Linkedin | Videos | Blog | Printables | ELT News | TpTs | Youtube Channel
Listening is a skill that is primary among the 4 skills. Especially for beginning learners believe it or not. Usually, listening becomes a focus later on in a student’s language learning developmental curve but that shouldn’t be the case.
[See our comprehensive post about Listening Activities]
When planning a listening lesson, a teacher should ask the following questions (Rost, 2004). View the YouTube video.
1. Content Selection: Will the input increase learner’s motivation? Is it interesting? Is it relevant? Is is packaged in a way that makes it accessible?
2. Task Design: Does the task promote learning? Is the task worth doing? Does the task focus on meaning? Does the task have pre-listening, while listening and post-listening phases? Are the procedures clear? Are there clear outcomes? Can the task be repeated?
3. Strategy Use: Are the learners encouraged to use active listening strategies? Are there opportunities for predicting, guessing, selecting, clarifying, monitoring, responding, interacting, reflecting?
4. Language Awareness: Does the task propose language awareness? Are there opportunities for the student to notice new vocabulary and structures?
Teachers also should ask whether the lesson will focus on bottom-up listening processes or top-down listening processes.
1. Bottom-Up Process: the listener uses linguistic knowledge to process auditory signals and recognize sounds, words, sentences.
2. Top-Down Process: the listener infers meaning from the context, their background knowledge, convention and culture.
See this quiz showing types of activities aligned with each process. Generally too, consider intensive vs extensive listening. Usually, intensive listening focuses on accuracy while extensive listening lessons focus on overall understanding and meaning.
Teachers also need to be aware that there will usually be 3 parts to a listening lesson.
1. Pre-listening. This provides the students a chance to prepare for the act of listening and activate background knowledge and schema.
2. While Listening. Students listen and demonstrate comprehension during the listening passage.
3. Post Listening. Students demonstrate understanding after the listening passage and solidify knowledge acquired.
The video above (view on YouTube), shares some tips for teachers designing listening focused lessons. Get the handy infographic of all the tips.
Highly recommended too, is to make sure your listening content contains a wide variety of speech patterns, accents, pronunciations unless you are working on a specific listening problem students are having.
Find many resources in the professional development category of our lesson library regarding the teaching of listening. Here is one of them.
Listening Lessons