listening book before, they kept messing me up.

The two youngest students were like a comedy duo, going back and forth. Every time I would press play on the radio, they would start speaking, "What did he say? What? One more time! Please?!" We listen to the dialogs over eight times before the students are responsible for writing it from memory. I didn’t matter if they only heard it once, or seven times however.

They just never learned "how" to listen before. One of the problems was that since they couldn’t get the first line, they would freeze and stop listening to the rest of the dialog which might have been easier.  I tried to break them of the habit and tell them to write line by line, and not as one huge dialog, but it was difficult.
Another weird problem they would have is the disconnect between speaking and writing. While the students can spell the words, speak the words, and even memorize the dialog. If you give them a notebook and tell them to write it down, they couldn’t. We could close our books, recite the entire dialog from memory. I would have the radio playing as they wrote. They would still miss words when writing. The words were not homophones either. Strange.

What I did find was that the students that had the shortest attention spans and were the most talkative did the worst. Every time one of talkative students was caught not listening or making a mistake, I would jokingly tell them to clean out their ears and listen again. We repeated the dialogs enough that I expect the students to be able to memorize them for a speaking test for next class. At least the talkative students should be good at reciting what we studied if they can’t listen as well.