teaching listening

From three groups that presented ‘listening lesson’, two groups used song as the technique. They used different song with the same activity: filling in the missing words. The first group was quite smart by using a cell phone and active speaker as the equipment. The sound produced was loud so that all students could listen to it well. The second group used a CD, and it took them quite a long time to know how to play the CD with the available equipment.

The use of song was not bad. They played the song more than once to make the students catch all the missing words but they didn’t explore the song quite well. They didn’t use the song, for example, to introduce new words (vocabulary) or the structure available in the song. Instead, they used different materials for the next classroom activity. They only gave one listening activity, i.e. listening to the song and filling in the missing words.

However, there was a group that presented the listening lesson very well. They chose ‘personal information’ as the topic. They used different listening activities with the same topic. They gave three kinds of listening activities. They did it very well even though the electricity was on and off during the presentation. The students even studied in the dark and felt hot because the air condition didn’t work. Yet, everything went well. I’m very proud of you. Congratulation for your great job!

Listening class took a longer time than the previous lessons (teaching vocabulary and grammar), so that I only had about thirty minutes to present my own presentation. To begin the class with, I asked the students about the difference between hear and listen. It seemed that only a few of them who knew the difference. So I gave them the example situation to make them understand more. I also gave them an example of listening task both from cassette and from CD.

Here’s the summary of the presentation:

The Importance of Listening

• We cannot develop speaking skills unless we also develop listening skills.
• To have a successful conversation students must understand what is said to them
• To develop listening ability, students need plenty of practice in listening to English spoken at normal speed.
• Listening to spoken English is an important way of acquiring the language – of ‘picking up’ structures and vocabulary

Listening in Real Life

• Casual listening: Listening with no particular purpose in mind, and often without much concentration
• Focused listening: Listening for a particular purpose, to find out information we need

Focused listening

• If we just ask the class to listen and we ask questions afterwards, we give the students a difficult task
• We can make it easier by telling the students beforehand what to expect and what to listen for. This will help them to focus their listening

Listening principles:

1. Encourage students to listen as often and as much as possible
2. Help students prepare to listen
3. Once may not be enough
4. Encourage students to respond to the content
5. Different listening stages demand different listening tasks
6. Good teachers exploit listening text to the full

Listening aims:

• Listening for main ideas
• Listening for specific information
• Listening to check if your answer is right or wrong
• Listening to check for mistakes
• Listening for dictation
• Listening to re-order a jumbled dialogue
• Listening to take notes
• Listening to complete text/picture
• Listening to other learners
• Listening to match pictures with description

Advantages and disadvantages of using a cassette recorder

• The cassette recorder gives a chance for students to listen to a variety of voices
• Recorded material is useful for listening to dialogues, interviews, discussion, etc.
• In a large class with bad acoustics, listening to a cassette may be difficult

Getting students to predict

• An important part of listening skill is being able to predict what the speaker is going to say next.
• Asking students to guess what they are going to hear will help them develop their listening skill.

This week you are VERY GOOD!