This month we are taking a look at listening activities in the classroom. How can you maximise a listening activity, what are the most effective methods and how can you keep your students engaged and having fun? 

Suitable for every learning style:

It is always important to try and build a range of activities designed to suit all learning styles. With listening activities, this can prove even harder than with other skills. So be sure to mix and match activities, here’s a few suggestions and the learning styles they pair well with:

 

Kinesthetic: Simon Says

Verbal/Aural: Headbands (Guess who?)

Visual: TedTalks and MovieClips

Interpersonal: Two truths and a lie

Solitary: Audiobooks, reading a story to the group

Musical: Finding vocabulary in song lyrics

Mathematical/Logial: Word bingo with minimal pairs (words that sound very similar like pin/pine)

 

Try to mix up your activities to keep things engaging for all of your students. There are plenty of great resources for activity ideas, for example, check out this helpful YouTube video: 

 

 

Resources they are interested in: 

The less relevant the topic, the less likely your students are to engage. Many students find it hard to focus during listening activities, so keeping content interesting is vital.

What do your students have in common with eachother? Do they like to travel? Are they all watching a popular TV series at the moment?  Do they have opinions on politics, music, news? Try to find videos and audio clips that focus on topics they care about to keep things relevant. There is a YouTube video on everything!

Although creating your own materials can be more time consuming, the level of focus gained by choosing an interesting topic is definitely worth it! You can even switch things around, and ask your students to take it in turns sharing a short English language video or clip about something they are interested in. The rest of the class can watch the clip, and ask the presenter questions on their favourite topic based on what they’ve heard.

 

Variety of content: 

Students need to hear and become familiar with a huge range of accents, not just yours or their classmates. Students are often thrown by new accents, speeds or intonations, so try to find resources with as much of a variety as possible so that they can practice this. There are plenty of videos online where you can ‘guess the accent’ using audio clips from real contexts. Check out this one featuring plenty of celebrities voices: 

 

Consistency:

Try to incorporate listening into every single lesson. Even sharing a one minute YouTube clip on the topic you are discussing will provide a useful opportunity to experience new accents, dialects and vocabulary. Make it a part of your routine to take it in turns reading a passage of text out loud before viewing it, or listen to the radio whilst students are working independently. Creating regular opportunities for listening to English will help students familiarise themselves with the sounds of English, and become more comfortable with listening activities in general. Check out this website where you can listen to live radio from the UK. 

 

 

Listening in stages:

Remember to break down a piece of listening into separate steps. This will help to maintain focus and comprehension, whilst avoiding students feeling overwhelmed.

You can start by asking students to share their own ideas on the topic, followed by introducing any new vocabulary. After this, a simple ‘fill in the blanks‘ or ‘answer these 5 questions‘ exercise helps students focus on specific points and get a gist of the piece of audio. Then, you can focus on the piece of content as a whole, asking larger questions and igniting discussion.

Students will be more familiar with the key themes, and any new language, so they will not feel swamped by the exercise. 

 

 

If you’re looking to improve your teaching and help maximise your students learning, why not consider one of our teacher training short courses. Both online and face-to-face, our short courses cover a huge range of topics, helping teaching make the most out of every lesson. 

Read our previous Back to Basics blog on speaking skills here, and our blog on group work here.