Reviews
  • Final Listening Review

    • Final Listening Review

    For listening practice this week, we will use one video for a few different activities. You will practice with small parts of the video and then watch the complete video.

    Objectives

    1. Understands all explicit and some implicit main ideas.
    2. Understands major and minor details.
    3. Recognizes and makes inferences from the speaker's purpose and point of view.
    4. Understands and identifies target grammar forms.
    5. Recognize organizational patterns.
    6. Uses suprasegmental cues to guess meaning.
    7. Asking clarifying questions to confirm/check comprehension.
    8. Makes inferences.
    9. Predicts what information will follow. 
    10. Connects ideas within the text and among texts comfortably. 

    Background Knowledge

    The topic of this video is "Measuring Personality." Crash Course is an educational YouTube channel and the speaker Hank Green is explaining the basic history and theory in psychology about personalities. Before you listen, think about the title and the context of a YouTube channel. What do you think he will talk about?

    Consider what type of vocabulary you would expect to hear in this video. 

    Think about the speaker's purpose and audience. How might his speaking be influenced by those factors?

    Purpose & Point of View

    Read the introduction to his TED Talk. As you read, think about the purpose and point of view by asking yourself these questions:

    • What is the main purpose here? To explain, entertain, persuade? What is the underlying purpose?
    • Crash Course lessons typically follow similar patterns. Read the Crash Course Mission Statement and consider how the speaking situation impacts the purpose and point of view: At Crash Course, we believe that high quality educational videos should be available to everyone for free. The Crash Course team has produced more than 15 courses to date, and these videos accompany high school and college level classes ranging from the humanities to the sciences. Crash Course transforms the traditional textbook model by presenting information in a fast-paced format, enhancing the learning experience. With hundreds of millions of views on our YouTube channel, Crash Course has a worldwide audience in and out of classrooms. While the show is an immensely helpful tool for students and teachers, it also has a large viewership of casual learners who seek out online educational content independently. It has changed attitudes towards education by creating a community of learners who are looking for more than just help passing a test. 
    • What is Hank Green's background and experience? What might his bias be? How would it be different than your own or the people in the audience?

    Introduction

    Listen to the first 1:25: 

     

    Now listen to his conclusion. How does the conclusion further demonstrate a purpose or point of view? 

      

    Organization

    In the conclusion, Hank includes a summary of the lesson. He says:

    As we talked about the trait and social cognitive perspectives, and also about different ways these schools and others measure and test personality. We also talked about what self is, and how our self-esteem works.

    Now compare this summary with the topic sentences from each spoken paragraph.

    Transcript

    1. How would you describe your personality?
    2. Ancient Greek physician Hippocrates believed personality manifested itself in four different humors, and, basically, you are who you are because of your balance of phlegm, blood, and yellow and black bile.
    3. All this is to say that people have been characterizing one another for a long, long time, and whether you're into blood, or bile, or ego, or id, or BLT, or PB&J, there are a lot of ways to describe and measure a personality.
    4. Last week we talked about how psychologists often study personality by examining the differences between characteristics, and by looking at how these various characteristics combine to create a whole thinking, feeling person.
    5. Instead of focusing on things like lingering unconscious influences or missed growth opportunities, trait theory researchers look to define personality through stable and lasting behavior patterns and conscious motivations.
    6. Modern trait researchers like Robert McCrae and Paul Costa have since organized our fundamental characteristics into what's casually known as The Big Five: openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism, which you can remember using the mnemonic OCEAN, or CANOE, whichever one you prefer.
    7. This flexibility that we all seem to have leads to the fourth major theory on personality, the social cognitive perspective.
    8. Now whether we're talking about control versus helplessness, introversion versus extroversion, calm versus anxious, or whatever, each of these different personality perspectives have their own methods of testing and measuring personality.
    9. By contrast with that approach, though, modern trait personality researchers believe that you can assess personality traits by having people answer a series of test questions.
    10. Then there's how Bandura's social cognitive camp sizes you up.
    11. And finally, there are the Humanistic theorists like Maslow.
    12. Which brings us back to that biggest motherlode question of them all: Who, or what, is the self?

     In addition to looking at the organization, consider the word choice in these sentences. How do these sentences show the relationship between topic, context, and audience?

    Crash Course: "Measuring Personality" by Hank Green

    Here is the complete Crash Course.

     

    Synthesize Sources

    Choose one of these sources below to read or watch after watching the complete Crash Course lesson. 

    Think about similarities and differences between the information in the Crash Course video and the source you chose. Approach this both in the sense of the content they present and how they organize and present their ideas. Are the purposes and points of view the same? Are the audiences the same? 

    Choose a quote from your second source and prepare to use that quote to explain the relationship between the two sources and the topic.

    Comprehension

    To evaluate your understanding of the TED Talk, you will take a quiz and answer questions about the main idea, major details, and minor details.

    In-Class Discussion

    • Hank's conclusion is that personalities are very complex, and there is no universal answer to how to define self. Do you agree or disagree with his perspective? Explain your answer with specific reasons.
    • Have you ever taken a personality test? Tell your partner about which test you took and your experience with it. Remember to include specific details about the experience and what made it accurate or inaccurate. Your explanation should use the past.
    • One point in the video that he does not spend much time on is that culture can have an impact on personality. In what ways do you think this is true or not true?
    • Look at the possible outcomes of a personality test like the Enneagram. Without taking the test, hypothesize what result you think you would get and why. Continue by hypothesizing how the results might influence your life or your understanding of others.
    • How would you change this topic to have a different purpose or share this same information with a different audience? 

    This content is provided to you freely by EdTech Books.

    Access it online or download it at https://edtechbooks.org/advanced_mid_listening__speaking/final_listening_review.