This research was conducted over the course of four weeks and it reached the following conclusions in regards to the topic selected. The topic—how do we run listening activities in Basic 1?—was selected in accordance with the members of the teaching team at Wise Up Brasilia, who volunteered to take part in the research. We experienced problems with regards to the understanding of the activity as well as its purpose. Very often we came across complaints from students who didn’t understand the activity and it was not unusual for us to hear that it served no purpose. In order to be able to reach a conclusion, the teachers had to attend several of their colleagues’ classes and analyze how the activity was presented.
The level selected for the research was BASIC 1—for reasons that have to do with availability, since that is the level with the most groups and the most students per group. That would facilitate attending those classes since they are everywhere on the school timetable. BASIC 1 was also selected for being the level at which students have their first contact with Wise Up listening activities—and at this point they may still be influenced by other methods, which, we suspected, really did influence them in certain ways.
Over the course of four weeks each teacher attended one class every week. As the teachers were watching the classes they were supposed to answer four questions in regards to the teacher who was teaching the class, the activity, and how the former presented the latter. To be more specific, the four questions were:
1. How does the teacher introduce the activity?
2. What constraints does the teacher find?
3. What strategies does the teacher use?
4. What are the students’ reactions to the teacher’s strategies?
The data collected was extensive, showing different aspects of our very own teaching at Wise Up Brasília in relation to the activity. As a matter of fact, we found out that every teacher whose class we attended had their own style of presenting the activity. Whether the styles were effective or not is the result of our research. But before presenting the results, we shall first analyze the styles we have identified in the classroom. We have identified three categories of teachers in relation to the strategies used to present the activity and, as a result, we have identified three categories of students in relation to their very own attitude towards the activity.
First, we identified that there are teachers who simply move onto the activity, informing only the number of times he/she will be playing the listening recording. Those had the weakest results and the lowest feedback in terms of the understanding of the listening activity itself or even its purpose. The students who were accustomed to this kind of approach had a rather careless attitude towards the importance of the activity. It was not unusual to find students who simply wanted the activity to end so he/she could copy the answers.
Other teachers had a different approach and followed the Teacher’s Guide more accordingly. They explained the activity in advance, as instructed by the Teacher’s Guide, and, therefore, had better feedback in terms of the purpose of the activity. However, there were still weak students who had trouble understanding it. The students who are used to this approach understood the purpose of the activity but barely understood its meaning. This would frustrate the students, making them complain that they could not understand the listening activity on account of background noise and the vocabulary used. The complaints serve as a thermometer, showing us that the students understand the importance of the activity but, since they cannot follow it, there must be some problem with it.
The best results we identified at our school were those teachers who went beyond the Teacher’s Guide and not only presented the classes but also performed some sort of vocabulary investigation of the listening material. After having the activity explained to them, the students were able to understand its purpose and, after vocabulary investigation, were able to perform the activity better than those students in the first and second categories. As a matter of fact, some of these students were the only ones who could perform the activity in its entirety. On the other hand, we observed that doing the activity this way took longer than the length of time indicated in the Teacher’s Guide on all occasions.
Thus, after analyzing the data collected, we reached the following conclusion: the student’s performance, as well as his understanding of the activity, its purpose, and comprehension, was in direct correlation with the way the teacher approached and dealt with it. The teacher’s very own behavior towards the activity influenced the student’s attitude towards it too. We established that students do not remain in one of the three categories throughout the whole course, but, rather, move from one to another according to the teacher’s categories. A student who was category one, for instance, and therefore paid no attention to the activity, changed his/her attitude completely when influenced by a category-three teacher.