LISTENING ACTIVITY

Purpose:
Listening is clearly not a passive skill. Listening involves a lot of mental processes and
knowledge sources, like the act to assign meaning to an aural stimuli. So students are actively
involved when they are engaged in a listening activity. In particular in class learners apply the
two modalities of listening. These are aural and visual perceptions. The visual perception
occurs when the listener receive information on how to interpret the message paying attention
to body gestures or facial expressions. This is exactly what foreign languages teachers do in
class, the way how they use gestures and a comprehensible input to make themselves
understood and make the students participate. Its really important and fundamental to
incorporate culture in every activity and in the case of listening activities is also essential to
use authentic texts. Authentic texts have not been prepared for students or foreign languages
learners and they are usually delivered by radio, television or internet like the spoken text that
I used for my activities.
For this listening activity I used a video about Wedding menu ideas. With this activity I was
able to incorporate really easily the Italian culture, based on the importance that for couples is
the menu in this important day of their life. Before this unit lesson of about 10 minutes
students have already learned how to talk about food, shopping for food, shopping in specialty
stores and order in a restaurant. They also know how to talk about their favorite dishes and
they have learned about the right order of the meals in Italy.
Materials:
Video/Internet (Wedding Menu Ideas)

Procedure:
Help students identify the listening purpose: the goal is not to memorize words but to
recognize them and attach meaning to them.

 Help students to listen to obtain specific information. I give them a kind of anticipation.
Learners try to predict what the speaker is about to say.

ASCOLTATE!

Idee per Men da Matrimoni. In this activity you will see and hear some ideas about
how to plan and organize an Italian Wedding Men.

A. Pre-listening activity. Review of existing knowledge and

preparation.

vocabulary

Work in pairs. You are in a restaurant in Italy. One of you is the waiter/waitress and
the other one is the costumer. The costumer is supposed to order his/her favorite
Italian dishes for dinner. Careful with the right order of the meals!
B. While-listening activity.
Listen to the speaker as he talks about Wedding Men in Italy. While you listen
try to list the meals that the bride and the husband prefer to include in their
Wedding men and why. Which kind of men both of them like? What are the
brides favorite dishes? Which kind of meat does the husband like?
C. Post-listening activity.
Answer the following questions. Italian food culture is all about joy, family, and
tradition. Meal time is the time when everything is put aside in order to enjoy
time with your family.

1. Which is the traditional Italian Meal? Which kind of desserts can you find in a typical
men? Which is the right order of the meals in a Wedding celebration?

2. Can you think of any U.S. celebration that includes a menu similar to the Italian one?
How is celebrated a traditional wedding in Usa? Which are the similarities and the
differences?

Outcome of the lesson: In this lesson, students:

Will gain cultural awareness of the celebration of weddings in Italy.
They will be able to use the information learned in the activity to do other activities.
They will focus on a cultural analysis. Students will be able to reflect on what kind of
cultural differences might be inferred between United States of America and Italy.
Students will be able to develop cultural sensitivity and compare their own Country
with a completely different one and at the same time they will learn new vocabulary.

Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBkBBzrBf9M. Idee per Men da

Matrimoni