Teaching Listening: El equipo fantasma lesson plan

Over the past month or so I have been trying to capture in words what my two students (soon to be my TAs) and I discussed last semester, that is, concrete ways to actually integrate listening strategies into a lesson plan for a Spanish conversation class.  Several things got in the way of making this post happen, one of them being foot surgery, so I am only now coming back to this post and the task of making visible some of the work we did together.

Perhaps the best way (but not the only way) I can share what we did is to share with all of you the lesson plan we developed for using Radio Ambulante‘s El equipo fantasma  in the language classroom.

Here were our objectives when developing this lesson plan:

• to include listening comprehension activities in the daily lesson plan, and to make sure those activities were more than just yes/no comprehension checks: to use listening as a building block for conversation not just comprehension;
• to create moments to talk about the process of listening with the intention of creating personal strategies for listening: what works? what doesn’t work? how do your listening abilities change over time? how does the learner create a balance between the aural and the written (and with that a decreased reliance on the written);
• to use the real-world content of Radio Ambulante to facilitate connections between the classroom and the Spanish-speaking world: to raise awareness of the stories and the histories we might not be hearing through the mainstream media,
• create moments for scuba diving vs just snorkeling through the content: I can’t guarantee that students will love these podcasts as much as I do, but I do want to make sure my lesson plan is flexible enough that if we do have to drop everything and dive deeply…we can do that.

Here is the lesson plan we developed.  I welcome your comments or questions and encourage you to try it with your own students, and let me know how it went.  Leave a comment on this blog or write a post on your own blog and link it back to here.

Lesson Plan for El equipo fantasma

Featured image: by “Listen, Understand, Act”  Steve Shorrock CC by-NC-SA 2.0