5 Give learners a reason for listening. Before you play the recording you
can give learners a task based on what they will hear, or even some
questions to answer. This can help learners to focus on key information and
filter out ‘noise’. Especially for lower level learners who find understanding
speech difficult, it is very motivating to successfully complete a task from
spoken input.
6 Use listening for pleasure, too. You can also use radio stories, films, etc,
where the motivation for listening lies in the interest of the text itself. This is
something that learners can do outside class, too—and they are more likely
to do so if they build up confidence by doing it in class first.
7 Show learners they don’t have to understand every word. Activities like
listening for gist, listening for specific information or listening to confirm
predictions can wean learners away from trying to follow every word. This
type of activity is easiest with texts that are not too dense, and which include
features like hesitation, repetition and redundancy, which we associate with
real time communication in the world outside the classroom.
8 Let learners experience a variety of accents and dialects. You will
probably want to do most of your listening work with the accent(s) your
learners are most likely to experience. But it is helpful to sensitize them to
the existence of a wider range of accents, and to the fact that an unfamiliar
accent is more difficult to understand.
9 Find out what your learners need to listen to. If they are aiming to listen
to relatively formalized speech events such as lectures or sales presentations
then you could show them some of the typical characteristics of their target
genre. For example, does it usually follow a certain order? Can you isolate
key language that the speaker might use to show they are moving from one
phase to the next?
10 Teach learners the strategies needed to control the input they get. In a
face-to-face situation, the ‘listener’ is very active, indicating how well they
are following the speaker. Perhaps using some transcripts of spontaneous
speech, show your learners how they can indicate that they are
understanding, or how they can ask for repetition or clarification.
Having such strategies at their disposal can give learners confidence to
interact with more competent speakers outside the classroom. By doing this,
they get themselves more exposure and so have more learning and practice
opportunities.
11 Consider setting listening tasks for homework. If you are working in a
well-resourced context, where your institution has plenty of tapes to lend
and your learners have tape players at home, you can set them listening tasks
to do outside the class. This gives them exposure to far more spoken input
than they could get if all your listening tasks were confined to the
classroom.
LANGUAGE WORK IN THE CLASSROOM 31