This article is about making the listening experience in the classroom more similar to what we do in real life. It’s about giving our students some choices in what they listen to and what they take from it.
Why we listen
Swimming is a sport that I’m very interested in, as I swim myself, and as I’m British, I am particularly interested in the results from the British team. In other words, I had quite a bit of personal investment in my listening. I listened to all the news, but I can’t tell you what I ‘heard,’ apart from the fact that yes, a British swimmer did win a bronze medal in that race.
Now it seems to me that the experience described above is not unusual.
- Firstly, when we listen to something as native speakers, we almost always have an intense, or at least fairly strong, interest in what we are listening to.
- Secondly, we usually choose which specific piece of information we are interested in.
- Thirdly, we are able to ‘blank out’ or ignore the other information so that we don’t even hear it.
When I think about my elementary students, I feel that I’m asking a lot if I make no effort to find out what their interests in the texts are and ask them to register information from different parts of the listening piece, without allowing them to ‘blank out’ or ignore what doesn’t interest them.
Our students’ interests
I always like to gather information about my students’ interests. What do they like to do in their spare time? Sports? Play or listen to music? Politics? Chess? Fishing? Secondly, what do they listen to most in their own language?
One way of gathering this information is by using a questionnaire at the beginning of term. Though my students are sure to have varying and different interests, this information helps me to cater to individual interests better. I can then start looking out for appropriate listening materials, and even recording them.
Allowing students choice
I believe that we listen better if we have a personal investment in what we are listening to, as in my example above. This would be easy to create in the classroom, if I knew that all my students were interested in swimming or urban music, but this is unlikely. What I can do, however, is to allow students to choose which piece(s) of information they would like to listen for from any given listening task.
A more controlled way of allowing choice with lower level students is to prepare a set of questions yourself, write them on the board, and get them to choose the two questions they would like to know the answers to.
This is fine with authentic listening taken from radio or other sources, but what about course book listening material? Here also you can give students an element of choice. Below is something I do with a short flight departure announcement from a well-known elementary course book.
| City | |
| Airline | |
| Flight number | |
| Gate number |
With very low level students you can just collect the basic information. With slightly more advanced students you can expand on the discussion about the cities. If your class is not too big, you can actually place the ‘gates’ on posters around the room and students can then actually go to the right gate for their destination.
Getting feedback
As I’ve already mentioned, it’s important to get feedback only on what a student has listened for, not on every detail of the listening piece. This selection really helps the student to zone in on information he or she is interested in, thereby mirroring what we do in real life.
If we can create an element of ‘personal investment’ in listening, either by tuning into our students’ interests or by giving them some choice, I believe that they will have more and better reasons to listen. The result of this will be that their listening skills will improve.
Briefsource: teachingEnglish.
