A sentence is written on the paper, and the first person whispers to the second person. During it, other team members should use earphone to not to hear the sentence. Each person hears a sentence with a whisper to the person in front of oneself. When the last person hears the sentence, write it to the paper and confirm that it is well conveyed. Through this activity, students can practice pronunciation accuracy.
There was such a famous game in TV program in Korea, so even though the instructor did not explain it, everyone knew what to do. But it would be nice to hear about it in advance if we have to prepare something. Because one student had a cell phone that was discharged and did not carry the earphones, so there was some struggle when ordering.
When the last person wrote the sentence, we just talked whether the sentence was wrong or not. This activity alone does not seem to be very helpful in practicing listening and speaking. At the end, rather than just check the answer is right, having time to ask "what did you say? and how did you hear the sentence?" would be nice. Also, guess what part of the sentence is missing and why. I think it would be a great help to talk about the pronunciation.
Another thing I want to suggest is careful arrange of the sentence. The sentence such as "The only thing better than a tall, rich, handsome man, is carrying ice-cream and a pizza box" which was presented during the activity was hard to memorize just because it was long. In contrast, sentences such as "Dumbo's real name is Jumbo Junior." Or "When I was 6, I had a pet guinea pig that I named 'Flaura-Laure." It was difficult to distinguish certain letter. It would be nice to give a student the latter one more.
2. telepathy
Two people in the group make one team to do this activity. Then students are given time to talk freely. Prior to that, the instructor says that she will ask questions such as "What is A's favorite color?" After a given 20 minutes, the instructor asks each team questions. Team members must answer at the same time. Afterwards, the team that gets most answer become the winning team.From family members or ages to favorite foods, colors and clothes, students can use a variety of expressions. And they can practice a lot of expressions in the real life.
The rules of the game were clear and everyone knew what to do. However, we somehow had ask questions to win such as "What is your favorite color?" rather than having a natural conversation. Thus the answer was also often short answer. It is likely that supplementation is needed when instructor tell students how to do the activity.here are some proposals for a game rule, it would be better to write the answer on the paper rather than count three and speak it out. It could be equitable to make the question in common.
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Anonymous
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RE: teaching Listening and Speaking (Spring 2019) - Week 10 Reflections for Super
I proposed this activity to change from what we had done in the first row of activities which were focused on speaking abilities even though we all included listening in it.
The telephone is originally a game to play around friends. The students are supposed to whisper to each other sentences. The teacher has to choose sentences that would make the students have trouble understanding by choosing sounds and phonemes that might sound the same or are difficult to differentiate. The teacher can also choose ridiculous sentences that may confuse or make laugh the students.
The main point of the game/ activity is for the students to focus on transmitting the right sounds for the next student in line to understand and get the message. Depending on the words and the sentences proposed by the teacher the activity can be either beginner or intermediate level. The students have to use either top-down strategy or bottom-up: they make a choice in between listening to the words or the the sounds.
The only thing that I noticed that might be a downside of this activity was the fact that students also have to memorize the sentences and that might be a problem to pass down the message.
Telepathy:
Telepathy is an activity for beginner learners. The students have 20 minutes to question each other by pair to get to know each other the best they can. After that they got question by the teacher/host a number of random questions about the taste and experiences of the other person that they have to both answer at the same time.
The host explained everything very clearly and the instructions were simple to apply and to understand.
The game is interesting because it pushes students to practise their simple questions and vocabulary. For beginners, I think this activity is well constructed to improve their fluency.
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Anonymous
Date:
RE: teaching Listening and Speaking (Spring 2019) - Week 10 Reflections for Super
Telephone is a classic listening activity. The rules to this activity is simple. First, students are lined up. Then, the first person in line reads a sentence prepared by the instructor or creates a new sentence and whispers it to the person next in line. Students keep on whispering what they heard from another student to the student next in line until it finally gets passed on to the last student. The last student has to write down and/or say out loud that they heard. Most of the time, some words or even phrases get omitted on the way from the first student to the last.
This activity is a simple way to practice listening through dictation. Students can get used to various, unfamiliar sentence structures and pronunciations. Also, a big advantage of this activity is the fact that all levels of language speakers can benefit from it by adjusting the difficulty of the sentences. Nothing can really go wrong with this activity, but in the case of our group, it couldve been better without the participation of the instructor. Since the instructor is the one who prepared the sentences, if she is in the middle of the line, she can recall the sentence and pass it on to the next student not solely from what she just heard. If the instructor wants to participate and also switch around the order of students every round, the instructor should always be first in line.
