How to Teach English Listening Skills

Teaching English listening skills successfully requires using a combination of different resources to expose your students to spoken English. The lessons can be stimulating, as you can use films, music, radio and language-learning CDs to improve their skills. Translating spoken English is challenging as the words cannot be read, and there are no accompanying pictures or gestures to help the students understand. Therefore, it is important to keep encouraging them and build up their confidence with easier exercises in the beginning.

 

INSTRUCTIONS

1.     Use dictation exercises to teach your students how to focus on understanding the context of a conversation. Play an audio clip of news from the BBC World Service website and ask the students to write down what was heard. Then, get the students to listen to one another's ideas while discussing the topic in English.

 

2.    Play a language-learning CD such as Rosetta Stone or English for Dummies, and work through the listening exercises with the students. Teach the students to focus on how sentences are structured by writing down the subject, object and noun heard during different clips, or answer the questions to puzzles.

 

3.    Write down a set of questions relating to an English-speaking film. Give them to the students to answer while watching the film together. Review the answers after the film has finished to assess their understanding of the plot.

 

4.    Allocate 10 minutes to listening to music with English lyrics. Use the music as a dictation exercise -- ask the students to write down the lyrics. This will engage the students and expose them to rhyming, slang and different accents.

 

5.    Teach your students to listen to one another by encouraging them to make English conversation or English-speaking friends. Use a website, such as englishconversation.org, to link up with English speakers, for example. Keep each conversation topic specific, such as hobbies, family or home town, to focus the students' attention, and to use vocabulary particular to that subject.

 

6.    Listen to English-speaking radio stations and teach the students about English culture, current affairs, music and listening simultaneously. Check out Radio Tower to access a number of different stations available in English.

By Philippa Jones

 

 

 

 

 

 

Reflexion:

 

In this article we can find not only recommendations for improve listening skills but also we can notice that there are another skills as a writing, speaking and reading which are inside it. For example when the activity requires listening the students can write about the main idea or specific details, another possibly activity after that is reported to a partner or a whole class.

 In addition, the use of the material is very important for try to avoid boring class and make the lessons dynamic; it also helps us to get the attention of the students. We can use CD, video, music, etc for improve their listening skills.

 

I agree with this idea:” Teachers need to keep encouraging the students and build up their confidence with easier exercises in the beginning” because the students could feel comfortable and there are more possibilities that they want to participate in class without fear.

 

In my opinion skills are used interactively and in combination, teachers have to provide students with opportunities to develop each skill: reading, listening, speaking and writing using real- life activities.

 

We need to remember the purpose of the learning language that is to enable the students to take part in the exchanges of information.

Finally, I would like to share with you an example about integrate skills.

      Self-introduction takes the answers to a series of personal questions (name, age, grade level, where you live, members of your family, favourite sports, animals, colours, subjects, etc.) and sequences them into a self introduction. The teacher can point to each picture while modeling a self-introduction (students are listening) and then invite learners to introduce themselves (speaking) to one or two if their peers. Some of the visuals can then be changed and the students can be invited to introduce themselves to others in the class to whom they have never spoken. This activity can be adapted to become a regular (daily, weekly) warm-up activity to get learners talking in the target language. Having covered listening and speaking in the oral self-introduction, a scenario can then be created where in learners must write a self-introduction to a potential homestay host. The same picture cues can be used, reconfigured to show a salutation, closing and signature. The picture cues provide learners with support without giving them a text to memorize.

 

      There is another activity that integrates the four skills- a reading and retell. First, learners select a story at their own level and read it. Learners are then given a template to follow to summarize their thoughts about the story (writing). The summary is designed to help learners gauge the amount of detail required in a retell. After additional practice reading the summary silently and aloud several times, learners are asked to select two or three illustrations from the book to help them tell the story. They then practice telling the story by using the pictures and remembering what they wrote in the template. Students find a partner who has not read the same story and retell (speaking) their story to one another using the selected illustrations. Partners not only listen to the retell but also complete a feedback checklist (writing) about the retell. After reading the feedback, partners switch roles.

 

"Theories and goal of education don´t matter if you don´t consider your students as a humas..."

Ann Lou