21 Reasons for Making Your Own Audio Files for Jigsaw Listening
My school’s resource room is brimming to the rafters with listening materials. There are CDs that go with coursebooks, audio accompaniments to graded readers, listening courses and a whole lot more. Add to this the millions of files online on websites and via podcasts and you have several billion hours of listening material.
But is that good enough?
Is it exactly what your students need in that lesson?
I’ve usually found the answer to these questions to be ‘no’. Sure, it’s practice, but it all seems too “textbooky / EFL classroom-ish”. None of the CDs, tapes (remember those?) or MP3s and WAVs was exactly what I wanted for my class.
So a long time ago, in 2005, I started making my own listening materials, using the free audio editor and recorder Audacity, which is my favourite piece of software ever in the whole wide world, ever.
This post isn’t a how-to on Audacity, so I’ll direct you to Russell Stannard’s excellent teacher-training video for that.
Here I’ll describe a few things that work for me when making jigsaw listenings tailored to my students’ needs of the moment.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/75/Jigsaw.svg/600px-Jigsaw.svg.png
Jigsaw Listening
OK. When was the last time you saw a jigsaw listening CD? Never. Thought so. I think jigsaw listening is one of the most valuable communicative activities around. It’s an audio information gap activity. Different groups of students listen to different parts of a text, then exchange information with each other to complete a task – piece the info together, find out who or what is being talked about, etc. It is great as the centerpiece of an integrated all-skills lesson.
The fantastic things about recording jigsaw listenings yourself are:
- you control the level and content of the audio text.
- you can build the rest of the lesson around the jigsawed listenings.
- you can use them to recycle vocabulary, grammar and other language taught earlier.
- you can make games out of them.
- you can make the listenings from student-generated work.
- you can use them to introduce factual content (giving each group different sets of facts).
- students love the fact they have to listen and then share and find out.
- the element of having to pass on information heard seems to make students “listen harder”.
- today’s technology means iPhones, laptops and classroom PCs do away with the need to drag 12 tape recorders/CD players to class.
- you can use the jigsaw listening for anything – introduce an important piece of school news by cutting it into different recorded pieces.
- get students to put events in a chronological order.
- you can beef up a lackluster textbook reading be recording it as a jigsaw reading.
- you can add intrigue to graded readers by creating jigsawed summaries.
- focus on different tenses by giving groups parts of the story set in the past, present and future.
- use it as a critical thinking activity – give students different parts of a set of instructions / cooking recipe / directions, etc for them to piece back together logically.
- liven up mystery stories.
- explain grammar by giving students different parts of the puzzle.
- explain word families by giving students different information about a word (collocations, parts of speech, antonyms & synonyms, use in phrasal verbs, etc).
- it can save you time (especially if you re-use the audio). They can take as little as ten minutes (the time it normally takes to do three one-minute recordings plus editing, saving, etc. The students then spend ages (all quality time) on the listening and piecing back together of the text.
- it’s free.
- you never have to visit that dusty resource room again.
If you have other suggestions for jigsaw listening, please share them in the comments below.
Thank you.
Tags: Audacity, audio, jigsaw listening, listening, mp3
This is brilliant, Sean! It’s easy to follow, and will encourage other teachers to use listening resources in more communicative ways, I think. I like it so well that I’ve added it to my wiki for both Listening Resources and the Reference Shelf pages
Thank you Barbara for this feedback. I’m very happy to make it to your wiki Listening Resources and Reference Shelf.
I do hope you’re right and teachers will focus more on the incredible variety of uses for listening. Digital recorders such as Audacity make it so quick and easy.
Best wishes
Awesome idea. i am going to use this in my class. I use Audacity, just never thought to use it in this way. Thanks!
I’ve also been using Audacity for preparing listening activities for some years now and can only join in your praise! Haven’t tried a jigsaw listening yet, but will definitely do so, as I see the great potential it has.
Many thanks for the inspiration, Sean.
Best,
Marian.
Fabbo idea! I’m not in a classroom this year (mat leave) but it’s ideas like this that make me want to steal someone’s class to try it out! I’m a language teacher and can think of a few ways this could be great for teaching new vocab, sentence structure, and listening skills…thanks!
Hi, just found your blog and I love it. I use audacity all the time with my kids. I used to have the kids type in their stories, now I have them just read them and put them on our blog. I’ve taught most of the class how to use it and now they add them to the posts for me.
Hi,
I have been a fan of yours for years and all of my students have profited from your brilliant material. I am intrigued by the idea of jigsaw listening. I have a few questions though: Do you do your own recordings for this exercise or do you use radio programmes? If so, what about copyright issues? How long would one complete recording (which you cut up afterwards) have to be?
Thanks for your great ideas and best wishes,
Christine
Hi Christine,
Many thanks for writing. I’ve always recorded jigsaw listenings myself. With radio programmes, I suppose they’d have to be Creative Commons and you’d need to attribute the parts you cut up – not really sure.
The length of recordings are entirely up to what you’re doing in class. Each recording could be as short as 10 seconds or as long as a few minutes.
Very cool idea.
How would you recommend playing the media for separate groups in a large classroom (in the absence of individual ‘listening lab’ style earphones)
what a great idea . Thanks! Just got a practical question: how do you distribute the different parts of the recording to the different groups ? Do you own a few iPod or MP3 you lend your students? What is the fastest system? Have a US B key and tell students to load the part you assigned them? Or …?
All of my students have laptops so I e-mail different groups different parts of the jigsaw or let them access the files on a shared network folder. I suppose if students don’t have their own laptops or computers, enough music players to go round – you might have to burn the recordings onto CDRs or put them on USB drives (if you have enough and if the music players have USB).
Hi Anne-Marie – Many thanks for your question – I just e-mailed my answer to a similar question – it should be one or two posts below this one.
I love your websites. We will be in China this summer teaching English teachers. We are from the southern part of the USA and our speech clearly marks us. We need for our students to understand not only us, but also other native speakers of English, including those from the USA whose speech is quite different from ours. Your short audio clips will be a wonderful addition to our classes, as they will help us introduce some listening comprehension exercises featuring British English.
Hello there, Sean, Jurgen Wagner, who I believe you know, put me on to your site, great stuff…just a quick comment about jigsaw listening: for anyone who is interested, I’ve developed a flash application for doing this kind of exercise. It is free and fully customisable, see:
http://davidbrett.uniss.it/eLearningTools/eLearningToolsBottom.htm
and click on ‘Example 6′
all the best
Thank you Ina – I hope your students benefit from my listenings. Best wishes.
I just wanted to say thank you for the wonderful resources you have on your site. I have used them with my class and they worked a treat. Thanks again.
Sean, I think I love you. I am about to start my final prac placement before graduation. I have one class that has caused me more than a few sleepless nights trying to think of engaging activities. I stumbled across your site by accident, but I have now bookmarked it, and I’ll definitely be back. Thank you soooo much
Thanks Bernadette – I love you too for your feedback
Please do come back, and check my other sites (go to the main page of my blog and see the widgets on the right).
Best wishes to you.
Sean, thank you for making things so easy for teachers!! I don’t know if you are really consciuos of the great help you provide us. Once again, THANK YOU VERY MUCH!!
Greetings from Spain
Thank you Eva – I really appreciate your feedback. I hope I keep being helpful to you