David Sutton TP #15

On Thursday afternoon, I shared a group tutoring session with classmate Max Herrle.  Our lesson was a multi-level listening exercise which consisted of watching and listening to a short documentary and listening to song associated with the documentary.  Our students were primarily from Group 1 and Group 2 listening level with one additional student from Group 3 level. 

Max and I decided to build a multi-level listening lesson by giving a brief history of the American 1960's counter-culture movement.  We began by building schema with a short documentary that covered this epic period, beginning with the election of JFK in 1960 and ending with the Woodstock Music & Arts Festival in August, 1969.  We felt this last event was the perfect culminating event to a very turbulent decade filled with many highs and many lows.

The narrator for the documentary spoke in a low, clear and understandable voice which was beneficial for all the students.  Following this video, we added more schema by giving a slide show presentation about the decade focusing on key events, for example, the war in Vietnam, student protests, the 1968 election and the assassinations of JFK and Martin Luther King.  Following the presentation, we conducted an informal discussion with the students, asking the higher level students to give their impression of the video and slide-show presentation.  This gave us an opportunity to gauge how well they listened and understood both presentations.  For lower level students, we asked more simple and direct questions, such as:  "Who was JFK?" and "What were the students protesting about?"

Finally, we passed out the lyrics to the anti-war song, "War" by Edwin Starr.  This was accompanied by a YouTube video performance which gave students the chance to follow along with the words and music.  Once again for the upper level students, we omitted several key words and phrases from the songs and had them fill in the blanks.  However for the lower-level students, we kept the entire song intact for them.  After playing the song and filling in the blank portions (by the upper level students), we asked each student a specific question about certain verses from the song, in essence, to explain the author's bigger meaning on some phrases.

Overall, I thought this theme was an excellent teaching tool for a listening exercise.  The biggest challenge to our lesson was probably time, there never seemed to be enough time to cover everything intended before launching into a practical exercise.  However for a first effort, I felt we delivered on the key teaching aspects for each level of ESL student.