Personality

September is here and the morning air has a hint of fall that I’m absolutely loving! Hopefully your teaching year is off to a good start and you’re feeling just as fresh and energized as the weather!

This month, I’m bringing you a sample of some of the listening materials I create for my own students with a lesson focused on describing personality.

You can organize this lesson in a variety of ways, using the four components provided in a different sequence or adding/subtracting elements based on the needs of your students.

These materials are appropriate for high beginning to low intermediate levels. I would love to hear how you adapt these listening activities to fit your own context, and what worked well—or not-so-well!

Listen-only

I personally like to give my students the challenge of listening without any helps first to see how much they understand! As you will hear in this recording, my pacing is slow but natural, and high beginning to low intermediate learners should be able to catch quite a bit the first time through, even if they aren’t familiar with some of the specific vocabulary yet.

By the way, Penny Ur (Penny Ur’s 100 Teaching Tips) recommends not pre-teaching vocabulary before a listening activity, based on Chang & Read’s (2006) research. This study suggests that providing information about the topic beforehand is more helpful than pre-teaching key vocabulary.

Here are a few ideas for how you might do this before pressing play on the audio:

• Have students call out some of the words they already know that could be used to describe someone’s personality. Write them on the board and ask them to listen to see if they hear any of them in the audio recording.

• Have students ask a partner: “How would you describe your personality?” Then have one student from each pair come up to the board and write the adjectives that were used.

• Ask students if they know what the words introverted and extroverted mean. Have students share ideas, then help fill in any gaps. Take a class poll to find out how many people would describe themselves as introverted vs. extroverted.

Audio file: Describing your Personality

Listen with Captions

With my students, I provide the version with captions after they have listened to the audio-only version. My rationale is that in real life, people don’t speak with subtitles, and they need to develop their skills of understanding as much as possible in real time.

Of course, you know your students best, and if you feel they would panic or feel demoralized by trying to understand the audio-only version first, feel free to reverse the order.

Listening while following along with captions helps students fill in the gaps in their understanding, as well as connect the written word with its pronunciation, so I feel that it’s valuable to listen both with and without captions.

You might assign this video as homework so that students can listen as many times as they need to. You could also ask them to bring back 3 new words they learned for the next class period.

I use Canva along with an app called Caption Craft to make these listen-and-follow-along videos.

Audio with captions 

Transcript

I love that the iPhone/MacBook voice memo app generates an automatic transcript which you can then copy and paste and correct as needed. This makes it quick and easy to create a variety of companion activities.

There are probably a hundred different ways you could use this transcript—here are just a few ideas:

• Highlight the words or grammatical structures you want students to focus on, then have them follow along with the transcript (printed or projected) while they listen to the audio-only version.

• Delete the words or structures you have focused on in class and have students fill in the blanks while they listen.

• Enlarge the font and cut the printed transcript into pieces and have students match parts of sentences that go together.

In this version, I’ve put adjectives that describe personality in bold font, but you can adapt this to focus on whatever vocabulary or grammar point you choose.

Transcript

Vocabulary Quiz

Here is a quiz I made in Google Forms, mainly by copying and pasting sentences from the transcript. Feel free to use different segments of the transcript to make your own quiz, based on what you want to focus on.

I usually give a quiz after several listen-throughs and teaching the key vocabulary, but you could also use a quiz at the beginning to activate prior knowledge.

Vocabulary Quiz

I hope you enjoy using some of these activities with your own students! Here’s a question for you:

Would you use audio files, videos, transcripts, and quizzes like these if they were organized into an accessible library?

I have created quite a few of these listening activities on a variety of topics and am considering making them available to other teachers if there seems to be enough interest. Let me know what you think!

Bethany