Simple steps to improve listening skills

Greetings to everyone

Listening comprehension is an important part of language learning. By developing the ability to listen well and hear accurately students are much more likely to be able to reproduce accurately, refine their understanding of grammar and develop their own vocabulary. In today’s newsletter, you can find some useful activities and techniques on how to boost your students’ listening skills.

Simple steps to improve listening skills in adult learners

Language learners often think that all their difficulties in listening are due to their inadequate knowledge of the target language. However, native speakers also experience problems with listening. We as their teachers have to make our students aware of all the processes involved in listening.

WHAT MAKES A GOOD LISTENER?

‘Being a good listener involves collaborating with speakers and taking an active role in asking for clarification when you do not understand. Some native speakers, particularly children and teenagers, are quite shy about doing this. Effective listening also involves empathizing with the speaker and trying to see things from his/her point of view,’ writes Goodith White in her book. 

'Small bits' of listening such as recognizing particular sounds or words in the stream of speech, identifying word and sentence stress, or recognizing and understanding the function of particular intonation patterns are often referred to as 'bottom-up'. To distinguish them from 'top-down' listening, in which listeners use more global clues to meaning, such as their knowledge of the topic or the way in which a particular kind of spoken text is typically organized. Of course, good listeners combine both levels of listening to help them to understand what is being said, but in teaching, it is sometimes useful to focus on one of the levels in a particular class.

ACTIVITIES

Most teachers tend to follow a number of familiar steps in a 'listening lesson', which have become comfortable and routine: 

• do a 'warm-up' on the topic of the listening passage
• set some 'gist' questions for the students to answer
• play the track, and ask the students to answer gist questions
• check the answers
• set some tasks that require the students to listen for details
• play the track again, probably once for each task
• check the answers
• use the topic or the language of the listening text as input for an 'extension' or 'transfer' activity in which the students use other skills, for example, writing, or speaking.

Watch trainer Dede Wilson demonstrate pre- and post-listening activities that will help your students get the most out of listening exercises in class:

The listening activities we offer today are designed to help the students become aware of the social and psychological aspects of the listening skill, which are often ignored when teaching the skill in the second language. They will also demonstrate timesaving strategies such as predicting what will be said next and inferring meaning. There are a number of activities which focus on identifying individual words in the stream of speech and 'chunking', as well as on intonation, individual sounds, and other aspects of ‘bottom-up’ listening.

Sounds of silence

This activity can be done at any level in order to learn to focus totally on listening and to improve concentration.

Ask the students to close their eyes and concentrate totally for 30 seconds on listening to see how many sounds they can hear, e.g. footsteps in the corridor, a ticking clock, someone's stomach rumbling, etc. You will tell them when the 30 seconds are up.  Ask the students what sounds they heard. After that, ask the students to listen again with their eyes closed. This time you are going to perform an action, and they have to guess what you are doing from the sound they hear. Some suggestions are:

• writing on the board
• crumpling some paper and throwing it in the bin
• opening the window
• eating a sweet and crumpling the wrapper
• jumping on the spot 
• drinking some water from a glass
• pushing a chair under a desk
• drumming your fingers on the desk.

This is also a good warmer to start a listening skills lesson.

Up the garden path

This will encourage the students of all levels to predict what they will hear next. 

Tell the students that you are going to tell them a story and that you will pause every now and then to ask them what they think is going to happen next. It might be a good idea to do a trial run first: read out the first sentence and elicit suggestions for what might come next.  

Tell the story, pausing to let the students make their predictions.  You can pre-teach some vocabulary and ask the students what they think the story is going to be about based on those words.

People’s sounds

Prepare pictures of some unknown people, one picture is enough for two or three students. Prepare one picture yourself, by selecting a sound you want to focus on and constructing an imaginary description of job, hobbies, likes and dislikes, and so on, for the person in the picture. The sound should appear frequently in the description. For example, you could choose the sound /i:/ and your description could be something like this:

Taken from Listening (Oxford Resource Books for Teachers) by Goodith White, 1998, p.58

Explain to the students that you are going to describe a person's lifestyle and you want them to guess which sound you are focusing on. Hold up your picture and describe the person in it, while the students try to guess the sound. You may have to read the description more than once. 

After that, divide the students into pairs, and give each pair a picture. Ask the students to write a brief description of the lifestyle of the person in their picture, focusing on a particular sound. The pairs should take it in turns to read out their descriptions while the rest of the class try to guess the sound they were focusing on.

Filtered listening

We also need to help our students pick out important information in a situation with background noise. 

Find two listening passages of roughly equal length from the coursebook which the students did some time ago. One should be of male voices, the other, female. Write five comprehension questions to go with each passage. Make enough copies of each set of questions for half the class.

Divide the class into two halves and distribute each set of questions to half the class. Tell the students that they must listen and answer the questions for their listening passage. The problem will be that there will be two passages playing at the same time, and they must try to ignore the other passage and just concentrate on their own.  Play the two passages simultaneously while the students try to do their task. You will probably need to play the tapes several times.

From Grade Education Center