Matthew Walsh's
EFL ESL website
Stages for
a listening lesson.
Listening classes
can be very boring, yet listening is the most basic and necessary skill
for the learner. If you set the tasks out clearly step by step, the
learner can be truly involved and motivated. Here are some stages of a
listening lesson that I have found very usefull to keep the pace up,
and maintain a coherence to a lesson.
1)
Introduction of topic.
The teacher says, or does something to get the students
interested in the topic and set the context. This could be a picture,
illustration, or a set of questions to the whole group. The idea here
is to give the students some idea of what the listening will be about.
2)
Pre-teaching vocab key to comprehension.
The teacher introduces vocabulary items needed for the listening
tasks. These would be vocabulary items that you could easily
identify as beyond their level, but necessary to understand the
passage. Difficult vocabulary items that are not relevant to
understanding the main point of the passage, or are not related to key
information that you may ask for later (Listening for detail) should be
ignored. Click here for an easy example of a vocab pre-teach activity.
This activity is merely a preparation for the listening, and
should be completed in 5 minutes or so. DonŐt get dragged down
explaining details like figures of speech.
Click
here for an easy example of a vocab pre-teach task.
3)
Listening for general understanding (Gist task)
This is an easy task for a one-pass-over of the listening
passage. It is important to set up the task before the tape is played
because doing so has students listen with a purpose, expectation or
agenda, similar to the way we listen in real life.
Follow up with some sort of feedback so the students can feel
assured that they extracted the info successfully.
Click here for an
easy example of a gist task.
4)
Listening for detail. (Detail task)
This task set before the listening to the same passage a second
time asks the students to listen for more specific, but relevant
information. A typical example would be who, when, or why, but you
could use contextual questions aimed at the grammar target if there was
one. Again, it is important to have the task understood before the tape
is
played so that Ss listen with a purpose. As a closing, follow up with
some sort of feedback.
Click here for an easy example of a listening for
detail task.
5) Go in a
different direction that relates to the target.
e.g. pair work mini-dialogues (like expressways), Info gap activity,
writing, ect.
Important aspects:
- The pre-teach vocabulary words should be chosen from the
passage because they are key to performing the task successfully.
Difficult words that are not important can be ignored.
- The tasks should be set before the tape is played so that
students listen with a purpose, as we do in real life.
- Experimenting with feedback styles can make the lesson
more student-centered.
- Some feedback styles:
- Elicit predictions about what will be in the passage from the
students and then see if what they predicted actually happened in the
passage.
- Students compare answers in pairs and feel more confident.
- Students write answers on the board themselves.
- Teacher asks true or false questions, students raise hands.