Comparing notes

This activity integrates reading and listening as students check a written text against the heard original. Texts that are found in both the magazine and on the audio are ideal, but you can of course pick any text and read it aloud yourself.

Because you are creating your own doctored transcripts, you can use the same original text for various purposes and at different levels. The activity can be used purely as a fact-checking exercise. Texts that work well for this contain a number of easily alterable numbers, dates or nouns. The "Who exactly is...?" section in Spotlight magazine is a good choice, and is usually on Spotlight Audio.

A more interesting use of the activity is to focus on aspects of pronunciation and form that cause listeners difficulty, such as contractions, weak forms or similar-sounding words.

Who it's for:
All levels

What it's for:
Listening for specific information, proofreading skills

What you need:
A text from Spotlight magazine that you have "doctored" and printed out for your class, and, ideally, the corresponding text on Spotlight Audio.

What you do:
Before the lesson, rewrite the text, including factual and syntactical changes, for example to numbers, nouns, prepositions, verbs or adjectives. It is a good idea to listen to the text while you do this, in order to pick out words or sounds that may be unstressed or unclear. Make sure your new text is grammatically correct and plausible!

In the lesson, hand out copies of the new text and give students a minute or two to read it through. Treat it as if it were the original version.

Tell the group that you are going to play the audio of the same text, but that there will be some differences, which they should find and mark on the sheet. You can tell them how many differences they should be looking for, or leave it open.

Play the audio or read the text aloud a couple of times, giving students time to check with each other after each listening.

When going through the text as a group, ask "What did you hear?" for each item. Students may be sure they heard a particular word or sound, when in fact they didn't. It is interesting to discuss how the brain can sometimes "trick" you into making certain interpretations or assumptions.