Methodology

The following activities for Las Voces de las Mujeres de Xelajú have been used with intermediate and advanced students of Spanish. Raphan (1996) suggests three phases of activities in her multimedia approach to academic listening: prelistening phase, listening phase, and postlistening phase activities. I prefer the terms previewing, viewing, and post-viewing to emphasize the visual component of the materials.

Previewing activities
Previewing activities designed for Las Voces materials consist mainly of students answering the questions themselves and to share their own answers with the class before listening to the interviews. The sharing of both personal answers and later summary and analysis by students of the women's answers helps to create a social context and builds community in the classroom, two features of Hovel's "A model for listening and viewing comprehension in multimedia environments" (1999). This activity is a challenge for some students, as these are not questions most US students have thought about.

Students also activate important vocabulary and grammar structures that are needed to express their answers in Spanish. Bacon (1992) found that students spent a lot of time activating schema and contextualizing listening passages. This pre-viewing activity might help shorten that time and better prepare students for the listening task. I have used this pre-viewing activity as an opportunity to review or provide important vocabulary and structures with my high-intermediate and advanced students of Spanish. According to Dunkel (1986), this is a crucial step which helps in "establishing common semantic fields between the speakers and the listeners, especially when listeners are from ethno-cultural backgrounds that differ from that of the speaker" (p. 103). Further support for listeners to better understand the background of the speakers is provided through the history of the area and photographs.

The teacher can also use class discussion of the students' own answers to help students analyze which questions generate answers that are shared by many students (shared cultural values), and which questions seem to elicit different answers (individual variation). This type of analysis serves as a model for careful generalizations drawn by the students after they listen to the interviews. According to Robinson-Stuart and Nocum (1996), "students should be guided to focus on similarities as an initial point of departure" (p. 436). The authors also state that, "By directing attention first to similarities, the tendency to exaggerate and generalize differences can be undermined with positive affective and perceptual results, producing the opportunity for the synthesis of perceptions and joint understanding that is necessary for subsequent tolerance of differences" (p. 435). Students need to learn to draw careful conclusions about cultural values and norms through inductive reasoning. I have found that the teacher needs to model this process for the students using their own answers before sending students to listen to the voices of women from cultures that are very different from their own.

Viewing activities
The principal viewing activity is to listen for the main points of each woman's answer, and to summarize each response, rather than listening for specific words or forms. Jack Richards (1988) recommends that the design of instructional materials for teaching listening comprehension reflect "a view of the nature of listening and the process it involves" (p. 59). He stresses the importance of activities that encourage top down processing in listening, as this is a more real-life task than bottom up processing activities, such as listening for specific words or grammatical features. These authentic women's voices provide students with many examples of both social and informational functions of language.

Each student develops a research question after listening to all of the women's introductions, which will help them select the women and parts of the interview that they will listen to. Las Voces provides a wide range of ages, education, ethnic identity, marital status, profession, and economic status. Students gain insights into shared values as well as changing values of the three home cultures of these women by comparing their answers. Research questions can seek to compare the women's responses to the students' answers, and can analyze various groups' answers within one culture. For example, students can listen to differences in the problems of older women and younger women within the same culture. Students listen carefully to authentic extended discourse, taking notes as they listen.

Post-viewing activities and Follow-up project
Students analyze their notes and look for similarities and variations in beliefs, practices, and attitudes within a culture, and draw conclusions about shared cultural values. Students share their summary and analysis with the class, either orally or in writing. Critical thinking is encouraged as students form research questions and are asked to summarize or paraphrase responses and draw conclusions.

Students studying a second language need to learn to ask questions and listen carefully in order to acquire communicative competence. These materials model an ethnographic approach to listening and to learning about other cultures. Students can be encouraged to form their own questions and conduct interviews with local Spanish speakers. An ethnographic approach to teaching culture along with foreign language has been shown to be very effective (Donan, 1997; Egan-Robertson and Willett, 1998). Bateman (2002) reported that students in his study who conducted an ethnographic project showed "an increase in understanding of and respect for Spanish speakers" and that "many of them achieved a degree of empathy and understanding for the experiences of their interviewees" (p. 327). However, native speakers of a target language, especially those from more remote regions, are not always readily accessible to foreign language students. Ideally Las Voces de las Mujeres de Latinoamérica should serve as a model to encourage students to engage in conversations with native speakers of Spanish wherever they are.

Summary of activities for Las Voces materials: Start with lots of teacher support and work toward independent learning.
Introductions - in all interviews
Students answer interview questions for themselves before listening to interview
review/learn related vocabulary and forms
Prediction - What will interviewee say?
Listening for specific information
Paraphrasing/retelling
Comparisons - how are these views different than my/our views
Cultural analysis - generalizations and variation - analysis of questions for the type of
answers they solicit.
Observation and analysis of meta-linguistic features - polite speech, gestures
Students write follow-up questions and role-play interview

The Activities document includes:
1. Introducciónes worksheet grid for all interviews (beginning to intermediate level)
2. Las Tres Cosas Más Importantes worksheet grid - students write names of
women under catagories (beginning to intermediate level)
3. Esperanzas worksheet grid for 5 interviews plus student answers (intermediate level)
4. Independent project (advanced level)

References:
Bacon, S. (1992). Phases of listening to authentic input in Spanish: A descriptive study. Foreign Language Annals, 25, 4, 317-334.

Bateman, B. (2002). Promoting openness toward culture learning: Ethnographic interviews for students of Spanish. The Modern Language Journal, 86, iii, 318-331.

Donan, L. (1997). Students as ethnographers. ERIC: ED415699.

Dunkel, P. (1986). Developing listening fluency in L2: Theoretical principles and pedagogical considerations. The Modern Language Journal, 70, ii, 99-106.

Egan-Robertson, A. and Willett, J. (1998). Students as ethnographers, thinking and doing ethnography: A bibliographic essay. In Students

ActivitiesGuatemala to use with Las Voces
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Guatemala links

Methodology.doc
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View more interviews online at Las Voces de las Mujeres online interface hosted by the Language Acquisition Resource Center at San Diego State University

ActivitiesMexico to use with Las Voces onlin

ActivitiesDonostia to use with Las Voces online

Also visit LARC Digital Media Archive for more Spanish videoclips.