A lesson snippet showing listening decoding

In the past, whenever I did a workshop on decoding authentic recordings with learners, I’d invariably hear this from someone in the room: ‘But surely this is only for advanced learners??’

In my experience, you can certainly do decoding with Pre-Intermediate learners and higher, so I thought I’d record a snippet with my new group, which is B1. We’re doing listening decoding for the first time with this group in this lesson.

Before this part of the lesson, we watched four 30-second authentic videos for gist (these were videos showing small talk, and the task was to identify the topic discussed). The learners are now working with a gapped transcript, transcribing questions and responses from the video.

All in all, we spent 19 minutes doing listening decoding in that lesson: 14 minutes transcribing and then 3 minutes summarizing the features we’d heard. We then moved on to categorize the questions and have a bit of practice making small talk.

I generally try to incorporate listening decoding in this way every 2-3 lessons, and I also set TubeQuizard quizzes based on the same video for homework. And I normally start noticing progress in my learner’s ability to cope with ‘standard’ AmE accents after about 5-6 lessons that have a listening decoding element.