A few years ago, while teaching Spanish 4, I worked through the Música Originaria unit from Huellas — Carrie Toth’s curriculum from Somewhere to Share, sold through The Comprehensible Classroom. If you don’t know Huellas, go find it. One of the things I loved about the unit was how many simple ideas it gave me for working with video and listening in class.
And I mean simple.
These weren’t elaborate listening stations. Nothing that took an hour to prep. Most of them were just: take the content of a video, give students a very specific reason to listen.
That distinction has stuck with me. And I owe it to that unit.
“Listen to this video” isn’t much of a task.
Listen to figure out which statement is true is.
Looking back at these activities now, I realize they were pushing me toward something else too — something I’ve become a lot more intentional about since. Listening tasks can do more than check comprehension. They can create repeated chances for learners to process a meaningful form–meaning connection without turning the lesson into a grammar exercise.
That’s the twist I’d add today. The four activities below are straight from that Huellas unit — the credit is Carrie’s, the twist at the end is mine.
1. Pre-Listening with Whiteboards
Who doesn’t love a whiteboard?
I’d always used them with beginners, especially when introducing new language. Say or show something in Spanish, students demonstrate what they understood, I immediately see where comprehension is breaking down.
I’d mostly stopped doing that with my upper-level classes. No good reason. It’s simple, it works, and somewhere along the way I decided advanced students didn’t need it anymore. They did.
For this activity, I pulled several important phrases from the upcoming video and worked through them one at a time before students watched. Students wrote what they thought each phrase meant on their whiteboards in English, showed me their answers, got feedback immediately.
The important part wasn’t really the whiteboard.
It was the selection of the language.
I wanted phrases that carried important meaning in the video. Not random vocabulary that happened to show up in it.
Working one phrase at a time also let us stay with the language longer. Instead of:
They understood it. Great. Next.
I could ask another question, change one piece of information, connect it to something students already knew, reuse the phrase somewhere else.
Useful reminder: upper-level students still need repeated, comprehensible exposure. They just need more interesting language to process it with.
2. 7 of 10
This one is ridiculously easy.
Write ten statements about the listening in English — or whatever language you and your students share. Only seven actually happen. Students listen and identify which seven.
That’s it.
But the design does real work. Students aren’t trying to understand every word. They’re listening for meaning and testing it against possible interpretations. Make the wrong statements almost right — the tradition began in the north, not the south — and now students have a reason to listen closely instead of waiting to hear a word they recognize.
For quick finishers, I added one more layer: What did you hear that supports your answer? A word, a phrase, whatever helped them decide. Same task for everyone, one more rung for the kids who needed it.
3. Which Do You Hear?
Same principle, narrower lens. Instead of ten statements, one detail at a time, two possible readings:
A. The musicians perform only during religious festivals.
B. The musicians perform during religious festivals and community celebrations.
Students pick which one they actually heard.
The trick is making both options plausible. One ridiculous answer and students don’t have to process anything. Two options that differ by one meaningful detail, and suddenly there’s a reason to listen carefully.
This is where I now see the clearer link to Structured Input. It’s not:
Did you hear this word?
It’s:
Which meaning did the language communicate?
That difference matters.
4. The Splits
This one moves a little closer to the language itself.
Take several sentences from the video, split them in half. Beginnings:
La música tradicional se desarrolló…
Los músicos utilizan…
La celebración representa…
Endings, shuffled:
A. instrumentos hechos a mano.
B. una conexión importante con la comunidad.
C. durante varios siglos.
Students match halves as they listen.
I do this after students already understand the video generally. Otherwise it turns into a sound-matching game — I heard música, there’s música on the paper! — and that’s not the point.
Once they’ve got the general message, The Splits gets them to notice how that meaning actually gets expressed. Meaning first. Form second. Not because form doesn’t matter, but because form is only useful once learners have something meaningful to hang it on.
What I’d Add Now: Let the Authentic Text Carry the Form
I did a lesson recently with Juanes’s A Dios le pido that pushed this further. The song is basically built for it.
Over and over, Juanes uses the same frame: pedir + que + a desired action or state. The frame holds still, the meaning moves — family, love, life, time, eventually his country.
We didn’t start with the grammar. We started with what he asked of others. First listen: Who is he talking to? What does he want? Then students read the lyrics and sorted what he asked into categories of their own choosing. Family. Love. Life. Country. Whatever made sense to them.
That sorting task was the whole lesson. They were rereading the same grammatical frame again and again, but the task was about meaning, every time.
Only after they’d spent real time interpreting what Juanes asked of others did I project an enhanced version of the text and ask: What keeps repeating?
At that point they couldn’t not see it. And the explanation took one sentence: This is how we talk about what we want someone, or something, else to do for us.
No paradigm. No verb chart. No twenty-minute subjunctive lecture. The text had already done the work.
The Twist
That lesson clarified something for me: I don’t need to change the activities. I need to change what I’m looking for when I design them.
Not just how do I help students understand this video, also is there a useful form–meaning connection already sitting inside this text?
If there is, I can sequence the listening so students hit it again and again while doing actual interpretive work: understand the message, make a meaning-based distinction, go back to find what carried that meaning, notice the form that keeps showing up, then reuse it themselves.
That last step doesn’t need to be elaborate. In the Juanes lesson, students used a fixed frame and a word bank to write a few things they ask of others: Yo le pido a ___ que ___. The production came after a flood of input, supported enough that students could think about meaning instead of scrambling for a conjugation.
Repeated Listening Needs a New Job
This is still the biggest thing I take from all of this.
Repeated listening works better when each listen has a different job. First listen: What is this mostly about? Next: Which of these ideas did the speaker actually mention? Then: Which detail is correct? Then: How would you organize the speaker’s ideas? Finally: What language keeps appearing when the speaker expresses that meaning?
The audio hasn’t changed. The reason for listening has.
That’s the difference between “we’re listening again because you didn’t get it” and “we’re listening again because there’s something new to figure out.”
And sometimes, if you pick the text carefully, students end up processing the same grammatical relationship a dozen times before anyone ever says the word grammar.