Listening Ideas

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Using Pictures

Pictures can be used to:

pre-teach the vocabulary

predict the content of the listening text - students tell the story by looking at the pictures then listen to see if they were correct. (they could even do this in their own language.)

during or before the listening put the pictures in the correct order.

21st Century

Take old stories and ask your students to bring them up to date.

Ask guiding questions like - where was it set? who are the people? what modern technology is used? etc etc.

Facebook updates

If the reading has characters assign a character to each student or to groups of students. Throughout the listening stop the CD and ask students to write a facebook status update for their character.

Then play some more and repeat.

Alternatively just use Facebook status updates once at the end.

Alternatively prepare some facebook status updates for the characters yourself. Play the listening and the students have to guess which character said which one.

Ooops

After the listening read lines from the text with mistakes. Ask the students to shout oops if they hear a mistake. They then correct it and earn a point for their team.

As an alternative the students can choose to either correct or ask someone from another team to correct the sentence.

Question Predictions

Give the students the questions and ask them to predict the answers before they listen. This encourages the students to read the questions then they will know what they are listening for.

Using the tapescript.

The tapescript can be used to mark the sentence stress, intonation, weak forms or words joining together. This heightens students' awareness of these features and help them to recognise them.

Write your own questions

Tell the students what you are going to listen to. Ask them to write their own questions about the subject. Then they listen and see if their questions are answered. Try doing this with the pictures as well to help.

Say stop

Allow the class to stop the recording during the listening if they feel a bit lost or confused. Get them to compare their notes in pairs first and then continue.

brainstorm synonyms and antonyms

Ask them to read the questions and underline the key words. The ask them to think of other ways of saying the key words so that when they listen they will be prepared for rephrashing etc.