Stop spending your planning period scouring the internet for audio excerpts!
“Avec sauci?” the woman working the bakery counter asked me.
Sauci? Like, ‘saucisse,” maybe? Like…sausage?!
My mind went into overdrive trying to understand why this woman would be asking me about sausage when all I ordered was a ham and cheese sandwich. As I tried to work it out, she stood there blinking at me, growing impatient as the milliseconds ticked by.
“Non, merci,” is what I finally replied. And she looked confused. Which made me confused.
The next time I saw her, she said the same thing. Only this time it sounded like “Avec souci?”
Wait! ‘Souci?’ Like…problem?! Is she asking me if there’s a problem with my sandwich?
This time I responded with “Non,” and a smile. She still looked confused—but slightly less so.
Finally, after the third visit, I begged my grammar teacher to help. “What is the woman at the boulangerie saying to me?!” I asked. I had, after all, been speaking French for seven years at that point.
Madame grinned at me, held in her laugh, and explained that the woman was saying, “Avec ceci?” —and with this? As in, “anything else with this?”
No wonder she thought it odd when I replied, “No, thank you.”
If this embarrassment from my study abroad years illustrates anything, it’s the difficulty of cultivating listening comprehension in another language. I could’ve pointed out the differences between “saucisse,” “souci,” and “ceci,” on paper, but with a growing line of hungry Parisians behind me, the phonetic differences did not compute.
It took making a mistake—and learning from it!—to improve my aural comprehension of that particular word. And that’s a critical part of language learning that can only be accomplished through repeated exposure—and some active listening instruction—to spoken language.
Listening is a tough skill to cultivate
In world language education, we lump listening comprehension into the interpretive communication skillset along with reading comprehension.
It’s a logical categorization, but a reductive one.
Being able to effectively parse, process, and then apply meaning to spoken second-language text involves cognitive processes that we haven’t fully investigated yet. But whether you’re a first-year language educator or an academic researcher, we can all agree on a core tenet of listening comprehension: exposure matters.
You get better at understanding a language by listening to it. But that input must be comprehensible and varied for you to truly build capacity to understand what you hear.
How ClearLanguages boosts listening comprehension
If you’re tired of creating your own listening activities and scouring the internet for level-appropriate listening samples, it’s time to check out our ClearLanguages solutions. ClearLanguages is responsive to the need for i+1 input by offering hundreds of listening activities in each level of Spanish, French, Chinese, Italian, and German we offer.
Here’s what ClearLanguages gives teachers to boost student listening skills.
Each unit of our 4-level Spanish program, ¡Qué chévere!, offers 30 listening activities—10 of which are purely interpretive. The other 20 activities incorporate interpersonal and presentational speaking and writing, making them uniquely effective at building language skills across the 3 modes of communication. The ancillary listening activity workbook offers an additional 12-14 listening exercises per unit, meaning there’s at least one unique spoken text for students to engage with per day of the unit.
Our French textbook series, T’es branché?, includes 25 listening activities per unit. That’s a total of 150 unique French-language audio texts per level—a crucial resource for a language that students are unlikely to encounter outside of the classroom.
Both French and Spanish come with Destinations Library, a catalog of news articles, videos, songs, and speaking tools to boost interpretive and interpersonal skills, including speaking and listening.
In addition to Spanish and French, our German series, Deutsch So Aktuell, includes 5 listening activities per unit, while our Chinese series, Zhēn Bàng! has 8 per unit.
ClearLanguages curricula intentionally integrate diverse accents into each language solution’s listening activities, ensuring students are continually exposed to each language's linguistic diversity.
Whether it’s highlighting West African accents in French; European, South, and Central American accents in Spanish; or the diversity of European accents in German, ClearLanguages exposes students to a wide range of target language speakers.
From grab-and-go activity templates to ready-made IPAs and multiple-choice exercises, ClearLanguages offers listening activities for a wide range of topics and situations. Listening activity structures include:
Build real-world listening skills with ClearLanguages
The path to listening proficiency isn't always straight—as my "avec ceci" story illustrates. But with consistent, varied exposure to authentic language, students can develop the confidence and skills they need to understand spoken language in real-world contexts. ClearLanguages provides educators with the tools and resources they need to create these opportunities for their students, ensuring every learner has access to rich, comprehensible input that advances their language acquisition journey.
Whether you're teaching Spanish, French, German, Chinese, or Italian, ClearLanguages offers the comprehensive listening resources you need to help your students develop this crucial skill. Because at the end of the day, we want our students to do more than just recognize words on paper. Instead, we want them to engage in real-world conversations with genuine language confidently—and perhaps avoid a sauci/souci/ceci mixup like mine!
Kelly joined Carnegie Learning in 2023, bringing a decade of diverse educational experience. Her career includes one year as a high school Dean of Students and nine years teaching French at secondary and post-secondary levels. An AP French exam reader in 2017 and 2020, Kelly holds ACTFL OPI certification and is versed in various world language pedagogies, including TPRS and Organic World Language (OWL). She taught using Carnegie Learning's T'es Branché? curriculum for six years. As a content writer, Kelly is dedicated to highlighting educator experiences and empowering teachers to enhance student outcomes nationwide.
Explore more related to this authorExposure matters. You get better at understanding a language by listening to it.
Kelly Denzler
