Listening activities are more useful
than for exercising mere the ability to understand oral texts. Harmer
(2001: 228) argues that listening activities are an invaluable source
of input other than teacher's speech; moreover, hearing spoken
English plays an important role in developing speaking skills by
helping students acquire good speaking habits and improve their
pronunciation. Students can benefit from both intensive listening
(in-class, using taped material or live talk) and extensive listening
(outside the classroom, using a variety of text types, preferably
chosen by students themselves) (Harmer, 2001: 228-230).
The teacher plays the following roles
during an intensive listening sequence: organiser (telling the
students the purpose of a listening exercise and instructing them on
the procedure), machine operator (using the CD player efficiently),
feedback organiser (checking if the students have completed the task
successfully) and prompter (raising the student's awareness of
particular language features in a listening passage) (Harmer, 2001:
232).
Various types of texts can serve as a
listening material. Students can watch and listen to a video or a
film, song, teacher's speech (in story-telling, anecdotes, etc.),
recordings which accompany the textbook, etc. A text can be authentic
or adapted to the students' level of linguistic skills.
The basic listening sequence in a
lesson comprises the following stages (Wilson, 2008: 60; 82-85;
98-103):
- pre-listening stage, which should help students prepare to hear a text by activating schemata (predicting the content through brainstorming, visuals, realia, problem solving or discerning between facts, opinions and ideas), setting up a reason to listen (What information are we going to listen for?) and pre-teaching vocabulary indispensible for understanding and completing the task;
- while-listening stage, consisting of listening comprehension exercises: recognition tasks (matching, multiple choice, ticking words which are heard, etc.) and production tasks (note-taking, writing answers to questions, completing charts/sentences, etc.). At this stage, students can listen for gist (normally, this is the first step), and next, for specific information, detailed understanding or for implications (pausing and predicting what will be said next);
- post-listening stage, in which the input is analysed (the focus is placed on the linguistic features of the text to which students have listened; this can be done by reading the transcript or listening to short parts of a text and stopping, in order to make students notice a certain expression, pronunciation feature or grammar point). At the post-listening stage, other language skills can be developed (reading a text which is somehow linked to the listening passage, speaking about it or responding to it by writing).
It is worth noting that a listening
task can be inserted in virtually any part of a lesson plan. It can
be a whole sequence, central to a lesson, or a lead-in exercise,
introducing a topic for reading, speaking or writing. It can be used
as a way of refocusing students' attention or uplifting the
atmosphere in the classroom (Harmer, 2001: 232), especially if the
teacher decides to play a piece of music or an interesting short
video.
Sources:
Harmer, J. (2001). The Practice of
English Language Teaching.
Chapter 16: Listening. Longman.
Wilson,
J.J. (2008). How to Teach Listening. Pearson
Longman.
