Listening

What and why?

In common with the other skills of WRITING, READING and SPEAKING, there are two main roles for listening in language teaching. The first is as a goal of learning. It is important for students to develop the listening skill in order to understand spoken English, whether on TV, on radio or in speaking to people. The second role, however, is as a means of learning. Listening can provide further sources of input and can help the students remember the words, phrases, grammar, etc. that they are learning. By working on listening tasks, students can become closely involved with the language and, in doing so, develop their general language proficiency. Handled well, listening can thus form a very important element in the course.

Practical ideas

• In the early stages, the emphasis is probably best placed on listening as a means of learning rather than as a goal of learning. This means that rather than treating listening as 'comprehension' exercises, students can listen to texts they have read and discussed as a way of consolidating their learning. They can also look at the text while they are listening.
• For listening to work well, students have to be able to hear! If you are in a noisy classroom, close doors, windows, turn off fans, etc. while you are playing the cassette.
• With larger classes, students can listen in smaller groups while the other students are doing something else.
• Unless you are conducting a test, you can allow the students to listen again if they wish or to pause the tape to check the meaning. Listening in this case will be useful for learning English generally.
• Control of the cassette player can be passed to a student. Other students may then feel freer to ask for things to be replayed or paused.
• Before the end of a lesson, you can play the listening passage again as a way of recapping what you have done.
• If the students are doing a listening comprehension exercise, they can work in pairs with one of the students listening for answers to some of the questions and the other student listening for answers to the other questions. They can then compare afterwards.