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:

1. you control the level and content of the audio text.
2. you can build the rest of the lesson around the jigsawed listenings.
3. you can use them to recycle vocabulary, grammar and other language taught earlier.
4. you can make games out of them.
5. you can make the listenings from student-generated work.
6. you can use them to introduce factual content (giving each group different sets of facts).
7. students love the fact they have to listen and then share and find out.
8. the element of having to pass on information heard seems to make students “listen harder”.
9. today’s technology means iPhones, laptops and classroom PCs do away with the need to drag 12 tape recorders/CD players to class.
10. you can use the jigsaw listening for anything – introduce an important piece of school news by cutting it into different recorded pieces.
11. get students to put events in a chronological order.
12. you can beef up a lackluster textbook reading be recording it as a jigsaw reading.
13. you can add intrigue to graded readers by creating jigsawed summaries.
14. focus on different tenses by giving groups parts of the story set in the past, present and future.
15. 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.
16. liven up mystery stories.
17. explain grammar by giving students different parts of the puzzle.
18. explain word families by giving students different information about a word (collocations, parts of speech, antonyms & synonyms, use in phrasal verbs, etc).
19. 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.
20. it’s free.
21. 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.

Progress reports

I have found that providing students with progress reports via audio files is a very motivating alternative to providing written feedback on their progress. Generally, I do both. I am required to enter written feedback in the online records kept for my students. However, there are several things that don’t overly excite me about this:

1. I sometimes find them to be overly formal and (on occasion) stilted.
2. They occur too infrequently – usually mid- and end-of-semester – to provide students with useful information.
3. They can (on occasion) fall prey to ticking-the-boxes syndrome and thus can (on occasion) not be so overly heartfelt.

Now…

This is why I like giving audio files to students as progress reports.

Reasons for this are:

1. It gets students to practice authentic and relevant listening. They have a real reason to listen and are usually extremely motivated to do so.
2. It is more relaxed than the formal, college-required progress reports.
3. You can make the feedback fun and irreverent.
4. You can (on occasion) say things that you could never put online.
5. You can really personalize it.
6. Their parents don’t know about the audio files (Shhh!!) whereas parents usually see the more formal written progress reports.
7. You can say a WHOLE LOT MORE in an audio file than you could ever write in a formal written report (unless you wanted to dedicate your winter break to progress-report writing).
8. You can do it very often. It’s not overly difficult to do every two weeks. Would love to do it every week, but…
9. It’s quick – You can do progress reports for a class of 20 in 30 minutes.
10. Students really appreciate the personalization and extra effort.
11. The effect of the feedback can be extremely immediate– you can almost guess from a student’s face which part of their feedback they are listening to.
12. Providing lots of enthusiastic praise in the audio files works wonders.
13. I have found students like to listen to each other’s feedback more than they would read it.
14. You can easily tailor it to those who need it more.
15. It really gets you thinking more about your students, what they need and how they are doing.
16. You can provide the class with a global feedback file on how they’re doing collectively in addition to individual files.
17. Giving students audio files can encourage students to respond – either via their own mp3 or in writing.
18. It makes me appear more human to them (I think – could be wrong).
19. Given regularly, it really comes part of a system of monitoring progress.
20. It’s fun – Students like it.
21. They can reciprocate and give you mp3 feedback.

In the upcoming semester, I’d like to try and provide this kind of progress reporting using VoiceThread. I’m sure students will respond so much more to the threaded audio format than the clunkier option of mailing the audio file or leaving it on shared drives. It would be nice to have more of a conversation with the students using media they are so comfortable and familiar with using.

Will keep you posted.

PS I use the free audio editor/recorder from Audacity. It’s pretty much like MS Word except for sound and not letters (you record, copy, paste and save!).

The Audacity manual is here.

Here are some YouTube tutorials on how to record and how to edit.

Feedback on Writing

I provide feedback to my students using mp3 files. I record them using the free audio editor and recorder Audacity (you can download versions for Windows, Mac and Linux/Unix).

I have found providing recorded oral feedback via an mp3 file to be a very useful addition to my feedback arsenal. I needed a little time to get into the swing of things but once I did, I loved it (and so too did my students). It’s very easy. I just record the feedback, save as mp3 and then e-mail it to the students.

I would suggest reducing the file size to 32 kpbs (if you can) so files don’t clog up e-mail InBoxes.

Example

Here’s an example text. I write numbers on the text where students need to focus their attention. When I record the feedback, I ask the students to look at number one, and then provide the feedback, and then do the same for #2, etc.

Teachers have asked me if it’s quicker than providing written feedback. In my experience, it takes a little longer if the text is short but saves time if the text is longer. Using audio files also saves time if you want to provide more extensive and comprehensive feedback.

Here are some of the things I initially had to get used to:

• Finding what to say and how to say it to be of maximum benefit to students.
• Starting a new sentence again if I made a mistake (in Audacity you just select the mistake and delete it, as you would do with a piece of text in Word).
• Cutting down on umms and ahhs.
• Creating an easy to recognize naming system when saving the mp3 files. I used the class name + student initials + writing task name (e.g. DF2-05_AM_cities.mp3).
• Finding the time and a quiet area to get into the habit of recording feedback.
• Some people might say they don’t like the sound of their own voice, but this disappears after a while.

Here are the reasons why I like and recommend using sound files for feedback:

• Students like them
  They really pay more attention to what’s on a sound file than what I write on paper. They also seem to get ‘excited’ at receiving one in their mail.
• It makes a change from red ink
  Whatever colour ink you use for correction, it’s usually messy business. Some students might need a microscope to read your notes. I know my corrections can sometimes look more like a maze of insertion marks and words.
• It practices listening
  Listening to the corrections is a valid and authentic listening task. Students are usually quite motivated to listen and will press play several times to make sure they got it all.
• It’s an activity in itself
  This is a sneaky one – The audio provides students with a whole new activity of listening for specific information and re-engaging and correcting their text. Great for recycling language and getting students to think.
• It makes the students rewrite the draft
  Always a good thing. In my experience, they are more engaged in the rewriting process with audio correction than with my scrawled notes.
• It gets students used to metalanguage
  The audio files are a good opportunity to reinforce grammar terms they might not be so familiar with. This is particularly useful for lower levels. Audio files give students more processing time to work out exactly what those big, confusing words are the teacher keeps saying in class (like present progressive, apostrophe, adjective…).
• It is quicker than writing if there’s a lot you want to say
• It’s useful with tiny handwriting on A8 paper
  No matter how hard I try to convince my students of the virtues of A4, I still get essays on Post-It-note-sized paper. You need an ultra thin pen and a microscope to notate these. Using numbers and audio makes this process cleaner and easier.
• It forces me to think more carefully about grading my speech and saying what I need to say as succinctly as possible.

So, I thoroughly recommend using audio to provide feedback. However, if you really want to push the boat out – use audio and visual. This is one of my New Year resolutions. Russell Stannard has excellent tutorials on how to use screencasts in providing feedback on writing:

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=207117

and
http://www.hltmag.co.uk/dec08/mart04.htm

Or check out Vance Stevens’ list of screencast software:
http://vancestevens.com/casting.htm#screencasting