Listening in less than ideal conditions: a game for the car

I used to hate to drive.  When I worked as the language center director for the Alliance Francaise, I lived very close to work, so I biked as much as I could.  I finally got a car in 2007, and when I did, I did not like it one bit!  In Milwaukee, however, it is a necessary for most of us, as getting to work when your job is far away is quite difficult with public transportation.  About the same time as I acquired a car, I also bought a smart phone and discovered the magic of radio apps and online radio in French, Hebrew and other languages I was learning or taught.  The apps were not perfect but it was amazing how accessible authentic input had become since when I was in high school.

In 2009, I began to teach at University School of Milwaukee, where I work today, and the commute was considerably longer than my former place of employment.  I began to put my smart phone on a certain radio station in French and put it in the visor of my car so I could listen to the news and other programs to get myself ready and "into the language", a sort of immersion experience in the car. Unfortunately, my car did not have blue tooth and so it could be difficult to hear and parse the syllables when the cars were zooming around me or sirens were blaring, or even the wind blew through the rolled-up windows.  After a few weeks of this, though I began to use this challenge to my advantage.

It occurred to me that in the classroom, I always try to make sure that the conditions are ideal so students can understand any aural input that I might throw at them, but in the real world, this is almost never the case. Think about when we watch TV or movies or when we are trying to understand an announcement in the train station or in public; even when we listen to a song often we cannot quite understand the lyrics because the instrumentals are maybe up a tad to high.  This all points to the fact that we need to allow for opportunities to develop listening skills with background noise.  It is interesting to think about the implications for the classroom.

For now, though, I content myself with playing a game in the car: I turn the radio down as much as possible and try to see how much I understand (this may be in the target language or in my native language).  What you realize is that if you have had sufficient input and have heard certain words enough, you can understand them by their phonetic contours and/ or by the words that surround them. Often words occur un partner with other words (idiomatic expressions, cultural references, etc.) Take, for example, the expression "rubs me the wrong way": if you understand "_______ me the wrong way" and you have understood the topic, then you probably can infer "rubs".  This is very interesting to do in the target language, for it may not only gauge your aural comprehension, but your grasp of pragmatics and socio-cultural information in the target language.  These concepts are what truly demonstrate mastery of a language.

So, why not give it a try and see how you do?  What else are you going to do on that commute?  At least I have found a way to like driving!