After I realized that the need to target specific listening skills was imperative to improve overall student performance, the activities I began to employ within Kiku have begun to increasingly rely on recall abilities. This meant listening activities needed to be more than shallow regurgitations of temporarily acquired material. Exercising recall meant that students would have to be able to hear the sound and reproduce it at a later time.
Being that I have no official training in linguistics, I was really just throwing paint at the wall with random listening practice activities to see what stuck. Eventually I came upon this bit of information in Universal Principles of Design (Lidwell, Holden, Butler):
The key to determining factors as to how deeply information is processed are the distinctiveness of the information, the relevance of information and the degree to which the information is elaborated. – Universal Principles of Design, pg 72
This bit of treasure gave me ideas for ways that I could use learning structures and treat each ‘post’ as a ‘lesson’, rather than merely a collection of random activities based around an audio file.
Cloze exercises alone weren’t enough. To improve lexical comprehension, sound recognition had to be processed at different levels, in different contexts. All this simply meant that listening activities had to be stratified with increasing difficulty, ranging from merely “listening and repeating” to dictation and eventually to recreate sounds by reading out loud. H5P’s speak the words set fortunately allows us to use Google’s engine, which, unfortunately also means I’m strapped using Chrome if Kiku is to be used in its full capacity.
Under this deep processing framework, teachers are involved either pre-Kiku or post-Kiku, thereby tying in the material they’ve practiced with Kiku into projects such as speeches and essays. Based on anecdotal experience, this targeted method of practicing listening is far more effective than providing long lists of words and phrases for students to simply remember.
All that being said, I have no empirical data to prove that this is indeed effective. Assessment and Evaluation is beyond me rn.
I need to get my post grad in Ed-Tech.
ALSO, I now have a lesson repo because why not. Behold! Lessons With Melissa