Teaching English Toolbox - OPEN ACCESS SANDBOX

Listening

DALL E: a crazy cat listening to headphones on a skateboard surreal

Generally, when English language teachers teach listening, they focus on all or some of the following:

  • Discriminating between sounds; or
  • Comprehending information (detail or gist);
  • Critical thinking (to infer or analyze or judge).

Can you think of activities that would specifically practice these things?

There are studies (for instance, see the work of Patricia Kuhl) that show that learners react best when they are spoken directly to and that CDs are only of minimal use in the classroom. That said, they can help learners get used to various accents which is important in training listening skills.

  • The Metacognitive Listening Questionnaire is useful for teachers to take so they are aware of their own strategies and can articulate them to their learners. The full concept and expert researcher on listening in the foreign language classroom is Larry Vandergrift.
  • Randall's ESL Cyber Listening Lab is older than this toolbox developer but still seems to be useful.
  • The ListenWise tool has a free trial.
  • The presentation here can be found on the ELT Forum website which is Open Access and you can use the search filters to find more!

What are you Listening For?

Teachers need to ask themselves what learners are listening FOR, what they can DO while listening and WHY they should listen!

Following instructions!

A big reason to NOT translate into German is that you do NOT want to make your learners dependent on the German, you want to teach them to listen and follow instructions. This is in the curriculum! So NEVER translate your instructions! Use your body or provide examples on the board, and then take these "crutches" away!

Surveys
These are good for listening but what will you do with the information? If the kids ask each other "What's your favorite sort of fruit?" then at the end they should make a fruit salad for their group with the favorites!

Daily Routines
Ask children "How they are" or "What did they have for lunch" to start your lesson. Throw in questions that they have to listen  to because they change frequently! Like this you can assess listening through chit chat and this is an important part of teaching listening that transfers to the outside world!

During presentations
Why should learners listen to one another during a presentation? Give them something to do!

  • Write a quiz question;
  • Give feedback;
  • Tell the new information to someone else.

Do you have any more ideas for while-listening activities during presentations?

Sorting / Classifying / Categorizing
Have learners listen and note (or use pictures) different categories of things they hear from the sound level (all the "p" words) to the grammar level (e.g. all the verbs in the past tense). 

Using Reading Texts for Listening

Any textbook activity you do for reading can also be done for listening! Here you can have the learners close their books, listen to the text (you read it), and then answer some questions on a gist, detail and inference level.

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Bethany Hamilton

She is an American professional surfer. In 2003, when she was only 13 years old, she was attacked by a shark when she was surfing. She survived the attack but lost her left arm. After only one month she started surfing again. In her first competition against some of the world’s best women surfers, she came 2nd. In 2004 she won a special award for courage at the Teen Choice Awards. In 2011, a film called Soul Surver was made about her life and special courage.»

Source: Tomkinson, A and Lee, E. (2014). Think Global. ELI Publishing. p. 45

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You can also use the traditional procedure (pre / while content / while language / post) as well, for example:

  • Pre-Listening: Ask the learners if they know who she is or show the pictures.
  • While: Listen and note all the numbers.
  • While: Listen to answer the question "Why is she special?" or "How is her life different than yours?".
  • Post: Write one statement about what you learned for a quiz.

In this example, you can read the crossword clues out loud and have the learners write the words on a piece of paper in the same way you see it in the book! Then it's a listening activity and can be done at a later point as a reading activity!

This image was created with Bing. The original crossword puzzle about Bethany Hamilton can be found in Tomkinson, A. and Lee, E. (2014). Think Global. Italy, ELI.
  • Describe how listening should develop according to the CEFR aims for the levels you will be teaching.
  • Why should you set your aims at a higher level than what the learners are actually at?
  • What are meaningful listening strategies? How do you teach these?
  • What is different about learning to listen in English than in your mother tongue or the local language?
  • What are meaningful listening strategies? Why are strategies such as listening for parallel words problematic?
  • What listening processes (e.g. top-down / bottom up) are used in which situations? How can they be trained?
  • What are meaningful while-listening activities?
  • How can you test listening skills? What constructs can you test when you test listening? Should you test listening?
  • How is teaching listening in the classroom different from listening in the real world? How can you bridge this gap?
  • How can using subtitles support language learning (listening and reading, for example)?
  • How can you differentiate listening activities in your classroom?
  • How can you separate listening from the other skills or can you?