Teaching English in Korea - ESL blog

What do we know?

Last time I wrote about the listening from p.83 of Penny Ur's book (the one about the weather).

I thought I had put together a clever lesson about the weather, and I thought that weather forecast listening was pretty clever. So I tried it again with a slightly more advanced class. The vocabulary part went well again. The listening bombed again. I thought it would be fun, but I have two classes full of students who say it's a bad activity. I guess I won't be using that one anymore.

I got to thinking about why I was doing it anyway. First I had them listening to weather conditions. That's a real-life task and students didn't mind doing it. Then I read the incorrect version the book suggested and had students listen for the differences. As far as I know, Penny Ur and I are the only two people who like that activity (at least I guess she likes it; she put it in her book).

One of the problems with the task is that it has no real life equivalent. I was doing it with my students for fun, not because they needed that kind of listening practice. When it wasn't fun, it still didn't give them the type of practice they needed. It was a waste of time.