The idea
When Roger mentioned transcription, it
immediately struck me as a good idea.
At the time, most of my students were
preparing to take Cambridge exams and the majority of them found the listening
paper very challenging. I soon realised
that the typical classroom routine of
‘doing a listening’, ie playing a CD, did
not provide them with the help they
needed in order to improve, but instead
simply tested what they could already
do. It is certainly the case that extensive
listening plays a vital role in the
development of listening skills, and I
encouraged my students to do it for this reason. However, many of them found it
incredibly difficult to get into a routine
of listening to English at home. As a
result, I wanted to find shorter, more
focused tasks that would help my
students to develop their listening skills.
Transcription seemed to have potential,
so I decided to try it out.