Teaching the art of listening

"Doing" listening is perhaps one of the least dynamic activities students do in class next to grammar "exercises".   Of course it´s your fault and not the recording´s if your students are yawning in class and not concentrating enough to do the activity the way you would like.  Perhaps, in fact, YOU are doing all the yawning.  Here then is an interesting activity that can be repeated class after class and will keep students on their toes and interested.

The objective

To improve listening skills as well as grammar

The language

It depends on the recording, doesn´t it?

The set-up

Just bring a good short recording of a monologue or dialogue, or a text you recorded yourself or plan to read aloud...and don´t forget a copy of the script for each student!  

The low-down

Tell students that they are going to listening to X and that you want them to brainstorm the words they think will appear.  Give them a couple of minutes.  Don´t check.  Now tell them to listen and write down all the key words they hear vertically down the page.  So, for example, if the first sentence is "I can remember the last time I went to an amusement park like it was yesterday", they should write words like remember, last time, amusement park, like, yesterday.  Make sure you stop the recording every sentence or so to give them time to write, even repeat if necessary.

Now what?

Once they have their key words, ask them to work together in pairs to reconstruct the text or dialogue.  This could be written or oral.  If you ask them to do it orally, then as a follow-up, ask them to write a short summary of the text.  You could challenge them further by limiting the number of words or sentences for the summary.  Get them to compare with each other and/or check in open class.  Finally, hand out the original and compare.  Discuss differences.

More talk-time

Ask personalized questions about the topic. 

Get them to create their own version of whatever the text was about, either monologue or dialogue.