Objective A: Comprehending spoken and visual text
According to the MYP language acquisition guide (2014):
“Comprehending spoken and visual text encompasses aspects of listening and viewing, and involves the student in constructing meaning and interpreting spoken and visual text to understand how images presented with oral text interplay to convey ideas, values and attitudes. Engaging with text requires the student to think creatively and critically about what is viewed, and to be aware of opinions, attitudes and cultural references presented in the visual text. The student might, for example, reflect on feelings and actions, imagine himself or herself in another’s situation, gain new perspectives and develop empathy, based on what he or she has understood in the text.”
“Comprehending spoken and visual text encompasses aspects of listening and viewing, and involves the student in constructing meaning and interpreting spoken and visual text to understand how images presented with oral text interplay to convey ideas, values and attitudes. Engaging with text requires the student to think creatively and critically about what is viewed, and to be aware of opinions, attitudes and cultural references presented in the visual text. The student might, for example, reflect on feelings and actions, imagine himself or herself in another’s situation, gain new perspectives and develop empathy, based on what he or she has understood in the text.”
As appropriate to the phase, the student is expected to be able to:
- listen for specific purposes and respond to show understanding
- interpret visual text that is presented with spoken text
- engage with the text by supporting opinion and personal response with evidence and examples from the text.
Here is my interpretation of the passage:
Notes:
- Videos with scripts should be considered as written and visual texts, but not spoken and visual texts as students will be reading the text.
- There is no requirement regarding how long the text should be, as long as the text is complex enough and the language is at an appropriate level to allow students achieve the highest band level of the criterion.
- The design of the comprehension questions should allow the progression of thinking.
- Unlike criterion B (comprehending written and visual text), students might not be able to go back and relisten to the text again. A lot of concentration will be needed for completing the task. Students must be explicitly taught how to take notes in sequential order to help them identify main ideas, supporting details, cause and effect, author’s point of view and so on in a text.
- Sufficient formative assessment tasks should be used to help students develop active listening skills and making sense of the oral text and visual text.
- Multimedia authentic texts are strongly recommended to help students develop skills of this objective.
- Since students are required to use their creative and critical thinking skills to understand what is heard and viewed, the two thinking skills must be explicitly taught in conjunction with communication skills.
Objective A for specific phases
Hi, thanks a lot for your blog and your ideas. I’m a MYP Spanish teacher. I’d like to know your interpretation of the use of the target language (compulsory? optional?), both for the questions and the answers.
Thank you!
Gari
Hi Garikoitz,
I think students in the Emergent Phase should be allow to their best language to answer the comprehension tasks. The objective is to measure their understanding in responding to the written or aural comprehension task, but not their productive language skills. Having said that, it is understood that students can’t just know how to read the questions in the target language when they enter the Capable Phases. There must be a plan in place to help students understand the questions and provide answers in the target language.
When doing inquiry in the class. students are also allow to use their best language to negotiate meaning and express their thoughts and opinions. Teachers can then supplement the vocabulary needed to help them further express themselves in the target language.
Hope this helps.
Alison
Hello Dear Alison, I hope you are great. I found your information extremely useful and accurate. I would like to know more specifically about Aii. I still do not have clear what conventions are in the spoken and visual text. I would appreciate a lot your help on this.
Thanks in advance.
Dear Dani,
Thank you for the message. I highly encourage to check out the Programme Resource Center (PRC) and check out the Teacher Support Materials. Lots of examples can be found regarding designing questions about conventions in aural comprehension tasks. Here are some examples for Phase 2:
Why has this video been created? What are some of the features that make you think this? Does the text present an idea or information about something?
Students are also expected to deduce the meaning of words and images from their context and identify the type of audio-visual text and its purpose and audience.
Briefly describe the features of the audio-visual text.
In two sentences, identify the type of audio-visual text and its basic purpose. (The answer could be something like: “It is a political campaign. The speaker wants us to vote for her.”)
These types of questions can help teachers identify conventions in audio-visual text.
Hope this helps.
Alison
I’m new to teaching MYP, teaching German and Japanese. Most of my students are Phase 1 or Phase 2. Do you have any suggestions for where to find good, spoken and visual texts that are at an appropriate language level? The things that come to mind are usually not accessible to students just starting their language learning and the readily available course books in my country are rather lacking in the viewing materials… they tend to be just audio.
I’m grateful for any advice or suggestions.
Dear Kirsty,
Selecting authentic materials without modification that are suitable for Phase 1-2 students can sometimes be challenging in my experience. FluentU (www.fluentu.com) is a place to look for resources. I found some German resources here: http://www.lindaegnatz.com/authentic-resources.html. I can’t comment on the resources for German, but the resources for Chinese are helpful. Sometimes it’s also useful to check in the local embassy or the target language cultural center for language materials.
Hope this helps.
Alison
Hello!
I have a questions about criterion A, but not audio. Can it be a comprehension of picture? I heard that both Criterion A and B can be illustrated in pictures.
Thank you.
Hi Alice,
I am not sure what your heard, but I will always refer back to the guide. Regarding criterion A, it says that “Texts used for the listening task should be spoken multimodal texts. This means that the texts should have the spoken mode and other modes such as visual still images or visual moving images.” (MYP Language Acquisition Guide September 2020, page 39).
Going back to your question, comprehension of picture is not a problem as long as there is an audio text for students to interact. Students need to interpret how different modes interact with each other. (e.g. How does specific music matches with the title in a youtube video? How why did the vlogger choose this image or video footage to express the topic?)
Hope this helps.
Alison