Colouring the wrong shoe: two-attribute instructions in Listening Part 4
Listening Part 4 of a Pre A1 Starters mock asks children to colour five objects in a park scene. The recording says: 'Can you see the shoe? The small shoe, next to the door. Colour it brown.' Amir, aged 7, colours the big shoe by the window blue and leaves the small shoe white. Across the five items he scores 2/5. He knows red, blue, green, yellow and black; brown, grey and purple are new this term. His class teacher reports that numbers 1-20 are secure and that he is left-handed and often swaps left and right in PE. He is quiet in class but has attended 22 of 24 sessions. His parents want him entered for the exam in eight weeks. You have the colouring sheet and a box of 12 crayons, and you can change the plan for the next six lessons.
1. Analyse what Amir processed in the instruction, and say what the error pattern tells you.
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What he acted on. He heard the object noun ('shoe') and that a colour was wanted. He did not act on either the size ('small') or the locator ('next to the door') - he chose the big shoe by the window instead.
Two candidate causes, and how to tell them apart.
- Colour vocabulary. Brown is new. If the two items he got right used red and green, and every brown/grey/purple item is wrong, vocabulary is a large part of the problem.
- Holding the instruction. He also lost size and locator, which colour vocabulary cannot explain. That points to listening for one key word, colouring, and stopping - the rest of the sentence is not being held long enough to scan the picture.
Most likely both are present, but the size and locator errors show the strategy problem is the bigger one.
What this is not. It is not a general 'poor listener' label. He is finding the referent, which is the hardest part; he is simply not yet carrying three pieces of information to the picture.
2. Design a ten-minute activity and a success criterion for it.
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Pre-teach (2 minutes). Real crayons: hold up brown, say 'brown', children hold up brown and say it. Same for grey and purple. Nothing written.
Barrier game (6 minutes). Pairs sit with identical park scenes and a screen between them; each has crayons.
- Round 1, one attribute: 'Colour the tree green.'
- Round 2, two attributes: 'Colour the small tree green.'
- Round 3, three attributes: 'Colour the small tree next to the door green.'
Model the routine first: hold it, say it, then colour. The listener repeats the whole instruction aloud before picking up a crayon. This converts memory into something you can hear and correct.
Success criterion. On a fresh scene with different objects, 4/5 items correct, with at least three items containing two attributes, and Amir can repeat an instruction of eight or more words accurately before acting on it. Repeating correctly but colouring wrongly would mean a scanning problem; colouring wrongly and repeating wrongly means the memory routine has not yet taken.
3. His teacher mentions left-handedness and left-right swapping. Should that shape your plan, and should you reuse the same colouring sheet next week?
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Handedness: no. The instruction said 'next to the door', not 'on the left'. The errors are on size and colour, not on sidedness. Building a remediation around left and right would spend lessons on a difficulty the task does not test, and would leave the real gap untouched. Note the observation and move on.
Reusing the sheet: no, but keep the format. In week two the children will remember their own colouring and the answer, so the task would sample memory, not listening. Make a parallel scene - different objects, different colours, same instruction language and same five-item shape - so Amir practises the format while being tested on the language. Keep one identical-format run for the week before the exam so the paper looks familiar and nerves do not distort the result.
What to record. Per item: object found, size applied, locator applied, colour correct. Four small ticks per item shows you whether the barrier game is moving all three, or only the colour vocabulary you pre-taught.