196 Part III: Teaching Skills Classes
compare their answers and discuss them with you. You follow the same order
for the second, more difficult activity. In each case the students should be
prepared for what they have to do before they listen. It’s up to you how long
the recording lasts but the second, trickier task should take longer and be
more detailed than the first.
Finally, have a follow-up activity that doesn’t involve listening to the record-
ing again but is loosely related to it. If the follow-up activity lasts longer than
the two listening activities combined, it’s too long for a true listening skills
lesson.
Choosing a Listening Activity
The first question you may confront is the problem of what your students
should be listening to. If you use a course book, quite likely it’s accompa-
nied by a cassette or CD with a simple cheesy dialogue. Great! But hold on.
Perhaps it’s better to give them real recorded conversations to set them up
for life outside the classroom. There are pros and cons on both sides, which I
lay out in the next sections.
Finding material from the real world
If you happen to be teaching in an English-speaking country or area, you
could, in theory, have your students engage in entirely authentic listening
by taking them out onto the streets. Realistically though, this isn’t your best
option, as you’ve no control over what your students hear in terms of gram-
mar, vocabulary, slang or even good manners.
Having said that, a few real, predictable situations exist, which students can
manage with a little preparation. For example, guided tours around cities
and museums provide opportunities for quite extended listening. Tours are
reliable in that they tend to follow the same pattern each time despite being
a little longwinded. Another advantage of a fairly controlled situation like
that is that listeners can predict more or less what’s coming and this is a key
point. In the real world you usually know more or less what kind of informa-
tion you’re about to hear. So it’s useful for you to use spontaneous, authentic
listening exercises, but they’re quite hard to find.
You rarely listen to anything without an expectation of what’s coming next. So
students also need a bit of preparation before they get stuck into a listening
task and they need a reason to listen. (The upcoming ‘Motivating students to
listen’ helps with expectations.)
