4.4 Listening activities

role he must play. Dramatizing based on scripts by them would be most helpful. A short drama of the parable of the Good Samaritan, lasting about 10’ and prepared along the year could end up with a performance for the whole school (or several courses) in May. The scripts of the play can be produced by children adapting vocabulary to them or taken from the DVD used in the classroom. This would be ambitious and requires preparation, but could be rewarding for both teacher and children with benefits for them beyond content and language. Before launching the activity, confirmation of performance should be gainen from headship of studies.

When it comes to drama and RE we should separate it from typical Christmas festivals. They have pros and cons. They are useful for exploring creativity and enjoyment and benefit from a captive audience. On the other hand, Christmas festivals usually do not develop religious concepts neither key skills. This is why I think dramatization of parables shouldn’t be kept for Christmas but rather for some other moment at the end of the year. Drama should be used within RE lesson and as a way to dive into religious ideas and feelings via other intelligences; there are many techniques to put drama into RE (Webster, 2010). For this reason, we will propose the use of a script by children to perform for other students as a way of going deeper in the understanding of the parable. This will produce incidental learning together with.

4.4 Listening activities

According to Barton, listening is “the most difficult skill to master”, specially “for boys, whose aural skills are often inferior to those of girls” (2006:60). It is awkwardly clear through the change from the

familiar voice of the teacher to a strange, recorded voice. Differences between spoken and written English are clear (Spratt, Pulverness, & Williams, Melanie, 2005). Children also regard listening a passive and unpurposeful process. We must bear this in mind and in order to minimize it we will use

only three different voices for listening activities: teacher’s, online audio bible of the NIV® available at biblegateway.com or its CD version (International Bible Society, 2001), and a DVD series on the History of Salvation (Monte Tabor Films, 2001). This way, we are reducing the strangeness of voices in the classroom but, at the same time, giving children a variety of accents, intonations and a taste of real pronunciation. Listening of the whole parable should never be done at the beginning of work with a parable; before, and introduction to the topic, vocabulary and characters must have been done in order to prepare them for listening. Also, a full reading and some activities on the parable should be have been completed. Nevertheless, audition of certain verses of the parables (very easily done with the online version) could be effective in introducing new vocabulary. For new words and refining of pronunciation, online version of some dictionaries is also recommendable.

There are clear differences in using audios and videos in the classroom for listening activities (Harmer, 2007). Nevertheless, we must take into account that the first source of listening in the classroom is

the teacher and we shouldn’t underestimate its potential, and we are so in many informal and sometimes unorganized way. But when it comes to videos we must tend to a structured use, avoiding

a mere watching. Purposeful watching engages children much more and if the topic or story is partially known, children will find it achievable. The video series we have proposed is to be used at the end of work with a parable /story; it widens the plot providing background for characters, introduces new dialogues and depicts a broader context. We will make watching purposeful by means pausing and predicting what will happen next, turning projector off or mute while audio still runs (asking children to guess what happens), writing on the board several statements that they will decide if are true of false, or we ask pupils to stand up each time they hear a certain word or phrase. Other activity- game that could be used when viewing a parable is called spot the lie. Before viewing we will make a few statements about the extended narrative of the parable contained in the DVD and

children must find out a lie. In the case of the Good Samaritan we can say: “The innkeeper’s daughter reported his father of the presence of two robbers” (it was his son). Finally, we will always use English subtitles when viewing.

Some of the new narrative that videos add to the parable can be contrasted with other writings or imagined scenarios by children in the classroom. We can ask the children if they have imagined the Samaritan dressed that way, if the inn looked like that, and so on. This contrasting can lead us into speaking and writing. All four skills are interconnected and going from one to another shouldn’t be avoided.

Purpose for listening also determines the way we do it: we may listen for gist (general idea), specific information, details, attitudes of characters or we do extensive listening (Harmer, 2007). These strategies are similar to those of reading that we saw before. When viewing or listening a parable we have already done several activities and it does not make sense listening for gist; rather, activities must go in search for details or specific information, catching the attention of students. One activity in search of detail is a cloze exercise on the audio script (that the teacher has to write extracting it from the DVD), like follows:

(At the house of the merchant. Father and son in conversation)

Daughter: Why are you going to Jericho when Mamma doesn’t want you to ____?

Father: If I buy ________ in Jericho, I get the first choice from the caravans. I get the freshest basil, the hottest peppers.

(The youngest son eats some spices, gets red and asks for help. Father gives him water)

Father: Quick, Rebecca, get some _____! Never, never, eat spices, Aaron! Never!

Preparing this cloze exercises may be very time consuming for teacher but renders benefits in engagement, especially when a portfolio evaluation is in course. Many other activities can be done. When watching a film, we can ask for details regarding images combined with the script. For example:

“What animal was the priest riding on? And the Samaritan?”, “What did the innkeeper predict the