Understanding emotions (CAE Listening)

Part four of CAE Listening involves matching two lists of words or phrases to five short extracts that students hear twice. I've noticed that the second list more often than not is a list of emotions, but since lists of emotions and feelings reach the hundreds (if you google them), how can ensure that my students can cope with this task?

I've noticed that certain emotion feature more often than others. 'Resignation', for example, seems to pop up regularly, and this is not something I can assume my students know, so I decided that their attention needs to be drawn to some words explicitly. I am not against telling exam classes: Learn this word because I've seen it ten times on an exam paper! Not a meaningful way of dealing with the word, but at least it's effective.

Just asking students to learn a list of emotions may help them to expand their productive vocabulary, but it may not help them complete the task any better. Why not, if they understand all the words?

The greatest problem with defining emotions is that many are very similar, and the strength of an emotion may vary from person to person. To understand intensity, we brainstormed synonyms for common, general emotions, eg. sad, happy, hurt, confused, and then tried to agree on a ranking from most extreme to least.

But how can I be sure that my students understand the fine distinctions between words, eg. the difference between despair and helplessness?

If I had more time and better resources, I would use a corpus to show a variety of situations in which an emotion is used. As I don't, I decided to ask the students to try to get inside the feeling themself

The task:

• We studied the exam task: Decide in which sport the speaker had an accident, and how he felt at the time.
• We predicted: If I had an accident parachuting, I wouldn't feel hope, I would feel terror... etc.
• We carried out the task and checked it.
• We wrote emotions on slips of paper, put them in a hat and drew one out in secret.
• Students created a personal story of about 30 seconds to describe this emotion without using the word or its synonyms.
• The class guessed which emotion was illustrated.

On the surface, this looks like just a repetition of the exam task, but the key here was that students had to fully understand the nuances of 'their' emotion in order for the others to guess correctly. If they misunderstood their word, they chose expressions which were not quite accurate enough, and the class failed to come to the right conclusion. From the teacher's point of view, it was very clear which students didn't quite understand the word and which words caused more problems than others.

We will spend more time on the contexts for these emotions, and then repeat this task at a later date. Hopefully their stories will be more exact.

Successes: I was impressed by my youngest student illustrating petrified by: 'I couldn't move, I was turned to stone!' None of the class were aware that the origin of this word lies in the Greek for stone!

'Overwhelmed' seems to be used at lot in my class, but never quite right, until today, when I muttered at a student who was going on and on about Czech beer, 'Alcoholic!', at which her jaw dropped in amazement and her eyes almost popped out, and the rest of the class pointed at her and shouted: 'Overwhelmed!!!'