This document provides guidance on effective strategies for teaching listening skills to students. It discusses the challenges students face with listening comprehension and recommends pre-listening, listening, and post-listening activities. Some key strategies include activating background knowledge, predicting vocabulary, focusing on specific details after getting the overall idea, and using the transcript to check comprehension after listening.

1. IS ANYBODY LISTENING?

2. MATCHING TASK COMPLETE It is both satisfying and instructive to match what you have heard to the written word. E Students read tape script and listen at the same time. It is important to exploit the text to teach language features, and aspects which will help students better understand the text. B Teaching listening, e.g. focus on identifying specific vocabulary, expressions, problem phrases, aspects of 'ear' training, etc. Listening intensively for detail is best done after learners have gained an overall grasp of the gist. A Set intensive listening task - e.g. asking about specific details. Play complete extract and check task, re-playing sections if necessary. A very general initial task helps discourage learners from trying to listen to every word. F Set gist task, for example, Who is talking to whom, about what, and why? It helps if learners can ‘tune in’ to the recorded extract so as to get used to the voice(s), speed and so on. C Play short introduction (first few lines of recorded extract), and set easy question. It helps reduce the difficulty of listening if learners are familiar with the most important words in the text. G Pre-teach key vocabulary or predict it- for example, by writing each key word on the board and attempting to elicit a definition, example, synonym, or translation. Activating background knowledge about the topic helps make sense of the text. D Generate interest in the topic - by, for example, asking the class about their experience, feelings, or knowledge of the topic. PRINCIPLE STAGE

3. Problems for students Unfamiliar context. Unknown vocabulary. Lack of time to process information, lack of concentration and anxiety about longer texts. Too fast. Can’t distinguish separate words. Can’t follow the rhythm. Not able to recognise sense groups, inferred message, mood or intonation. Difficult accents. Background noises.

4. Listening Strategies Listening Strategies: The following strategies from Rost 1991, are considered to be the areas where we can help learners with their listening. Using background knowledge (what we already know about the content and form) and context to predict and then confirm meaning. Recognising words. Discriminating between sounds. Identifying grammatical groupings of words, e.g. perfect tenses, conditionals Identifying expressions and sets of utterances which function as a whole. Identifying paralinguistic cues (intonation, stress, weak forms, etc). Rejecting superfluous content. Recalling important words and ideas

5. Pre-Listening Activities Students Predict Topic Students predict what they expect to hear from the listening, work in pairs, and feedback ideas to the board/teacher. (Make sure you read the tapescript beforehand and you can then feed in vocabulary in your intro/lead in) Predict Vocabulary Once students know the topic of the listening, they predict words or expressions that they think they will hear. Again, write the feedback of these predictions on the board. As students listen, they should tick the words they find. Which pair predicted the most words?

6. Pre-Listening Activities Vocabulary selection/sort In this activity, the students are given a group of words, some of which are from the listening, others are not. The students decide which ones are from the listening. Sentence selection This is the same as vocabulary selection, but students sort sentences instead. Get students to read the text first This is very good for students who have big problems with listening (the hard of hearing, for example): they can read at home before the class.

7. Pre-Listening Activities Tune in Learners need what John Field describes as ‘normalisation’ before attempting a challenging comprehension task. To help students you can include tune in as a step in many of the recordings. This is a short extract, usually from the beginning of a recording, which learners listen to before they hear the main extract and before doing the comprehension task. The aim is to help learners to tune into / adjust to the speakers’ voices and the context. For example: You’re going to listen to Colin on the phone to a friend, Diana. Listen to the beginning of the conversation. 1 Did Colin expect Diana to ring? 2 Does he sound pleased? Learners are eased into the listening by a fairly undemanding task which focuses on the voices. In addition, they only hear a very short extract (about ten seconds), just enough to acclimatize to the voices and context.

8. Post-Listening Students work together It isn’t a test, so get students to confer and help each other. Obviously they can’t listen together but can compare what (they think) they’ve heard after every listening. A great confidence builder and useful for you too. When a student calls out the answer also ask the others if they agree. Don’t accept the right answer from the strongest student and then go on to the next question. Ask for suggested answers from everyone without indicating which ones are correct at this stage. Let them listen and check. In the previous exercise they will have checked only in pairs.

9. Use the Tapescript The following examples are taken from ‘Natural English

10. Use the Tapescript

11. Use the Tapescript

12. Use the Tapescript

13. Use the Tapescript Listening Cloze The listening text has occasional brief gaps, represented by silence or some kind of buzz or even a nonsense word. Students write down what they think might be the missing word. Remember that if the text is recorded (not teacher speaking) then the gaps have to much more widely spaced than in a reading text; otherwise there is not enough time to listen, understand, think of an answer, and write. You could also write the missing words / phrases at the bottom of the tapescript to check later or to give learners more help.

14. Post-Listening Focus on problem phrases. In open class build up what students have heard on the board in a kind of mini-dictation approach. Play the sentence or phrase several times, writing up words students have heard correctly as you go along, discarding wrong ones and indicating missing words with a line. Helps solve mysteries or mishearing. So for example with the following sentence Are you going to do any travelling while you’re there? After the first listening you might have Are you going….. travelling……. there? Then they listen again and call out the missing words and at the end practise saying it as on the recording.

15. Post-Listening Count the number of words Play a short phrase and ask learners to say how many words they have heard. The teacher could also read out a number of sentences and do the same, remember to read out the sentences naturally and include aspects such as weak forms. Learners can be asked to compare in pairs before listening again and seeing the tapescript. Transformations Transform these sentences. The meaning must stay the same. Then check while you are listening to find the transformations, e.g. It will have a big effect on peoples’ lives It will make ____________________________ (a big difference to people’s lives). We’ll give you the information you need. We’ll tell you __________________________ (whatever you need to know)

16. Post-Listening Use of Context, Content Stop the tape before the speaker has finished and ask learners to provide a plausible continuation. Learners should be guided to use any clues available to them. Such clues are: the situation, what has been said so far, the stressed words, the speaker's tone of voice etc. Use the tapescript As a final listening and reading activity use the tapescript. Play the extract again after they know the answer to ensure they do hear it in the end – this is very satisfying. It also helps with pronunciation issues.

17. Post-Listening Dictogloss This classic technique originally came from Ruth Wajnyrb’s book ‘Grammar Dictation’. The first step is that students listen to a text read aloud by the teacher and do a comprehension task as in a typical listening lesson. This is checked and perhaps any vocabulary central to the meaning is pre-taught. The text is then read a further two times and students note down key content words and working in small groups, try to piece together the text. They do this by pooling together their words and notes and making grammatical decisions about the text; specifically about word choice, sentence formation, etc. Finally, after each group has produced its own version of the text, the whole class comes together and the groups’ versions are compared with the original, analysed and corrected.

18. Post-Listening