Listening

Your challenge as a teacher is to develop listening activities in the classroom which try to imitate real-life listening circumstances and thus help develop students’ abilities to cope with them and improve comprehension.

 Some important features to think about:

• Chunks or phrases that don’t make sense out of context
• Words are often pronounced differently than how they are written, e.g. "I'm going to..." becomes "I'm gonna..."
• Features of connected speech; intonation, missing out of syllables, sounds, etc.
• Grammar - informal speech is often ungrammatical.
• Conversations contain lots of fillers, e.g. "I mean... Well, ..."
• “Paralinguistic” clues like facial expressions and body language.
• Usually the speaker directs the conversation at the listener and responds depending on how much the listener has understood.

Remember these qualities when devising listening activities in class. They will help the activities to be more authentic and useful to the student.

Specific listening activities for use in the classroom

• Songs
• Course book tapes
• Video

 
Ideas for listening lessons

Different types of listening tasks for “detailed” understanding
Students will need to listen to a recording at least two times. The first time is called a “gist listening” and is carried out to help students understand the main/general ideas in a text. The second time students listen they have to focus on the specific details in the text. One way to help them do this is to provide them with a thorough list of questions that we have them read through before having them listen to a text a second time. However, there are more ways we can help students understand the details of a listening text and it is nice to change your approach from one lesson to the next in order to keep students interested. Certain texts will lend themselves more to certain tasks as you will see below.

• Filling in gaps/closes
• Ticking off items you hear
• Listening for mistakes
• Note-taking
• Summarising
• Guessing meanings
• Paraphrasing (saying the information in a different way)
• True/false
• Filling in information: i.e. list, timetable, a blank clock face, etc.

 
 Using songs
Songs are great fun and a valuable language resource. You can use them to consolidate grammatical structures, vocabulary and to practice the musical rhythm of the English language. Here are some examples of how songs can be used in the classroom to work on different language areas.

Then make sure you and the class have a sing song at the end!