Listening is where language teachers really see a difference when using Captur paddles. In the broadest sense of listening, we mean that we want all of the students to listen to the content of the lesson, all the time. Too often in language classes, students are tempted to shift their attention away from the teacher if the students feel that they're not going to be held personally responsible for paying attention. For example, if I call on Junichi to answer a question, he may then feel "off the hook" for the next question that I pose to the class, because he's pretty sure that I won't call on him again without calling on some other students first. When we play audio for listening activities, some students tune out, secure in the belief that the teacher probably will not figure this out. With Captur, though, every student can be told to respond to every question, or have some responsive action while listening, and thus we motivate them to pay attention to what's being said.
In groups, students create their own surveys to give to the rest of the class. They make predictions ahead of time about which option will be the most popular. Afterwards, they compare their predictions with the actual data they've collected.
Students can have fun making trivia questions, asking them to their classmates and recording the responses. This article goes with a photocopiable worksheet that you can use with your students.
The regular past tense in English is formed by adding "ed" to the verb. This past tense regular verb ending has three distinct sounds ("t", "d", and "id"). Captur is an ideal way for teachers to find out how well their students understand these sounds.
It's usually pretty difficult for my Japanese students to make the distinction between "thirteen" and "thirty", even at the lower intermediate level. Often, when they say a number like 16, it sounds like "sixty", and when you repeat the number in English to confirm it ("Did you say sixty?"), they say "yes, 16." This page talks about using Captur Paddles with words that sound similar.
When the textbook has listening comprehension or reading comprehension activities that feature three correct and one false answer, it can be a challenge to elicit students' answers in class in a way that helps you understand how well each of the students have done on the activity. But when students show their answers with their Captur paddles, you get an answer out of every student, and you will know how unanimous (or not) the consensus is.
Most English conversation textbooks contain model dialogs for students to practice. Usually, these model dialogs are included on a course CD or as a downloadable mp3 file. Here are some ideas about using Captur to focus students' attention while they listen to these dialogs. The point here is to focus students' attention on the dialog they're supposed to be listening to. The teacher shouldn't try to get perfect responses from the students; it's enough to know that they're all staying attentive to the dialog (and, with Captur, the teacher can see how well they're doing).
This activity is more challenging for students, because it checks their understanding of the sentences while also asking them to process some new information. If the textbook contains sentences that the students have just finished working on, then the teacher reads out a sentence in the first person, and adds a second sentence. Students use Captur paddles to let you know if the second sentence logically follows from the first, or at least shares a logical connection.
This listening activity draws on the expiences of the teacher. Prepare some statments (or even short stories) about yourself, but include some that are false. This activity has three different options for including students in discussions before answering.
Use this when the textbook or workbook has a list of sentences that the students have worked on. If you do this before the class-wide speaking activity, it's a good warm-up to check their understanding of the items. If you do it afterwards, it's a good follow-up to review all of the items. You will read out the sentences, and students use their Captur paddles to let you know if the sentence is true about them, or not.