TheInterview
The Interview is an activity created by the host herself. Students are first paired up into groups of two and given 20 minutes to interview each other, which is basically freely having conversations. After the 20 minutes, the instructor who didnt participate acts as a judge for a sort of evaluation of how much each pair got to know each other. To do so, the instructor asks ten different questions to each pair and the pair has to answer the question at the same time. For example, Youngeun and Yeajin was in the same group, and if the instructor asks, What is Youngeuns favorite color, the two students have to answer at the count of three.
From doing this activity, students can get to know each other better, so it would be good for it to be played in the beginning or a semester. Also, in the linguistic perspective, students can practice listening and speaking while experiencing a real-world communication situation. Getting to know someone and presenting yourself to another is an important skill in the real world. To improve this activity, the instructor should maybe prepare some sets of question words or phrases to help students practice asking questions in various ways, not just in the way they are used to.
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Anonymous
Date:
RE: teaching Listening and Speaking (Spring 2019) - Week 10 Reflections for Super
The first person whispers the sentence to the second person. The second person whispers the sentence heard from the first person to the third person.The last person writes the sentences she heard on paper.The team members all check that the sentences were delivered correctly at the last time.
There was a rule that she had to wear earphones and block noise around her. However, the rule was not pre-announced, so one member of the team came without charging a cell phone. Also, some sentences that is hard to distinguish like "Dumbo's real name is Jumbo Junior." Or "When I was 6, I had a pet guinea pig that I named 'Flaura-Laure. is hard to figure out by listening other persons whispering. Two out of ten sentences were delivered correctly. It was difficult to convey the relatively long sentence without writing it on paper, and memorized it. We couldnt write down the sentence or word to memorize what we heard, I focused more on memorization than speaking and listening. When we checked the sentence at the end, I couldn't even confirm which part I had misinformed. It will be good to have time to compare sentences that I understood one by one when I checked the last sentence. Because we can check your listening and speaking skills.
This activity is very familiar to Korean. It was very fun during this activity.
Telepathy
It is a pair work and we were free to talk. The topic of conversation was to ask various questions to get to know each other better.For example, I asked questions like What is your favorite color' and What is your favorite fruit. We had conversation for 20 minutes. The other 10 minutes were to answer questions prepared by the host. For example, when asked, one member's favorite food, we have to answer the same question to get a score. We learned better about each other's tastes and tendencies by asking many questions in 20 minutes.
It was comfortable and fun to talk for a relatively long time through simple questions. However, having to ask as many questions as possible to find out many information about the other member, it led to a simple answer, rather than a natural and deep conversation about one question. It will be better the host shows the list of questions in advance and asks questions randomly in the list, team members will be able to learn more everyday and natural conversations, not getting simple answers.
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Anonymous
Date:
RE: teaching Listening and Speaking (Spring 2019) - Week 10 Reflections for Super
I think the purpose of this activity was to let us practice pronounce correctly. I think partly it was helpful for pronunciation. I personally thought that I was able to know that it was difficult for me to receive the message correctly in a specific situation where there is noise and voice is inaudible. The context of the activity was not related to the world, but situation was close to the usual environment where conversation is usually taken place.
It was difficult for me to correctly understand the sentences through whispering and let other people understand the sentences. Also, the sentences presented in the paper didnt make a sense at all. I think in some aspect it was natural for me not to be able to understand the sentences while doing this activity.
Definitely there were some immediate ongoing feedback, which can be viewed as beneficial, however, I thought the way that feedback was going on could be detrimental for learning and the atmosphere of the group. For example, I was not able to remember the sentences and I admit that my performance was not good and I know the face that I couldnt remember the sentences might have caused pause.
After this class, I thought teachers role is also managing class environment and ongoing feedback because those elements can also affect students language learning. For example, giving feedback like Are you speaking English? is not a good way of giving feedback to others. That kind of word should not be said. It is natural for EFL students to use English only in the class, and they dont always come to the class like they are taking OPIc test or something.
At least in EFL environment, all kind of speech styles and accents should be embraced and respected. Because when EFL speakers go out to the world with accent from their language, there would be many discriminative speeches like Can you speak English? I dont understand or Do you even know how to speak English, I dont think that you are speaking English.
It is natural for a person who use English generally all day to have accent or to have mistake sometimes. I think it would be much better when the way of giving feedback is changed in a more respectful ways because all kind of thought can have possibility to be rejected and to be regarded as not right, and we all might have weak points in our lives.
2. Telepathy
This was a great ice-breaking activities which might form student-student rapport and get to know each other in the class. However, if the category of the questions were given in advance, it would be much better. Because of the time limit, it was not easy for us to have time of conversation because of the time limit, and we were in a hurry. If the category was presented in advance, it would be much better.
