I finally got around to testing Sundol's listening skills for the first time during our second tutoring session. He came to my apartment so that we would be able to hear the text as loud as we wanted without bothering anyone nearby.
The lesson seemed to be pretty successful. I centered the session around a YouTube video by YouTubers H3H3, a married couple, Ethan and Hila who put out silly, funny videos, but also some that tell more serious stories of things that happened in their life. The video is titled "We Used to be Drug Dealers" and details an experience the two had some years ago when their finances were in such bad shape that they resorted to selling marijuana. Still not completely sure of where Sundol's skill level lies, I left the closed captions on throughout the video. I picked the video mainly because:
-The story is told in a casual manner, littered with swear words and commonly-used expressions
-English is spoken in two different accents, with Ethan's California accent and Hila's Israeli accent
-The speech of each story-teller contains complex sentences, yet is spoken at a deliberate enough speed for my student's skill-level
We watched the video all the way through, and then I had some context-based questions prepared to ask Sundol to make sure he understood what the pair talked about in the video, which he answered almost flawlessly. I took this as a sign that if I do a similar exercise next time, I might want to leave the captions off so that he can focus better on just listening, since it was probably too easy for him.
I also prepared a transcript of sections of the video with blanks on some of the words for Sundol to fill in. I also prepared a vocabulary sheet, stocked with plenty of different variations of four-lettered words used in the video.
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