Different kinds of practice techniques  for listening activities

Listening

Listening is the activity of paying attention to and trying to get meaning from something we hear. Listening supposes three main stages: pre-listening activities, while-listening activities and post-listening activities.

Pre-listening work can be done in a variety of ways and often occurs quite naturally when listening forms part of an integrated skills course.

Typology of pre-listening activities

Looking at pictures and talking about them.

(Students are asked to look at a picture or pictures. You may want to assist by checking that the students can name the items which will feature in the listening text. This can be done by question and answer or by general or group discussion.)

Looking at a list of items/ thoughts.

(This type of activity is particularly helpful for practicing newly learned vocabulary with early learners. It could, for example, be a list on which certain items/ ideas will be ticked/ circled/ underlined at the while-listening stage.)

Making lists of possibilities/ ideas/ suggestions.

(When a listening text contains lists of possibilities/ ideas/ suggestions or whatever, it is often a good idea to use list-making as a pre-listening activity and then the students can use their own lists as the basis for a while-listening activity.)

Reading a text.

(Frequently, students can be asked to read a text before listening and then to check certain facts while listening. This type of activity is popular with students who feel more secure when they have a printed text in front of them.)

Reading through questions (to be answered while listening).

(Many listening activities require students to answer questions based on the information they hear. It is very helpful for the students to see the questions before they begin listening to the text.)

Labelling a picture.

(It is suitable for pairwork and can generate a lot of discussion. The pre-listening part consists of endeavouring to label a picture or a diagram.)

Completing part of the chart.

(This activity can get the students involved in a personal way if they are invited to fill in their own views, judgements or preferences. For example, the information may be presented in jumbled order, and so students need to move up and down the printed list quite rapidly.)

Predicting/ speculating.

(Students can be told something about the speakers and the topic and then asked to suggest what they are likely to hear in the listening text.)

Pre-viewing language.

(There are sometimes occasions when you have a listening text which provides a good example of the use of particular language forms in an 'authentic' situation and which you want to use because your class has recently studied these forms. Although you will not wish to neglect the content, using an interesting topic, you may want to focus on the language itself.)

Informal teacher talk and class discussion.

(The teachers give their students some background information, begin to talk about the topic and indicate what the students should expect to hear.)

While-listening activities

While-listening activities are what students are asked to do during the time that they are listening to the text.

Typology of while-listening activities

Marking/ checking items in pictures

(This type of while-listening activity is good for helping students to focus on the listening itself, because they are not distracted by the need to try to write down words.)

Matching pictures with what is heard.

(Students hear a description or a conversation and have to decide, from the selection offered, which picture is the "right" one. The most common pictures used are drawings/ photos of people or scenes, indoors or out of doors.)

Storyline picture sets.

(Two or three sets of, usually, three or I four picture are presented to the students who then listen to a story, either j read by a teacher or on tape, and try to decide which set of pictures represents the story.)

Putting pictures in order.

(A number of pictures are presented to the students. The aim is to arrange the pictures in the correct order according to the text. It is important not to have too many pictures which cannot be put in order easily without listening at all.)

Completing pictures.

(Having looked at the basic outline of the picture, a student is required to follow the instructions and draw in (or colour) various items. This activity is popular with younger students and is particularly useful at the very early stages of learning when the level of difficulty can be kept very low.)

Picture drawing.

Making models/ arranging items in patterns.

(You can provide each student with four or five pencils or different shaped \ pieces of paper and then give instructions on how they are to be laid out on the students' desks.)

Following a route.

Form/ chart completion.

(Students are required to take information from the text and use it in various kinds of written/ drawn completion exercises.)

Labelling.

(Quite frequently, in lessons other than English, students label diagrams/ pictures to enable learning and remembering various parts of a leaf or an engine or whatever.)

Using lists.

(A popular while-listening activity consists of making a list, often a shopping list or a list of places to visit.)

True/ false.

Multiple-choice questions.

Text completion (gap-filling).

(Completing lines of poetry or the lines of songs is often fun for students, and pre-listening can be done on making guesses, using the rhyming system or rhythm as clues.)

Spotting mistakes.

(This activity can be based on a picture, a printed text or simply facts established orally at the pre-listening stage.

You talk about the picture, making some deliberate mistakes, and the students are required to indicate each time that they spot a mistake.)

Predicting.

(Predicting can be used at the pre-listening stage to give students the opportunity to speculate on what they might expect to hear in any given situation.)

Seeking specific items of information.

(Students are asked to find the answers to series of questions by listening to a range of receded texts.)

The post-listening stage

Post-listening activities embrace all the work related to particular listening text (whether recorded or spoken by the teacher) which are done after the listening is completed.

Typology of post-listening activities

Form/ chart completion.

Extending lists.

(The students are asked to make a list or tick/check a list while listening, and then to add to it after the listening is finished.)

Sequencing/ "grading".

(Students may be asked to 'put in order, from the most liked to the least liked" six jobs that the speaker has to do.)

Matching with a printed text.

Extending notes into written responses.

Summarising.

(Can be done by extending notes made at the while-listening stage or by simply depending on memory.)

Using information from the text for problem solving and decision-making activities.

(Students can be asked to collect information from a text, or from a text and other sources as well (e. g. a reading text/ pictures/ a chart) and apply the information to the solution of a problem or as the basis for a decision.)

Jigsaw listening.

Identifying relationships between speakers.

Establishing the mood/ attitude/ behaviour of the speaker.

Role-play simulation.

(Role play and simulation are activities which can be based on a number of different stimuli: role cards, stories, characters seen on television, etc., as well as listening passages.)

Dictation.

Listening should be looked upon not as an appendage, but as an integral part of the total package of learning, sometimes leading to and sometimes emerging from other work.