5th Meeting: Counting and listening

Photo taken from TOEFL Preparation Wesite

Today's class is exciting. We embarked to the next milestones of our learning.

- Counting up to 100

- Listening activity

It is exciting for me because I can now say my age in Spanish (I can fell you're smiling.. :-)). I mastered 1 - 10 and now I get to 100.. Huraaah!!! lol... For my beginner student they love it when we go to 100 because we can do a LOT more with the range of number knowledge they have. We can play the math jigsaw game, they how old is/are... game etc etc. 

Anyhow, what got me really excited is that we did a listening exercise where the teacher played the recording and we filled in the blanks in our photocopied worksheet. This a milestones for me because I can complete all except 2 answers. To be able to listen for information and actually able to retrieve the information correctly indicated that to certain extend I have the vocabulary needed, the sentence understanding and context understanding. This is a complex application of learning. This is when the seemingly solitary learning of vocabulary, useful phrases etc come together to aid you in your understanding.

Wencheng Sun's article in English Language Teaching Journal says

Languages are mainly used for listening, speaking, reading, and writing in intercommunication. Listening and reading are input competence, and speaking and writing are output competence. Among these the listening and speaking competence tends to be more important in human communication and daily life. The primary language of human being develops from listening and speaking.

She went on and says:

In order to hear the important data, characters, events, and time clearly, and master the general idea, students must integrate languages and specialties and apply them into practices.

As an input competence, listening required on-hand basic knowledge. That is why, I am excited and say that this is a milestones. I can comprehend the message. I have enough basic vocabulary to get me by. I do not have full understanding of the sentence but I have the vocabulary that can act as my cue words for me to guess the meaning. -