Listening Group Work

It’s a particular bugbear of mine that listening exercises in MFL lessons are often treated like tests. I have blogged about this before, see my previous posts here. This week, I was teaching Year 7 Spanish that old favourite of items in a school bag. The listening exercise in the text book involved putting the pictures in the correct order (you know the sort of thing 1c, 2d etc). Instead of doing this, I put the class into groups, got them to collect the items as shown on the textbook page and then we did the exercise with the actual objects. This instantly made the exercise more engaging. Rather than trying to decipher the pictures in the textbook, the students were holding actual books, rulers, pencil cases etc and moving those. The students were really engaged, looking at other groups to see if they had the same order, for example, and the activity was transformed from something quite mundane to something very engaging. I will definitely do this again!