English language learners ages 11 to 15 take MET Go! to show their accomplishments in their English studies with an international certificate issued by Michigan Language Assessment. Learners who take the 4-skill exam study for the listening, reading, writing, and speaking sections. Here are some activities for teachers who are preparing students for the MET Go! Listening Section.
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- Train to listen for specific information. Find an audio recording (from a textbook, a podcast, a video, or a song). Play the audio and ask the students to listen and write down certain words they hear. For example, ask them to listen for food types or words related to animals, depending on the audio clip content. Include a word bank to make the task more accessible for students at beginning levels. At the end of the activity, share the recording transcript and highlight the relevant words and compare them to the words that students wrote down. This activity can be done in person or online.
- Listening to dialogues created by classmates. In this activity, students will create dialogues or monologues and act them out in front of the class. Start by brainstorming with your students to generate multiple situations and contexts for their dialogues. Write these down on a shared screen or whiteboard so everyone has a copy. Review the situations and, as a class, begin to draft the beginning of the dialogue/monologue — this will help set expectations for the task. Put the students into pairs and ask each pair to pick a situation. Give lower level students (A1-A2) 5 minutes and higher level students (B1+) 10 minutes to draft. Then, give additional time — at least 5 minutes — for them to write comprehension questions about their dialogue. These questions can be True or False (T/F) or requests for specific information, e.g. Who, What, Where, When, Why. Students will then act out their dialogues for the rest of the class so give them a few minutes to practice before performing! For online learning, students can record themselves at home, perhaps using virtual backgrounds to add some context. Play the recordings during class time. Before viewing the dialogue, show the students’ comprehension questions to the class so everyone knows what information to listen for.
- Listen for detail. This activity can be done with pairs or as an entire class. For the full classroom activity, one person—either the teacher or a student—chooses and describes a picture to everyone else. The picture can come from their phone or an Internet search. Without seeing the picture, the rest of the students will listen carefully and draw a picture based on the description. This can be done on paper or online using a free whiteboard program. Before beginning the activity, review the vocabulary and grammatical structures that students will use to describe the pictures. You could use this as an opportunity to practice certain themed vocabulary. Once the drawings are completed, students can compare their work (either in pairs or to the entire class) and report on the drawing experience using relevant vocabulary. After everyone compares drawings, the speaker will show the original photo to the class. Students can then reflect on differences and similarities between their drawings and the photo.
Learn more about MET Go!, or watch a video of Assessment Developer Luke Slisz describing these activities.