I’m Lesley Young and I’m a teacher in the Modern Languages department in Grove Academy.  As the final stage of the Chartered Teacher programme, I had to carry out an action research project.  I chose to research listening acquisition and listening skills and focused on Higher French.  A large part of the research project related to metacognitive strategy instruction, but I also created materials to help pupils with sound discrimination. 

Learners at the beginning and intermediate stages of French sometimes find it difficult to recognise words they know when they hear them.  They have not learned the correct pronunciation, or they have poor knowledge of the rules of liaison.  I developed a booklet and sound files on pronunciation and liaison and created a Glow learn course.  Pupils were taken to an ICT suite and introduced to the course, and the listening activities were then issued as homework for the holidays on Glow learn.  From August onwards, almost every listening activity done in class was uploaded onto Glow learn.  I painstakingly copied cassettes onto CDs to rip the tracks into MP3 files.  We are lucky that the activities we do in class mostly have been written and recorded by our language assistants (unfortunately no longer employed in school), so are not subject to copyright restrictions.  The MP3 files were issued as homework and pupils were asked to listen again, along with the transcript which I also issued.  If they had had difficulty identifying the sounds that they heard in class, they were asked to read the transcript, anticipate what the words will sound like, and then listen to the MP3 file whilst reading the transcript.  Finally, they were advised to listen again, without the transcript, trying to visualise the words.  (This advice is taken from a recent research study into the listening skills of AS level students in England.) 

There are two main advantages of Glow learn for sharing sound files with pupils:  1) there is unlimited storage space 2) although it’s time consuming to upload files, it’s easier than asking each pupil to bring in a blank CD and copying the tracks onto CDs.  The disadvantage of Glow learn (compared to Scholar) is that although you are able to check that the pupils have accessed the task, you cannot actually tell if they have opened the file, and cannot tell how long they have spent on the activity.  On the other hand, they are able to copy the files onto their own ipods.  Pupils tell me that they have been doing this and seem appreciative. 

 All this listening should of course lead to an improvement in their speaking and pronunciation as well as their listening.  As most pupils seem to feel compelled to listen constantly to their ipods, I feel that we should be exploiting this and providing them with educational listening whenever possible.