Listening Skills Development

General Rule:

Students’ ability to understand what theyhear can improve very much if they are regularly exposed to audio materials:the more English they hear, the more readily they will pick outindividual words, then phrases andsentences.

Daily learning programme

a ‘hearing English’ component

audio or video

recordings

classroom discussion activities

a teacher as a listening exercise

Listening Cycle

Teaching Prediction

Listening

Checking

Reflection

Before listening Prediction and establishing contextpredict the key words and discuss with them

what they can expect to hear, e.g. names and places when they turn on the news, or numbers and times if they listen to railway announcements

read a summary of what they are going to hear before they listen to the full text.

determine the type of a recording text and the purpose to listen (narrative, descriptive, comparison etc)

While listening

Encourage your students to identify the stressed syllables and words in a listening text (the ones which carry the message) rather than trying to listen for every single syllable.

Students should practise listening to and reading the question, so that they are sure they understand what they are listening for and what they have to do.

After listening activities

• checking and reflecting• whole-class discussions• oral summaries• reading the text from the tape script

and listening again• listening dictations• written reproductions

And at last

Try changing the focus of the tasks they do in class:

sometimes ask your students to listen for specifics,

sometimes for overall summaries.